Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I used this with some personal video surveillance to identify some thieves who were casing driveways to find cars to get into. Instead of wasting hours looking at footage, I was able to give the police excerpts that helped them identify the perp. Also, because of the circumstances and footage, they were able to charge him with a more serious crime than petit larceny, which means he won't be back next week.
It's an effective tool. If you're allowed to have a camera, you should be allowed to look at it with whatever means you want.
The reality is that the horse is out of the barn. The Federal government has been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on interstate corridors since at least the 90s.
Edit: Just saying because almost all petty thievery is committed to get goods to trade for drugs.
Edit 2: Also, I'm not saying that this wasn't a good use of home surveillance, or to whatever parent's comment referred, although (s)he is probably wrong that they won't be back next week. I have acquaintances that having got hooked on meth, began stealing cars. Once caught, I thought she'd be put in prison or a drug rehab program. No. She basically served no time because the judge and everyone else know she was just a junky and there was no funding for rehab, and little room in prison.
You could not be more wrong. Everyone will do mass-surveillance. Everyone. The police is worst, because they will legally use violence against (true AND false) matches, with limited to no recourse for their victims. But the cats' out of the bag. Legal or not, mass surveillance is not going to happen ...
It is happening.
They will even sell that information on. "Alexa, which bar has the most blonds going into it ?" coming up soon. Or worse: "Alexa, can you tell me who is my daughter's boyfriend with face recognition ?" "That'll be $0.45, buy ? $1 extra if you want to know if they have sex. Included for free with Prime ! Order that instead ?".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-surprisi...
If you believe this will only ever be used to stop thieves and people that victimize others you are naive at an unfathomable level
>The Federal government has been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on interstate corridors since at least the 90s.
lol... You believe that is justification or a defense. The fact that the Federal Government is doing something that people that value privacy oppose does not mean we should allow local law enforcement to do it even more efficiently
So no I do not think it is "slippery slope" at all, we have already slide down the slope; arriving at the bottom. We long ago surpassed the level of government surveillance I believe is ethical, constitutional, or proper for government
if the government having a database filled with everyone Bio metric data they can then use technology to follow, trace, and monitory your every movement is not a "surveillance state" I shutter to think what it would take for you to classify such as system? a Brian implant that reads your every thought?
(... I don't actually think it's a 1984 dystopia, mind ;) ).
I am sure there were many in Oceania perfectly content with their life, thinking they were free because they never butted up against the edges of their cage, they never tested the limits of their "freedom", they were "respectable" citizens doing as the government said
I do not recall getting that impression when I read 1984. Rather, the majority of the proles were absolutely under the figurative boot, and kept there via fear. Even the Inner Party were aware of the edges of their cage -- either they tested them and got reconditioned, or they were all-in on the dystopia, but I don't think that counts as thinking that they were free. Rather, they traded freedom for power over others.
To stay in dystopian sci-fi: The computers on the Enterprise (TNG at least) were aware of crewmember's positions and health situation at all times as long as they were aboard ship. Do we imagine they felt spied upon? It seems instead being born into a world where surveillance is ubiquitous and benign-to-benevolent, they were fine with it.
Maybe we can build that world instead of assuming the end-result is 1984 every time.
The Key difference between the 2 is Resource Limitation.
In 1984 Society had limited resources, in Star Trek it was a Post Scarcity Civilization.
Star Trek is not possible while we have limited resources, invent replicator tech then you might have the ability to create a Star Trek society, no replicators no Star Trek
This is akin to saying "humans on board the IIS are monitored intensely, do they feel spied upon? Therefore we should all be willing and able to live for a lifetime with that level of monitoring".
And not taking into account that IIS visits are undertaken by very unusual, pre-selected people, for limited durations, being monitored by a single organization, mostly for the purposes of research and protecting their investment.
Which is completely not anything like reality for most people, where things are operated by goodness knows who, for goodness knows what reasons, and barely or not at all regulated against potential abuse.
Keep believing the government has no access to this data..
That assumes 2 things
1. that the Warrant process today is more than a superficial formality to give people the illusion of check on government power. When in reality to get a warrant they simply have to fill out a form, there is hardly ever any push back and it has been proven countless times that law enforcement lies via omission, or stretched the truth, or any number of dishonest unethical things to get warrants, on top of the fact the most judges simply approve 99.9% of all warrant applications. "Getting a warrant" should not be viewed as some panacea of government restraint
2. Assume that "if they got a warrant" then people like me would approve of government having access to that data. That "Getting a warrant" is a valid justification for obtaining data.
OP gave an example where he was better off. Do you mean that the trade-off is not worth risk/down side?
When you take a GPS from an unlocked car, you get charged with petit larceny, which is an appearance ticket and $50-500 fine.
When you get charged with a higher crime, you get a few weeks in jail. In my case, the offender was a known “frequent flyer” who victimized my neighborhood for months, and was arrested 6 times. He was charged with a more serious misdemeanor, and was charged with 30 days in jail. He has not returned.
My objective as a citizen is to peacefully enjoy my home. Some lowlife doesn’t have the right to pillage our yards.
That end is peace-of-mind.
People who have been damaged by random acts of crime may very well find more peace-of-mind sacrificing a bit of privacy to not have those acts repeated on their persons.
Privacy is an fundamental aspect of our quality of life. Privacy is not of secondary importance to security but exists alongside it. If that were not so, then there are plenty of places we could be putting surveillance cameras in order to improve our security.
I agree that privacy exists alongside security. Where the balance-point is best placed varies from person to person. In public spaces not scoped for private activities (such as the streets of a city), the balance point has to be agreed upon by the citizenry in general and is almost certainly somewhere past both "toilet stall" and "personal residence" in terms of collective value for surveillance.
After all, we already put up security cameras on street corners.
"Voters" is generally considered the correct answer in democracies and republics, I believe.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to assess where we are at with each box in contemporary America.
The legal Expectation of Privacy[0] continues to be important, even if there are people who think that it was a legal handwave that only existed due to lack of adequate technology.
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I certainly agree, but just wait until They/Them/Those start telling us this is part of some sacrosanct "social contract," and those who don't like it can simply leave.
Edit: small changes for clarity.
people start leaving
> wait! dont leave! We're gonna jack up the renounce-your-citizenship fee by thousands of dollars!
actually happened already.
TL;DR: You could renounce your US citizenship for free before 2010. Then it when up to $450. In 2014 the fee was raise to $2,350.
On top of the fee is the exit tax wherein you may be required to pay a tax on the entirety of any gains on your assets as if you had sold them all that day. And, further, if they think you are renouncing to avoid taxes they claim that you must continue to pay taxes for 10 years after you renounce.
Just because something is out there does not mean you want more of it.
You aren't allowed to look in to people houses with it or in to schools, up girls skirts, inside some banks etc.
You may have rights to own a camera -- I have the right to go around swinging my fists in to thin air but my right to swing fists stops where your head begins.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/01/on_police_s...
In short, having a unique id and database of car owners may be okay when the police need to manually look up information. But when they can have every plate in the city regularly scanned by robots and the data fed to an AI to look for patterns, that's not even close to the same thing.
My point isn’t that pervasive surveillance is great. It’s that if you’re allowed to have cameras everywhere, why would you limit useful processing of the data?
How do you regulate it? If you can’t hire Amazon to do LPR or facial recognition, can you pay a guy to recognize people walking down the street and note their patterns? Do you license/permit camera placement?
Use vague words in the statutes like "reasonable" and have jurisprudence define how it can be used in practice. At least that's how the law already works.
Even though private surveillance is pervasive in the US, law enforcement is still sometimes rejected from using some of it when it flies in the face of the privacy standards to which we are accustomed[1].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/judge-blasts-fbi...
The feds had thermal cameras hooked up to a helicopter, flew over some guy's house, saw thermal signatures looking a lot like someone growing marijuana.
Supreme court threw this out as a warrantless search because people are allowed an expectation of privacy against tech that "everyday people" don't have.
IANAL, but if you don't buy this logic, then search warrants are mostly limited by tech? Like if the gov't invented binoculars that could see through walls, does that mean they could just look into your house without a warrant?
The search warrant is about intent and expectations. And while "police officer checks records manually of a person" is kinda expected, "police officer x-rays an entire crowd instantly" seems a bit less so.
We _do_ put up signs about cameras, and there's rules about recording phone conversations too. It sure feels like there's case law around a lot of this.
So that a company doesn't end up doing mass surveillance.
During bad times, you'd see crackdowns and suppression caused by such a system. If you look in the present at the countries that are more authoritarian, you can get a picture. Places like China or Russia, where the internet is censored, monitored and mass surveillance is openly practiced. Russia recently passed Yarovaya law:
"Internet and telecom companies are required to store communications and metadata for 6 months to 3 years. They are required to disclose them, as well as "all other information necessary," to authorities on request and without a court order. It also requires email and messaging service providers to have cryptographic backdoors. The surveillance regulations will take effect on 1 July 2018."
It probably goes without saying that they use this tool to get a tighter grip on their population to maintain power.
Because what matters is what the result of that processing is. This is not some abstract concept; what's actually being done with the data matters.
>How do you regulate it? If you can’t hire Amazon to do LPR or facial recognition, can you pay a guy to recognize people walking down the street and note their patterns?
That's a silly analogy and I think you know it. Again, this is not some academic debate. The difference between being able to process TB order data automatically and hiring a guy to watch a corner and take notes is the difference between the Hubble telescope and me in my backyard with a pair of binoculars.
But I agree that the pandora's box has been opened and there is no going back.
Isn't charging defendants with overwhelming charges part of the problem?
I worked very revently on a large internal face detection service for a legal and compliance application at a large US company.
Being pragmatic engineers, the first thing we did was to pilot test Rekognition against an in-house prototype built by modifying some open source deep learning approaches.
Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process).
Our very simple prototype could fully process upwards of 30 faces with 1 second of latency, and so if using a similar 5 second timeout limit, we could process around an order of magnitude more faces (which happens more often than you think, e.g. crowds, people in public places).
I just could not believe that the web service, backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate.
We didn’t even bother trying to price out how expensive it would be for our expected amount of throughput, because we knew from a simple accuracy and per-request latency point of view, Rekognition just couldn’t cut it.
As I’ve moved into a more lead role with machine learning teams, this experience really opened my eyes to how seductive cloud solutions can appear to non-technical managers.
They will act like severe bean counters when they see a high salary request from a really experienced machine learning engineer, but they won’t even bother with due diligence or estimating cost-per-request or cost-per-unit-accuracy for dropping money on a cloud service.
Instead of empowering a small team to do something much more cost-effective for the company, they’ll ball at their internal engineers while setting a pile of money ablaze.
Criticizing the technology's performance is tangential to the emergence of the technology on public streets, and its adoption by local governments for surveillance. It does not matter what performance it has now; I argue and predict it will improve, and then your statement becomes moot.
The issue is not how well it performs. The issue is allowing it to happen, and without trust from the people.
My fear is: government wants surveillance, and businesses pursue revenue, so there is no incentive among those two to question their actions.
Mostly they are “surveillance theater” akin to useless (but costly) TSA surveillance. The way it interacts with society is by being vague and scary, not by actually enabling truly scary scales of surveillance.
Another way to look at it is that the government buys these contracts and services and rarely holds the provider accountable, perhaps especially in fields like machine learning where people can more easily make political arguments out of the debate over whether it’s working or not.
Since agencies are happy to drop big money even when the technology does not work then providers like Rekognition actually do not have incentives to invest in making the scale of accurate surveillance larger. Why would they when they’ll make more money yanking an engineer off of a material project like that and slotting them to work on some braindead TED talk sort of demoware that gets them the next big contract?
I worry about the spread of these surveillance contracts more as a taxpayer seeing government money wasted that could help people through much simpler means than I do as a concerned citizen who sees the danger in Orwellian surveillance.
you've never heard of the chinese police state's facial surveillance which they're using to throw countless uighurs in jail for stuff like jaywalking, i suppose?
>as a concerned citizen who sees the danger in Orwellian surveillance.
you don't see the danger because your paycheck relies on you not seeing it. the rest of us are not so willfully blind.
You could imagine similar things for face recognition. An Alzheimer's patient who has a large digital photo library of family members and events, and would like some information retrieval tool to help search for a specific memory, family member, etc. Or someone who takes stock photographs and wants to photoshop bystanders out of the photos so that nobody's image rights are infringed when submitting the stock photo for publication-- might want face detection to aid in the person-removal task.
I agree completely with scrutinizing motives and refusing to work on tech when the goal is unethical. But I don't agree this allows us to point at a generic, amoral technology in and of itself and say it's conceptually unethical for existing. Maybe there would be some extreme or contrived cases when I would agree to that, but even this face recognition stuff is very far from it.
The answer is always the same: "Because the potential for benefit outweighs the potential for abuse."
Using Rekognition for this would be like hiring a fraudster construction company to build a local bridge. The bridge could collapse, nobody did publicly verifiable due diligence, and nobody would be held accountable. This could be the automated surveillance equivalent.
I don't see much benefit to pushing back against the technologies themselves; they're here, they're easy to apply, and we're well past the point where trying to ban them will just push them underground. Misapplication of the technologies and erosion of fundamentals of evidence-based action are a real problem.
Contrast the California police using genealogy datasets to narrow the realm of potential "John Doe" serial killers. As court evidence? Shouldn't be admissible. As a tool to focus the search to a subset of the population? Extremely good idea.
Similarly, the face-recognition camera can tell the authorities where to turn their eyes but should never be the be-all and end-all of adjudication; they're too easy to fool (as Maryland discovered when it started auto-ticketing cars that blew through red lights at camera-tagged intersections, only to find a wave of high-schoolers thinking it was hilarious to tape a photo of an unliked teacher's license plate across their own and then blow through an empty intersection at 80 MPH at 2AM).
This barn is devoid of horses and is getting chilly from all the airflow.
Some examples: https://medium.com/@deepak.gulati/trying-amazon-rekognition-...
That said, it could flag faces for manual screening. Or cross reference other data (License plates, Geo data from phone) to boost confidence. Also, once they get more data as part of some of these deals they'll get better.
You'd be surprised. Many many AWS services are launched by a single 2-pizza team (8-10 developers). It's in Amazon's DNA to act like a startup, ship something quickly, collect feedback, then iterate, and scale.
Rekognition will get much better in time.
No doubt, the flow is usually Amazon -> Google/Facebook, because for mid-level engineer/scientist, money talks :), and Google/FB generally have much open/better publication policy, while Amazon is neurotically secretive. Apple is not on the picture, I think the internal engineer culture is very problematic(no common codebase, severe NIH syndrome), except for the money, it is subpar place to grow.
Disclaimer: Work in a ML related AWS team.
> amazon has the resources to scale this to thousands of RPS
Actually, this part is mostly straight forward. Not easy, but straight forward, and Amazon already has this part solved for most things. Our ML team did have expertise in making very large-scale services (our company operated a large ecommerce web store, so our traffic was actually very high, top 500 Alexa rank), but our concern over Amazon had nothing to do with whether it could handle enough requests per second.
But this also misses the point. The latency for a single request was too poor for a variety of natural images (crowd scenes, public streets, etc., -- exactly the types of images relevant for many surveillance applications). It was not a throughput issue, I guess unless you expect consumer teams to do something like chopping images up into sub-images, replacing one Rekognition request with a bunch of sub-image requests, and then post-processing to stitch the results together and account for error introduced by the choice of where to split the original image. Yikes.
It's not an issue of "scaling it up" -- it's an issue that the fundamental machine learning algorithm underpinning it suffered too high latency, likely because it was a deep neural network combined with a bunch of post-processing gadgets that are conceptually not good enough for bespoke use cases -- things which engineers on a centralized platform have little incentive to care about.
The real question is whether Amazon has incentives to make this part better, and if so, how? Will a general one-size-fits-all face detector work for customers? Or will they need application-by-application customer-specific tailored models (and if so, why aren't customers savvy enough to realize that the all-in costs to build and operate it in-house are so demonstrably cheaper than Amazon, and might be the only way to meet specific performance goals)?
I hear this so often, that Amazon can "just scale it up" -- but I think if you really work in face detection and have studied the problem deeply, you know this is not right. There's a whole different bucket of problems and issues and cost-effectiveness trade-offs going on.
https://cloudacademy.com/blog/google-vision-vs-amazon-rekogn...
We were able to solve this in-house using only about 15 8-core servers (we used a few general GPU servers for training, but found we only needed CPU machines for runtime, and did not have the poor latency of the AWS calls) with quite a lot of redundancy for traffic spikes and a pretty easy deployment system if we needed to add or remove nodes, and it was only one of several dozen different machine learning projects going on, so whatever portion of the total cost of operation could be allocated to paying the salary of a machine learning team, it would further be amortized by work on many projects. For example, amortizing the cost of GPU machines for model training across a variety of projects.
Even if the tech may not be useful right now, it probably will be in 5 years, and unless something is done now, another large slice of the little bit of privacy that remains will be gone.
Companies would end up paying huge premia to Amazon essentially to have Amazon build in-house teams that would be equivalent, only much more expensive, than the companies own in-house team just building an in-house solution.
With some forms of consulting this can make sense, because the consulting services are temporary and should set the company in a position such that for the long run, the company can maintain the solution cost-effectively.
But for something like face detection, assuming it's a pivotal service you'll need on an on-going basis, this would become the worst sort of vendor lock-in imaginable, combined with the fact that if you don't appear to be creating growth for Amazon, you're liable to be deprioritized at any point, and at the mercy of Amazon's choices regarding when and how to address your bespoke need.
For these specialized machine learning services it doesn't fit the same kind of commodity model that AWS infrastructure uses, though that's currently how Amazon is pursuing it.
Don't get me wrong, Amazon is very good at making money and convincing nervous management to buy their brand. I suspect they will find ways to sell these services despite the services not being cost-effective or customizeable for bespoke customer situations.
But when I point out that Amazon's machine learning services don't offer cost-effective performance, it's very different from a "just throw more devs at it" kind of problem, fundamentally.
The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially available information from linked in, facebook, etc to identify everyone's whereabouts.
Pushing back this early will not have mass appeal and will not help to prevent the future, broader concerns IMHO.
Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most people.
There absolutely should be a clear delineation between what is possible and what is allowed when considering state surveillance.
The 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It's right there. You have a right to be secure as a person from unreasonable searches. Massive face recognition of 'criminals' is a violation of exactly that, and should be prevented without question.
Is it "unreasonable" for the Amber Alert system to co-opt the eyes and attention of ten thousand citizens around a kidnapped child? Hard to say. Most people seem to think 'no.'
If that system could co-opt camera feeds instead of human attention, we could get most (all?) of the benefits of the existing Amber Alert without having to burn civilian resources on it. Wouldn't that be a strict improvement over the current system?
Could they? Oh well, that is at least something then.
Can those things actually be done with a vanishingly low false-positive rate? If I'm walking down the sidewalk and a camera sees me suddenly grimace because a rock got into my shoe, I don't want paramedics rushing to the scene to offer me assistance for a heart attack.
I think your comment may have changed my mind about the utility, objectivity, and overall value of amber alerts...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Automating-Inequality-High-Tech-Profi...
In my area amber alerts are usually along the lines of "the non custodial parent has the child when he shouldn't". Reducing the resource cost of (and therefore threshold to utilize) that system or similar systems is not something I can get behind.
Finding and bothering specific people should be something that scales poorly enough that all the government organizations that engage in it are forced to pick and choose who they do it to. A low threshold is an invitation for abuse.
Edit: and I'm wrong because why?
"People cannot opt out of this," said CRTC spokesperson Patricia Valladao. "There is a high importance that people — want it or not — receive these alerts."[0]
[0] http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/emergency-alerts-system-ph...
Is it right for the government to track all the online dealings of an average citizen? Most people think no.
You may see a discrepancy here. That is why there is the saying "First they came for the fascists...". It is why when we talk about breaking encryption and backdoors discussion is centered around terrorists and pedos. Because those are universally hated groups. The problem comes with the fact that there is spill over. (See cases like San Bernardino shooting or the cop that is sitting in jail without sentencing because they know he has child porn on an encrypted drive. Btw, they use this same tactic to frame less controversial legal cases too)
I think if backdoors/searches/whatever could only be applied to universally hated groups and not include a single random citizen than there would be almost unanimous agreement that we should do that (you are not violating a "non-criminal's" rights). The problem is that technology doesn't allow us to exclusively target those kinds of groups. As tech oriented people we understand that this spill over HAS to happen, but the average citizen (outside SV) does not understand the how it works, the scale, nor ramifications. I'd like to remind everyone that 1984 wasn't about the government watching everyone at all times, but having the ability to. I'm not sure why we call that a dystopian society but many people readily accept the use of this technology by the government. Sure, the police have the technological ability do facial recognition without Amazon, but technological capability is not the question. It is SHOULD THEY?
Sure
No, that would be an implementation of a panopticon. You'll find a lot of interesting criticism of that concept, and of Bentham for trying to solve societal problems in an inhumane fashion.
It does matter. Citizens do care. Just because they haven't taken action yet doesn't mean that they don't care or won't.
There is a non violent solution to this, I'm just not smart enough to know what that is.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Do you know where that quote is from?
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-...
Or in other words
> We had that right taken away and there's nothing we can do to change that. Laws can't be changed, so accept your fate.
We are literally talking about that we don't want to accept that and change it.
More importantly, pretty much everyone has a driver’s license or other government issued ID, and in most states, the police have access to your mugshot from that.
The criminality can be figured out later. The problem is real time surveillance of the entire population.
To be pedantic, it was Lavrentiy Beria[1] who is credited with that statement[2]; So it was a WW2 Russian Sentiment. Though Stalin-ism is also an example of a surveillance state government that was known for being unpleasant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria [2] http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1137804
By analogy, if a police officer has an excellent facial memory and they recognize someone, can they use their memory to influence their actions towards the person?
Yes, I likely commit a couple felonies a day unknowingly. Still, I've never been arrested and I don't have a mug shot. It's not inappropriate for law enforcement to automate processes that are valid and legal for them to do. They are allowed to study the mug shots but it's not reasonable for them to memorize every mugshot. However, automating their recollection via machine learning is reasonable.
This will be a constant in the future. It has everything government wants : a gross grab of power, vast potential for abuse, and it saves a little bit of money ! What more could you want ?
You see, apparently youth services has a problem that once across the border all the "crimes" like having a teacher pissed off and report you to youth services or having your parents divorce, which according to the Dutch should lead to a child's incarceration are not actually crimes once you cross the border. You see, they feel the need to increase the safety feeling of children with divorced parents, by having the police violently (search on youtube) abduct them, then dumping them locked up in a "group", ie. a set of adults who don't care about them at all (not professionals, of course, those are expensive. No, the normal people they come in contact with come without so much as a high school degree), with total and complete power over them. But then night comes, and those adults abandon the group entirely, so the kids are totally at the mercy of older kids or just the more violent kids in said group. Needless to say, the rate at which rapes and sexual assaults happen in this environment is "somewhat" higher than in normal society. Oh and why does the Dutch state do this ? To make the child feel safe ! Sadly, that's not a joke.
Sadly, if you were a lawyer, you are now to advise that if you're trying to keep kids away from those services, you need to either rent a car (not sure if they surveil that yet), or you need to physically assault the police (you laugh, but that's exactly what immigrant communities are doing in Rotterdam and that's (granted, a small part of) the reason why they're doing it. The alternative in some cases is giving up their kids to these monsters. Again the government responds, not, of course, by fixing their own problem).
Because of these sorts of things, most of the neighboring countries have become appalled at this behavior and refuse to cooperate in all but the worst cases, so naturally they're fixing it : the fix for that problem is employing high pressure tactics to get other police forces to cooperate and mass-surveillance on their own people.
They are actually proud of this. Seriously.
Companies and governments have demonstrated that they are not sufficiently responsible to have these databases. HIPAA-like laws and severe criminal penalties would be a start.
But without more government, there can't be more handouts, so ... ok ?
for a specific case, I can point to Portland's own suspected gang member list: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/09/portlan...
thankfully, it was required to be purged 2 years ago.
unfortunately, that didn't stop them, and an audit found that the same department was ignoring the rules and laws, and keeping an additional secret list to profile community members: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/03/police_...
these are not necessarily criminals, and it is inappropriate for police to be using automated surveillance to track or monitor them.
Body cams for police? Huge deal guys! How we gonna pay for this? Oh gee my body cam was off judge my bad
Yes. But what’s striking is that by offering this product and heavily marketing its law enforcement use, Amazon are clearly endorsing total surveillance as their preferred model of society.
I don’t imagine this will be incredibly lucrative relative to other AWS products. There’s very few potential customers. Law enforcement access to data is extremely broad, data-osmosis/‘fusion’ with the private sector is rife, and the whole area is pretty much unregulated. The potential for abuse is large.
Vigilant Solutions has been running this for years. Not just cops but tow trucks, bounty hunters, all kinds of private enterprising individuals have been building a collaborative commercially accessible database on all our locations, it was already robust technology based on plates alone.
Vigilant is so well placed, I wonder if Amazon will even have a market impact...
The last useful moment to get freaked out was probably when Vigilant hired facial recognition expert Roger Rodriguez back in 2016.
The cat's long gone, fat on mice, and we don't even remember where we left the bag.
I don't really give a shit what tiny little corner of respectability they hold onto so they can sleep well at night while ratcheting up the surveillance state.
Half the houses in my neighborhood have some sort of camera system that you can see, there are probably more that you can't. People are scared of things, there is a market there.
It's freaky 1984ish stuff to think about but normal type people have these cameras, it's only natural for there to be private databases used for analytical purposes.
What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real, pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in the system.
The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-cit...
What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in making surveillance data transparent and public.
We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least.
Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it.
If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - by gosh, eventually it will become true.
Ultimately what the Bill of Rights means is determined by the Supreme Court. It could limit the Third Party Doctrine, which is really what gives the government warrantless access to that information, in light of new technology and social circumstances.
> "More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
Gorsuch may also be on board:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
> [Gorsuch] appeared eager to apply originalist principles to contemporary technology in a way that shields cellphone users from law enforcement overreach. Indeed, Gorsuch seems poised to build upon the jurisprudence of his predecessor, Justice Antonin Scalia, to establish real constitutional limits on the government’s ability to track our movements through our mobile devices.
I still shake my head that "wiretap" laws are what are being used (last I knew a few years ago) - why not have a clean law to address modern communication capabilities and proper privacy & court interests? :-/
The same recourse when you're false-positived by a witness, I'd assume: get a lawyer. Personally, I'd probably place my trust in facial recognition (possibly not this system specifically, though) over human eye-witness testimony, based on my understanding of human psychology and its vulnerability to incentives.
It's not as dire as it's sometimes painted. MD attempted to apply mass-ticketing with intersection cameras, and it was found to violate the state Constitution because the use of a car in committing a crime didn't imply the owner was behind the wheel at the time.
If the technology is unreliable, we call it out as unreliable. What society is going to need is people well-versed in the ways the tech can fail to be good, not a doom-sayer's disregard of the ways the technology can help.
I can see a time where the presumption of guilt is assumed simply because the technology says so. Clearly we are not there yet and possibly never will be. I hope that issues will be sorted out before the technology gains widespread use.
This isn't a technology problem, it's a legal problem.
The technology isn't going away no matter who provides it and as long as it's legal someone will.
You might just as well outlaw knives (they are in fact illegal in many European countries, which has done nothing about their easy availability, and software will be far easier to acquire than knives)
Also laws do work in these scenarios: look at the difference between US and Israeli security practices and you'll see dramatically different laws in effect.
Which is why I said that completely illegal is not realistic. What laws can do is provide a scope and framework on how technology is used. Data retention, sampling, court admissibility, etc... are all pieces that can be argued and adjusted to fit with new technology. But, like I also said above, I don't have faith that current law makers understand technology enough to make any of these laws. It will take some overreach cases that end up in SCOTUS to get anything done.
> You might just as well outlaw knives
Using knives in a certain way (stabbing someone for example) is against the law. Using this new technology in certain ways could also be against law.
This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.
Amazon takes my product, which I identify, and puts it in a bin at whatever warehouse. Another seller, sends in the same product, but theirs is counterfeit. Without opening the package, how is Amazon to know which one of us is selling the counterfeit and which one is real?
Now, my inventory is mixed in with amazon's and this counterfeiter, that product gets shipped out with my name because the customer chose my price of the list of sellers, but Amazon takes whichever one is closer, not the one I sent them. This is done to help ensure cheapest/fastest possible shipping. I take the blame even though someone else sent bad product.
This is a shitty situation all around, but how does Amazon fight back? They do eventually go back after the counterfeiters, but its a slow and complicated process because its super simple to set up as a seller on Amazon.
But, this is also not a new issue. Ebay still has this issue and I would say its far more mature than Amazon at the "3rd party seller" crap and Ebay cant fix it either. Its a shitty hard situation to deal with.
What reasons do you have to conclude that Amazon is not pro-consumer? Chasing marketshare and profit margin is something else, and being pro-consumer is a way to win marketshare and profit-margin.
Selling everything, generous return policies, free shipping, customer reviews; these are all customer-friendly.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-26/amazon-...
Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the police and government, they tech is out there. Those groups could have used it on their own.
When in reality it's just a service that's been around for a while that offers a technology that other people have, and was available to law enforcement long before Amazon started selling it to them.
What is the news here? That Amazon sells their products to the government?
Amazon might be a bogeyman here, but calling out the potential for abuse by governments of new tech is a primary function of the press in a modern free society.
The scariest part is the DNA fishing expeditions through cousins like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27... . They find a hair in a crime scene and 17 years later, more or less, you need to prove that you didn't do it. Maybe the victim was next to you at Starbucks or picked your hair with his /her shoes. Good luck
This is the law of the land right now. As to your next example, I don't see what's wrong with those, as missing a court date or violating parole is a perfectly legitimate reason for you to be arrested.
I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the many bad ways that this can be used for, especially since police oversight is notoriously bad, in virtually every country, including the west.
they don't expect to be the ones facing oppression.
On the contrary, I share the concern, but I don't share the conclusion that police should be relegated to crunching data with nothing more complicated than an abacus (obvious hyperbole) because of abuse concerns.
I also believe in a level of consistency that states no, you do not have a right to privacy in public. Any such abuses should be dealt with on a case-by-case, abuse-by-abuse basis, rather than unreasonable blanket bans. And any such cases must be ruled based on existing law, rather than what amounts to bench legislation.
The only viable counter I have managed to imagine so far (for the US) against automated facial recognition is to develop a new, serious religion that always wears identity-concealing veils, masks, and costumes in public places. It has to be a religious value, because otherwise, state-by-state anti-mask laws may be employed. This may be easily justified as an expression of egalitarian non-discrimination. If one cannot immediately identify someone as a member of an out-group, such as by their facial features or skin color, it is more difficult to treat them differently from a member of an in-group. It's harder to be racist if you don't know what races other people are. So adherents might also be required to wear gloves and concealing clothing, or full-body coverings like "morph suits". Fursuit cosplayers are likely to be political allies.
If you are worried about automatic ID, you should find out whether your state is a stop-and-identify state, and if so, work to have those repealed, along with any anti-mask laws. The presumption of innocence goes hand-in-hand with the right to pseudo-anonymity in public. If you aren't doing anything criminal, nobody needs to be identifying you. Sometimes, I even prefer not to be identifiable to my friends--maybe I just want to get some groceries without having to stop and talk to anybody.
All these technologies should be used first on cops and government officials, to ensure they are upright, before being used on anyone else. Qui custodiet custodes applies. It is too dangerous to be used by anyone who is not provably trustworthy.
The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs
It's already been half a decade since the UK surveillance regime and the reality of mass surveillance was opened to us, yet nobody batted an eyelid in the US. Meanwhile, facial recognition has improved by an order of magnitude and has already silently been seeing deployment everywhere around us. I'm being led to believe that unless we have a public poster boy to rally against, the situation isn't going to change.
Maybe I'm not plugged into the right channels, but I haven't heard any news about "London falsely jails thousands of people due to false-positives on the camera surveillance network" or "the Crown finds and jails protesters by the thousands."
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digi...
http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/art...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
AWS has tried to position themselves as being different from the old 'dinosaurs', but the public sector market is probably ripe for them to move into. They've already made steps with GovCloud, now it's time to get specialist teams and consultant contracts going.
If Amazon didn't do it I bet Google wouldn't be far behind
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-webs...
All this does is allow his Little Brother to help him keep tabs on us.
How long until we see tons of marketplaces to sell your home & business surveillance videos?
Maybe security companies will start offering free versions of things like Nest as long as you let them sell the video in their marketplace. It's the 21st Century way after all.
It's a bit dated, but the basic premise---the pattern of technology getting smaller, cheaper, and easier applies to surveillance technology also---tends to continue to be an accurate depiction.
A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or discuss it.
Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own logic and many have already made their peace with it.
That is already becoming SV's reputation abroad:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruin...
While Hollywood’s influence has waned, America’s leading internet companies ... have spread from Silicon Valley to all corners of the globe, even some untouched by American movies and TV shows.
It’s time for Americans to recognize that they have a new major cultural export, alongside movies and television: the set of modern communications platforms created in the United States that have since overtaken the world. The question then becomes: If the world looks at America and sees Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as its profile picture, what does the world think?
Americans should be concerned. We’ve reviewed how America’s new major cultural export has been characterized in the international media and other public discourse lately, and based on that we’ve identified three key features that have become associated with it in the eyes of the global audience.
They go on to discuss that SV has a growing reputation as the engine of 1) the spread of "hate and harmful ideas, 2) "foreign intervention in domestic politics", and 3) "the general surrender of privacy". Well worth reading.
Interesting to think that Amazon could use their face recognition tech instead to let you enter without doing anything, just like you exit "without friction". You'd just need an app the first time for them to learn your face.
They haven't done this. That means they either think it'd be perceived as too creepy, or the tech isn't good enough yet.
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actu...
If so, there is some serious moral hazard around using this service - you are making anyone in your dataset more identifiable in the future.
(Follow-up question: how long until the toolkit is just an open-source library that you can run on a Raspberry Pi? ;) ).
Govs? Big Incs? Deep Pockets? Can any of them be trusted?
What used to be known as "local law enforcement" is now a heavily armed para-military organization that dreams technology wet dreams. Its vendors dream of drowning in cash.
The din of fear is taking its toll. The expectation of unlawfulness is becoming self-fulfilling. The kids are not alright, as the normalization of school shootings shows.
I'm not going to defend the NRA, but they are the least of my worry at this point.
(And how about open source?)