Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
thehill.com
thehill.com
Along with the similar actions at Google and Microsoft[0,1], I hope that this represents a bit more of the decision-making power of tech companies coming back towards technologists, and away from the money-men.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/tech-companies...
The fight isn't whether or not ICE should have facial recognition software. The fight is to make ICE act in accordance with our values. Some agency (ICE or whatever replaces it) will still need to protect the borders, and that protection will require facial recognition software.
If you hate ICE, you should also probably hate defense contractors more, because they have very little moral qualms about accepting contracts from the government, even ones that may violate human rights. And that's where that money is going to go now.
> ... that protection will require facial recognition software.
Why?
Lots of things are effective, but life in a free country means that we don’t do some of them.
We could put cameras in every home, make them illegal to disable. Ban encryption. Censor the web. Ban cars that can’t be remotely disabled.
Free societies are free because there is slack in the system. This freedom is how norms evolve. Gay sex could put you in jail when my parents were teenagers. Supporting Nelson Mandela when he was in jail was supporting the leader of a terrorist organization. Heaven forbid smoking a joint. The status quo is not divined.
My point is, that regardless of your issue, authoritarianism is not a good answer. Even if you think it might swing things in your favor today, there are no guarantees that it will tomorrow.
Are there benefits of facial recognition cameras for law enforcement which can’t be said of other mass surveillance techniques?
Are there specific pros you want to be acknowledged?
Again, if you want an honest debate, I'm willing to have one. But I think in your quest to make a popular rhetorical argument, you've lost the moral high ground.
Your assumption that this software would be used for authoritarian ends is exactly the problem the OP was trying to point out.
Authoritarianism is a behavior of a country's leaders, not a label on some unwanted technology.
E.g. Sniper rifles are not authoritarian in an of themselves. The use of sniper rifles to snuff out dissent is.
And that's why this debate is dishonest. Because if you support facial recognition software for the police as another tool for the good guys, you get smeared as supporting authoritarianism.
When in fact, if you deeply wanted to remove authoritarian behaviors, you would add more checks and balances to the system to prevent unchecked behavior from our leaders.
The founding father's knew that and designed the constitution that way.
And sure, I didn't make it explicit, so let me make it explicit now: the use of the software to identify real people is authoritarian.
If you use it to classify random cat pictures then that's obviously not authoritarian.
But saying two things are equivalent doesn't make it so.
My phone tags people in them. Are you saying that is authoritarian? Because to me, it seems like a really nice tool to tag people in photos.
So right now: yeah it's probably an authoritarian system. But in the long term, we need a better understand of the legal and social implications of facial recognition before we can really trust governments at scale to use the technology within a framework that preserves our values.
Right now, it's best to deny them access to it.
Use of the term with regards to immigration is established. Here’s an (old) NYT oped as an example (other outlets available via your favorite search engine):
US legal system seems to disagree with you. http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/us-immigration/crime-ent... https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33351.pdf
It is true that some of the illegal immigrants (e.g. those overstaying visas) may not be guilty of criminal infractions, but most of the illegal border crossers are. As you can see, this question has little to do with ICE as these conditions are written in law, not ICE policies.
Here’s an (old) NYT oped as an example
NYT is not exactly a neutral arbiter of correct word usage, especially in highly politicized matter in which NYT is fully engaged. Additionally, if you do read the article, right from the start it points out that the change from criminal handling to civil is a target of a future reform, not a current state of affairs:
A bedrock premise of smart immigration reform is the sharp distinction it draws between criminal aliens and Americans-in-waiting. While it acknowledges that illegal immigrants need to get right with the law, it treats illegal status as a civil matter to be resolved by the machinery of naturalization, not by the police and prisons.
Nobody would need a "reform" if the above would already be the case.
In any case, ICE has no power to decide any of these matters, beyond very narrow band of operative focus (i.e. how to allocate prosecutorial and prevention resources, etc.) - if something is criminal, ICE can not "decriminalize" it, and if something is not, ICE can not "criminalize" it. That's why the very article you quoted talks about "bills" - i.e. legislative actions - that can do exactly that.
You're wrong. The use of the term "criminalization" here is correct. The Supreme Court has stated multiple times that being on US soil without proper documentation is not a crime [1].
You then deliberately try to conflate this with border crossing but note that irregular border crossing is also not a crime when individuals are seeking asylum. The US law here is actually quite muddy here (several lawsuits are in the air [2]) but international treaties (to which the US is party) make it quite clear that criminal prosecution of asylum seekers and refugees is both illegal and inhumane [3].
The criminalization effort (especially part where ICE agents get decked out with body armor and assault weapons to detain restaurant cooks) is precisely a propaganda effort to make it look like these people are all criminals when they're mostly just poor desperate people refuge from failed countries. (Of particular irony: many of these failed countries are so mostly because of US policy. In the case of Honduras the US decision to back the right-wing coup in 2009 led directly to the total collapse of law and order in that country. [4])
> In any case, ICE has no power to decide any of these matters
Not sure if this is deliberate or you're just very naieve but ICE has a lot of leeway in how it carries out its mostly administrative duties. (Contrary to popular belief ICE are not police though they love to dress up in the "POLICE ICE" jackets while terrorizing people.) There's a big difference, for example, whether ICE chooses to pre-emptively detain individuals awaiting processing in Immigration Court or it lets people show up on their own.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2017/dec/01/ka...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-right...
[3] https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/press-release/report-docume...
[4] https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/us-role-honduras-c...
Being is not. Crossing the border not via border control is.
> but international treaties (to which the US is party) make it quite clear that criminal prosecution of asylum seekers and refugees is both illegal and inhumane
We are not discussing what is humane according to some international treaty, we are discussing what is the US law and whether ICE has any power to change it. US law is illegal border crossing is a crime and ICE must enforce it.
> ICE has a lot of leeway in how it carries out its mostly administrative duties
It does. Changing the law about what is criminal and what is not is not part of it. It can, if directed by the head of the executive, refuse to uphold the law and prosecute behavior which is criminal by law, but that won't change the fact it is criminal - it'd be just criminal behavior that is not prosecuted. They way to make it not criminal is to change the law that makes it criminal. And, also, they can not just decide something is criminal and start prosecuting it without the law already having it as a crime - it's just not in their powers.
> Contrary to popular belief ICE are not police
Whose popular belief? ICE is a separate law enforcement agency, just as FBI, DEA, CBP or Secret Service are. The fact that they are not police does not change their powers as an executive agency.
> There's a big difference, for example, whether ICE chooses to pre-emptively detain individuals awaiting processing in Immigration Court or it lets people show up on their own.
There is, but it doesn't change anything about criminality.
You assume that there NEEDS to be some kind of border enforcement. It's not clear why that needs to include detention camps, armed guns, tent cities for children, no logistical support for reuniting asylum seekers with their children, or intimidation tactics.
That is, unless you think South Americans are fundamentally different and less worthy than their North American cousins in some axiomatic way that says, "Only the top N% of you are worthy of joining our society." This is especially true because the US really doesn't have substantial social services (or those that we do have are teetering on the edge of collapse) to fund compared to other first world countries who proportionally spend much more of their budget on entitlements.
Seriously? What makes YOU more entitled to be here than someone else? The answer is: there are probably many people who'd like to be here that would have similar positive (or negative) impacts on society. It's only because of implicit exceptionalism in American culture that we assume there is chaff to filter out.
You seem to not understand how the world works at a fundamental level.
Prove it.
> You seem to not understand how the world works at a fundamental level.
You seem to believe in magic and suggest it's essential to the world. You think America is fundamentally different. It's really not. It's rich, that's the difference, and a difference that's fading over time as its imperialism is curbed by progress elsewhere. It's largest ideological plurality is Christian, which is just as violent and hate-prone as any other religions.
It's not special. It's already chaotic. We could trivially improve the immigration process to make the waits less than 10x. We could even tax immigrants more than legacy citizens to offset that cost, if we wanted.
But what people actually want is to pretend that they're special. That only the best of the rest of the world match up with their mediocre life. It'd be funny if it wasn't leading to scaled human rights abuses and mass child trafficking by the human government.
IBM and other companies helping the nazis used that argument.
We could educate every american and have another 60 billion to spare to help the African-American community.
https://www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-b...
This is such a ridiculous number that it should be discounted out of hand. It also sounds like you're not counting the benefits of, work done by, and taxes paid by, these people.
Immigration enforcement is never going to get you free college. That's not how the politics works.
As for myself I got a full ride scholarship based on test scores and makes 200k in my early 20s, I just don't like seeing my taxes pay for people who cheat the system.
"The overall population that we analyze, for the purposes of determining the costs of illegal immigration, also includes about 4.2 million American-born minor children of illegal aliens. Although, the U.S.- born children of illegal aliens are, under the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, de jure U.S. citizens, they are also typically “targeted low-income children,” who are eligible for a variety of federal benefits. While not counted as illegal aliens, these children are a signifi cant part of illegal immigration’s fi scal impact on the U.S. taxpayer. Because they would not be present in the United States but for their parents violation of American immigration law, we consider them to be appropriately considered part of the cost of illegal immigration. "
Right. So they're counting US-born children, who they admit are constitutionally Americans, as part of the cost of illegal immigration.
So I guess the next step is finding a way to deport or cage those US-born American children of illegal immigrants?
ICE is removing illegal immigrants from the US. If it was removing legal citizens or legal immigrants for some arbitrary reason then people would be much more sympathetic to your position.
In reality however, because ICE is not rounding up "immigrants" as you say in an intentional effort to obscure the truth by avoiding the necessary word "illegal", most people in the US are in support of ICE's mission.
ICE will continue to carry out that just and necessary mission with or without the assistance of some naive and privileged ideaologues that work at tech companies.
Your position on this issue is rooted firmly on the wrong side of history.
But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy.
Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen on AWS.
Mass surveillance of the population via facial recognition is an offensive proposition to a great many million Amazon Prime members!
I’m not saying that they are, just that Amazon are within their right to stipulate that there are certain uses of their technology which they just don’t like, as they see fit.
> Domain fronting is illegal.
First I’ve heard. Where? Why?
> ...NSA... If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up
This story is not about the NSA. The Rekognition controversy arose regarding local police departments, who are very much not tasked with mass surveillance. Amazon used local police departments as example deployments, and for marketing copy as an idealized use-case.
I would personally stop shopping at a local store, if by supporting them I was supporting their objectionable side-business. Consumer boycotts are pretty common, as are changes to corporate policy due to the bad press boycotts generate.
I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments, but it's gonna happen anyway. I'd rather it be Google than Northrop.
So would many of us here, but not Google itself. It is just terrible PR for any company that wants a decent public image. It is one thing to get grilled by senators, but entirely another for your average user to start believing you’re part of a war-machine, and thus something to be avoided. And the bulk of Google/Amazon’s profits come (directly/indirectly) from B2C markets, which makes their image/brand-value a significant intangible asset that cannot be compromised. Contractors don’t have this quandary.
Tides can and do change though. And anyone working on anything that can be weaponized (see also self driving cars) and has heard of Alfred Nobel is just fooling themselves if they think they can control their creations.
In your admiration for a Google employees, you’re projecting your own beleifs and norms.
The whistle was blown; Project Maven is too far.
> I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments
Me too, but a cleaner way to deal with it might be to demand better transparency and accountability from the government. Beleif that large corporations will act in your unstated best-interests (and not their own) seems pretty noisy.
The reason we're hearing about this right now is that a lot of whistles are blown. The question is whether this will be effective in any way.
Ethical use doesn't matter once the government has their hands on it - government doesn't have ethics, it has politics.
The whole thing seems like virtue signaling.
Those who don’t come out with us any more are clearly doing it with the same intentions as everyone else that disagree with me; the wrong ones.
FaceID users. Just because something has downsides doesn’t mean it has no upsides.
Given that tech earned millions of dollars vs this tech earning billions, I'm gonna guess the old tech is now underwhelming.
Snowden, Assange both shed light on massive surveillance and the outrage lasted a week. Now Assange and Snowden are seen in a less positive light as well by the same people who hailed them as defenders of freedom and transparency.
People are fickle.
There was a change in policy from: we don't generally presecute parents with children, to: prosecute all parents with children.
You don't think that change could have had anything to do with people's outrage?
The suggestion that facial recognition cameras are pointed in the faces of ordinary Americans, just in case they do something the cops don’t like, is a pretty extraordinary proposition for a US consumer company to make.
The Rekognition pitch is encouraging the use of a specific controversial practice, rather than abstractly aiding the general compute capabilities of a large (if controversial to some) government department.
If those employees were really against this type of work, they should have come out against it years ago.
It's not like GPS, because GPS doesn't invade my privacy. I'm not sure that being identified everywhere I go is "legitimate", though it is common.
Where do you draw the line on ethical usage?
In my mind, if you're concerned about the ethics of facial recognition tech, you shouldn't be working in that field at all. It's fundamentally anti-privacy.
One can put me in a box. The other one can’t.
That's not to say that that's a perfect situation, but (if your threat model is the government) a government which has to take data from unwilling companies is weaker than one that need not do so, because they have the capability to collect the data themselves.
I’m not saying one side is good and the other is not. But if we’re drawing lines, the side that can punch me is the one I’m more scared of.
Uber put someone in a box in Phoenix recently.
Otherwise the message is "don't oppose the surveillance state."
If you do not like surveillance and would like to have less of it, the proper way to deal with the problem is to get your lawmaker to ban it at the federal level, not to shift the implementation to some other company just because you don't like Trump.
But that's not the issue here, is it? "Resistance" is. Time and time again it is uncovered that the Obama administration did the same exact things the Trump administration is being panned for, and everyone just nodded in agreement. If someone's moral compass turns opposite depending on whether their candidate wins or loses, that's not a "moral compass" at all, that's just a political dog whistle.
Putting aside the "Obama did it" false equivalency I do not see why following ones conscience and using their right to choose to take a stand in a nondamaging way is so offensive to some people. I would guess from it highlighting their own moral abdications but I am not the best at understanding people.
It already happened, years ago it is a random forests/SVM, now it is a neural network. Weapons are machines, should we just go and ban research machine learning as a whole?
I bet that in back rooms, high level cloud execs at Hear companies are hearing an earful about how they need to control their employees and part of getting the big contracts requires controlling your employees. Just look at how the NFL caved in when Trump accused them of not supporting soldiers. Will these companies stay the line when Trump starts saying that these companies are hurting American soldiers and police officers? I am not confident they will.
They’re a pretty famous name in US labor history!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
So what various political leaders or even nations are doing is not necessarily material to his goal. I wouldn't see it as a double-faced 'talking a good game', but rather understanding that what companies say in any region is little more than a product of their public relations teams, if not only because of apathy.
I also don't think they would ever fire individuals in large quantities over anything like this. There's a much easier solution. Turnover in tech companies is huge. All they need to do is change their hiring preferences and in a decade the company could have almost entirely shifted the ethos of their workforce without having had to fire a single person.
The fact that the hot areas have absurd cost of living and companies keep paying it instead of moving to cheaper locales and attempts to do so have failed is quite telling.
Long story short, basically what a previous poster said. People spent so much time trying to find out if they could, no one seemed to stop and think about whether they should.
Well then, how do you feel when the two cooperate, one enabling the other to screw us more efficiently?