Ban Facial Recognition at Festivals
banfacialrecognition.com
banfacialrecognition.com
1- For face f, is f a member of F_known? (From national ID cards etc.) Assume this gives an answer [0.0 - 1.0].
2- Is f a member of F_suspect? Where F_suspect is a database of face imagery associated with potentially illegal activity or refugee migration. Not that these faces could be from video surveillance (from a border region, train station, migrant camp) or scraped from war zone images e.g. jihadi propaganda, YouTube video of regime critics, talking politics on HN, video of protests in other countries, etc.
3- Not matching anything, and hence also requiring investigation.
All of these have errors, which generally go up as more people are added to the training database. Apparently some ethnicities (okay, black people) are often trained for poorly. This will likely result in 'over-servicing' of some ethnicities.
If local police get a hit for someone going through festival security and detain them on the basis of face recognition software, what is the legal basis for that? Police would say that they had 'intelligence' but can they explain the basis for it? Is this not essentially maintaining dossiers on people who have not committed any crime? They have no evidence a crime has been committed but instead they are essentially running a police checkpoint and saying "Papers!". These are the mechanisms of the Stasi.
One can argue that police should be able to detain those with outstanding warrants. I have no problem with that, except that when police take photos of citizens it is hard to know what is done with those photos. Ironclad legislation requiring they not leave the device or be stored on anything except ephemeral storage would be a good start, along with civil and criminal penalties for non compliance and direct individual responsibility and penalties for the chain of command.
Without a rigorous push back, America will become like China and the UK, where your face must be shown, and it will be recorded and tracked 24/7. Of course in America it will probably be via a company, and police forces will have a subscription, which lowers their fees the more faces the capture.
The average European is highly highly unlikely to have ever encountered an undocumented refugee from Syria or North Africa.
You also have those that are in limbo as for example there are several countries that are not taking back their citizens if they are forced there. Afghanistan used to be one of those countries for Sweden so even if someone got a no on their asylum application they could still just say no and stay. However now Sweden has a deal with Afghanistan so people who are not leaving willingly are put on chartered planes down there.
Then there are those internally within EU like beggars who are officially not allowed to stay as long as they do but no one is checking of course.
Most of Europe is very different to the US in this regard. Without being legal/registered, you’ve no chance of getting the equivalent of an SSN, drivers license, opening a bank account, leasing an apartment or in some cases even buy a mobile phone. Consequently, the number of undocumented immigrants is minuscule.
I get the impression that in the US it mightn’t be unusual for the average citizen to encounter undocumented immigrant gardeners, nannies, etc. - this almost never happens in Europe.
So it's probable that many Europeans could have encountered illegal immigrants without realising.
The common point is there a selection of low pay service jobs that attract illegal immigrants, who then become trapped. Some by debt and threats to family, and other more direct slavery. Anti-trafficking and similar groups have been warning of issues for years, and mostly ignored.
It remains a truth that the vast majority of immigration in Europe is legal, but there is a significant level of illegal migration. Thanks to the free movement of peoples within the EU, it is far harder to detect than before those border checks were pulled down.
Here is just one of a selection of pieces that have come up this week across all the press:
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/oct/25/trafficked-vietn...
What would be convincing would be a reference to a source with numbers/data to back up your claim.
The most recent Europe-wide figures are pretty out-of-date but indicate estimates of between 0.3% and 0.7% of people living in Eureope being irregular/undocumented (http://irregular-migration.net). This is much less than the comparable estimates for the US, for example.
Regarding the illegal immigration situation in EU is very different from US because the laws are different. In EU state helps immigrants so they're incentivized to register, and also it's easier to get permits. According to the official DHS report [2]: "Of the total illegal alien population in 2015, nearly 80 percent had resided within the United States for more than 10 years", which is super uncommon in EU, they'd be legalized by that time.
So just comparing the numbers doesn't tell the true story, but according to the official report from Austria [3]: "Irregular residents account for between 2.9% and 1.1% of the total population.", so 10x more what you suggested. They also note in this report: "As there are strong incentives for immigrants to register in Austria (e.g. certificate of registration as a prerequisite for application for state benefits), the majority of immigrants are on record at the registration offices. In contrast, very little information is available about irregular immigration." And Austria is one of the stricter countries in this regard.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache...
[2] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...
[3] https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats...
If you want to practice civil disobedience, it can sometimes effectuate change, but it doesn’t always work — especially not immediately — and you have to be willing to be punished in the meantime.
When people argue both that laws are bad, and we need a new law to improve society, I wonder if they're really thought things through.
You can't do away with borders in an environment where governments are at each other's throats and there's massive wealth and cultural inequality. At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish? The refugees (small percentage of 3rd world residents who could/would migrate) come from cultures that are unable to fix their own countries' problems from within, granted often due to initial conditions outside their control. So how would they fix our problems — and we have a lot of them — which are equally out of our control to solve? And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.
Opening borders to absolve our guilty conscience about ill-gotten gains of empires past and present doesn't solve anything. It just makes us feel better. It's like shooting heroin on the titanic.
America was built on immigration from undesirables (an Irish or Italian Catholic ~100 years ago was treated as suspiciously as a Muslim is now), and it seemed to turn out okay. The key difference back then was there was minimal welfare, so immigrants had to find something productive to do or else they'd starve.
>At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish?
This is already happening via outsourcing: see for instance the rise of China, hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty while working-class Americans get poorer, and China's rising political influence on other countries. Open immigration would encourage more competition between countries: a hellhole like North Korea would have to clean up its act if its citizens were free to get up and leave.
>And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.
Do you think current (legal) refugees would agree that they're hardly any better off than they were back in their original country? Why would illegal refugees be any different? (Often the only difference between an illegal and a legal refugee/immigrant is that the legal one is at the front of some queue, the illegal one is at the back).
>the key difference back then was minimal welfare
And an expectation of assimilation. Regardless immigration in the absence of a welfare state is a completely different beast than immigration into a welfare state.
>Do you think current legal refugees would agree.
Current refugees benefit from unequal access to our labor market. If you eliminated that advantage by letting anyone in, not just risk takers, they almost certainly wouldn’t find it so attractive. How is a race to the bottom a good thing?
>outsourcing
Yes Americans get poorer, and the world gets tons more plastic in its oceans every minute. So we all get poorer too. In my estimation it’s far more important that 1st world countries make a stand for the health of the earth. Globalism is completely incompatible environmentalism best I can tell.
Did you pay for the country's infrastructure upon your birth, or did you freeload for at least 18 years before contributing anything back to it in taxes?
Of course it should be a human right to freely travel, in a political utopia. Guess where we don't live? We don't live somewhere called no place.
If wishes (moral and otherwise) were horses, we'd drown in horse shit.
If everybody thought like this, we'd still be in the stone age. You don't achieve change by deciding it's impossible and giving up.
Ten years ago it wouldn’t have been a thing. There were other issues. These things come and go like fashion. Twenty thirty years ago it was self determination of nations, today its “there should be no borders” which is the opposite of self determination of nations.
It is not. To quote Zach Weinersmith
"Every time I talk about immigration, someone says 'but the US has the right to control borders.' Sure! Yes!
The US also has the right to create a branch of the military containing only monkeys wearing tiny hats. That has no bearing on whether it's good policy or not!"
This is a pure strawman.
The efforts and the social impact of chasing people doing something illegal must be balanced with the seriousness of the crime.
If property is a fundamental right, then shouldn't it be the right of a landlord to rent his property to whomever he wants?
Do not underestimate the power of "computer said so"
Forgetting about illegal immigrants for a moment, are you saying that visitors to some country shouldn't be allowed at festivals? What have you got against tourism?
There's no right to visit attractions, but there ought to be a right to privacy, and I'd personally prefer a few illegals get to unjustly enjoy themselves over the invasive panopticon required to prevent that.
You might disagree, but perhaps you can think of some other law that you wouldn't want festivals to assist in enforcing. If you can't, do you trust that the government will never pass such a law? If not, you might not want to normalize having facial recognition tech everywhere.
Or maybe they could just put shock collars on every attendee in case they begin to act in an unacceptable manner.
In fact, once it's proven to work at festivals we can extend this to schools!
I just don't want a facially-tagged database of me doing my shitty drunk dance moves at shows ... is that too much to ask?
In fact, my biggest worry about facial recognition is not even government abuse but the marketing, ads & stalking industry which is way more efficient at stalking people than any government will ever be (see Facebook for an example).
Voluntarily providing your identity is different having it involuntarily collected.
Further, collecting contact info aligns with the data subject’s goal, i.e. an impactful petition. With FR used for security, the goals are also aligned, i.e. a fun event. But for immigration control or marketing, the data subject does not benefit and may even be harmed by the data collection.
But we don't have the infrastructure to do such things atm, so which other option do you have to prove the validity of a petition?
I can see how they would not explicitly ban participants from including it in art. New rules can take a while to be formed and it is only if there is a real need.
I can also see LE using it or requiring its use—but that could happen at any of these events.
This is sort of an alarmist site / concept given only five out of the large list “might” use it.
Banning it in art would also make art that is explicitly about facial recongnition pretty much impossible.
If they'd had facial recognition, it'd only be for staff to treat him as a VIP.
Basically, this looks like a FUD campaign to work the outrage machine to get more followers and donations (and e-mail addresses)
Is that what people think? We are letting this shit run wild on us, and if the future is anything other than a bonafide utopia (spoilers: it's not going to be that), people are going to pay for our present naivete.
You could track every person and item in public space and automatically fine a percentage of net income for violations. Think in terms of enhanced red light and speed cameras.
The system would store everything encrypted in a distributed system. Data would automatically get wiped out after 30 days. The public would be able to verify this (open source code and public access logs)
Any humans accessing the feeds would need a court order specifying time span + place + item being searched for and a good reason why. The court orders would be also be publicly accessible. May be a blockchain which is append only and distributed. Some form of hard mechanisms to prevent anyone being above the law. If anyone abuses access, they’d stand a trial too)
Access would would blur out all other faces other than person being investigated.
Basically what I’m saying is let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Good Surveillance may offer the means to quickly find violators and deter crime. A car got stolen. Boom, easily identified. A kid got lost/kidnapped. Instant search. Some asshole didn’t cleanup after their dog pooped. They think twice. Littering in public space. Nay nay.
Whether we like it or not, with the advance of cheap cameras, cheap processing power and advanced computer vision algorithms/neural nets. Surveillance is coming. It’s a god like power.
I believe we should at-least be having conversations on safe and trust worthy surveillance.
Facebook/Google already know what everyone is doing. We don’t know what they are doing with our data. The information asymmetry is a problem.
Yeah, we should, but we aren't. Or, at least, the people actually involved in advancing the state of surveillance either aren't participating in such conversations, or are there for appearances only and don't really give a shit what the other participants have to say.
You don't have to be paying much attention to see that there's basically zero accountability and zero effort to protect the public in what I guess I might call the surveillance-industrial complex.
Believe me, I see the theoretical potential and value of surveillance for keeping people safe, but it's sort of like the idea of a benevolent robot dictator who makes perfect decisions to maximize good and minimize bad. Even a shaky first-pass implementation of such a thing is way beyond our capabilities, and if done even slightly wrong it could be a global catastrophe. Surveillance is a bit different because we're starting to have the technology to make it happen, but we don't have the social machinery necessary to do it effectively or responsibly.
No matter how much I hear about illegal immigration being cracked down upon, the Spanish speaking radio stations aren’t being converted to another format, so there’s still enough advertiser demand to pay for the station. That can only happen if the advertisers are finding a large enough customer base to justify their costs.
If these radio stations then sponsor concerts, it’s likely that the attendees will have a high illegal immigrant percentage.
Should the government be able to mass survey the Spanish speaking population attending these concerts, looking for immigrants who have not turned up to their deportation hearings?
I applaud the government for being that efficient with my tax dollars (I expect this method is much cheaper than others), but should they be doing it? Probably not.
Now what about facial recognition for known terrorists at large sporting events in order to prevent an attack? Maybe?? At music festivals? I can see the argument there too.
If I had to quantify my suspicion of Spanish radio listeners in my city, I’d say that 90% are likely illegal immigrants.
If I was in Florida, I’d say that 10% are likely illegal immigrants.
Don’t interpret my observation of illegal immigration existing as condemnation of a group of people who migrated across vast distances and dangerous deserts in order to work hard manual labor jobs in order to better their families. If I were in their shoes, I’d do the same. But, that doesn’t make it any less illegal.
My figure is a direct observation having worked landscaping and construction jobs in my town along side people who are illegal and open about it. Then, interacting with the second and third generation friends in school, they weren’t listening to the Spanish radio stations.
CBP also maintains statistics: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
In the private sector, Pew Research (a well regarded, nonpartisan institution) generates statistics using loads of studies. See, e.g., https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/us-unauthor...
These are all readily found using some basic Google searches.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/11/us-metro-ar...
Police forces _has_ to act before such happens
This is like metal detectors in airports - useless
Coz if someone want to do harm - they can do this on parking, in line or in any areas near where people are crowded
And even more There is no evidence that facial recognition lower terrorists attack possibility
If I were a Western country, I would simply arrest all the known terrorists.
I would also note that Nielsen rating are based on an incredibly small number of Nielsen listeners. Their system might be good enough for advertising, but not for dragnet surveillance.
Look, I get that if you are worried about illegal immigration, then using FR at Latin concerts has a rough logic. My point is that targeting ethnic groups for mass surveillance is not good for anyone.
(Note: I see where you said the government should probably not do that, but the rest of your post seemed to support the practice.)
Lost me at deported. Why is this hypothetical music fan in this country illegally? And why is it so important to allow him to stay?
Basically you are arguing that cultural organizations should support the police state.
We should fix the damn laws, not make a conflicting hodgepodge of regulations meant to mitigate ones we don't like. Putting police and law enforcement in the middle of a political debate is a recipe for disaster.
Which problem do you _not_ see with that?
Example 1: So, let's say you're on a festival where cameras and facial recognition systems are used "for safety purposes" and everybody is feeling really safe because of that. Now some crime happens, like sexual assault or whatever. Nobody really saw the culprit and there's no usable evidence on the victim or crime scene, but cameras filmed him when he flew from the scene.
The images are not the best. It was dark, he ran quite fast and he was also wearing a black hoodie. Facial recognition systems worked hard on every frame of the video material and are somewhat sure (90% probability) that you are the sexual offender. You also happen to have a black hoodie with you and you were not with your friends when the assault happened.
Obviously you will tell the police that you were on your way to the toilet and that's why you split from your friends for half an hour, just as the crime happened. But what reasons do they have to believe you? The software solution is quite sure of two things: You are the suspect (90% probability) and the system found nobody else that matched the video frames. So, it can only be you, right?
Well, seems like you could go to jail for some time before the real culprit is found. Or maybe you will be convicted for something that you have not done. That is a real possibility when law enforcement starts replacing "real" police work with automated solutions which are prone to errors.
Will those systems even say that they are only 90% sure? Or will there be pressure on the manufacturers of those systems to only deal in absolutes and have great hit rates?
Example 2: You're on this march against right-wing politicians. Police is using cameras to watch the march and is also using facial recognition technology to save who attended the march, in case something happens. Your face is detected and linked with your personal information because a reference picture of you is already present in the passport database, which the police obviously has access to. Police says that the data will be deleted after the march, but somehow it's saved for testing purposes in a MongoDB hosted on AWS and never got deleted after all.
Elections come and go and now those right-wing politicians your protested against are in control. Or some hackers stumble over the database, copy it and sell it to whomever is willing to pay for that. Or some corrupt members of the police get payed a nice bribe for a copy of that list and they don't really care about "that data". Nothing of that really sounds unlikely in this day and age.
In any case you are now on a list of "political enemies" because you were on that march. Nobody knows what will happen with you from here on. Maybe you will just lose your job when working in a public institution, because there is somebody more "loyal". Or you simply don't get promoted anymore, although you are doing really great work. But maybe you end up on some kind of bounty list for some ultraradical people, who knows.
Just look over to Hong Kong. Would you really feel well when the Chinese government knew that you were attending the protests against the government?
From here on you might think about more examples where facial recognition could go really wrong for you, although you did nothing wrong.
There's no need to be uncivil or rude.
Let's take Example 1.
It would indeed be problematic if we convicted people based solely on the algorithmic conclusion of a machine. But thankfully, we still have jury trials in the U.S.; it requires a unanimous verdict to convict someone; and it requires a level of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt."
It's important to understand that a machine is not a witness. It can't be cross-examined. So whatever result it produces is evidence. How strongly that evidence is believed is up to the jury; and a good defense attorney is going to do whatever it takes to attack the machine (using expert witnesses and so forth) to introduce reasonable doubt if its conclusion is incorrect. The defense attorney is also going to introduce whatever other exculpatory facts and witnesses they can find.
In your example, if a sexual assault occurs, the victim is likely to testify. Without the victim's testimony identifying the defendant, and without any corroborating DNA evidence, the defendant is likely to walk, even with the machine saying it's 90%+ probability match.
In any event, I think what's needed here is some additional law forbidding the sole use of FR data as evidence used to convict a defendant. That, I think, would help assuage most people's concerns -- even though I think it unlikely that a conviction would result this way anyway.
A really important fact that you're not considering is that FR has a strong potential to prevent false identification. Many studies have shown that eyewitness identifications, including line-ups, are extremely unreliable; and yet, we've been using them for decades to convict people. And we've released innocent convicts many, many times, sometimes decades after imprisonment, when it turned out the witness was lying or simply had a faulty memory. And in your example, if you in fact went to the toilet during the crime, the cameras would be able to corroborate that.
OTOH, if a machine strongly disagreed with the eyewitness, I have little doubt that the defendant would be dismissed.
Example 2 is a bit trickier.
You don't need FR technology to have a police state: North Korea has had one for nearly 70 years without one. East Germany had one for over 40 years (see: Stasi). There are cruder methods than using FR technology; spying is a very old game.
So, FR can help enhance control for regimes that are already inclined to preventing freedom by making it much more economical than having a spy network, but it's by no means necessary. Besides, you can trivially foil FR by wearing a mask.
I don't know how to prevent a police state, other than to employ violent resistance, and even that doesn't always work. I don't think anybody knows. But if you want a prevent a police state, I think banning FR isn't really going to help. At least so far, history shows that many police states resulted from democracies or republics ceding control under some sort of "necessity."
It seems this was a convincing argument for a lot of people in regards to encryption. Facial recognition is math just as much as encryption is.
And even in some cases math itself can be illegal. For example digital images can be written as large integers, and we know that in some jurisdictions, it is illegal to have some types of images in one's possession.
Certain encryption algorithms, which are at their core applied math, are still illegal to export to this day to certain countries such as Iran. They are regulated and banned under the same treaties that apply to nuclear weapons.
If you publish an app to Apple's App Store, for example, you have to sign a waiver explaining if your app uses encryption (such as for SSL/TLS) before being allowed to publish in international markets.
Not saying it is right, but there is definitely legal precedent to ban mathematical knowledge at the international level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Maybe because the FR industry is the one that's delivering those death threats?
BTW, this web site is nothing but a fear farm. The defining image has text right at the top "Could lead to..." which is just fanning fear.
One can both support the ban and doubt its success.