Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests | Hacker News Reader

Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

everestpipkin.github.io

622 pointsdsr12379 comments

Some tips to maximise user privacy while deploying this tool:

1) The code, for now, runs locally. This is good. To avoid the possibility of the code being tampered with at a later day (for example, it could be modified to send copies of the image to a server), download the webpage and use the saved copy, not the live copy.

2) Do not use the blur functionality. For maximum privacy, this should be removed from the app entirely. There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques.

3) Be weary of other things in the photograph that might identify someone: reflections, shadows, so on.

4) Really a subset of 2 and 3, but be aware that blocking out faces is often times not sufficient to anonymise the subject in the photo. Identifying marks like tattoos, or even something as basic as the shoes they are wearing, can be used to identify the target.

"There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques"

Any examples? You can't reverse it if the data is gone.

The data may still be there, it just looks like it's gone.

Blur is in effect a lowpass filter on the image. The high frequency information is gone. Reconstruction based on domain knowledge, like AI methods etc is unlikely to be able to reconstruct the distinguishing features between people enough to avoid false positives when used to search for similar people.

Then again, maybe groups of people can be associated together, and a poor match is good enough given other clues.

So, much better to be safe than sorry.

I'm not sure if I had a particular good point to make, other than that blurring does remove information that cannot easily be reversed. You can probably make very convincing reconstructions, but they might not look like the original person.

> The high frequency information is gone

diminished in power.

It's only gone if it goes below the quantization threshold. Depends on the filter.

True. I think the reasonable assumption would be a low-pass filter that removes high frequencies altogether. A gaussian filter wouldn't be a particularly good idea.

Blur deconvolution is not exactly a new method. Easy to find examples of reconstruction from blurred images. Eg, https://www.instantfundas.com/2012/10/how-to-unblur-out-of-f...

I don't when de-blurring would be a novel idea. I think newer methods that use machine learning can produce very good results. But the math of it is much older than any computer implementation.

If you remove high frequency details, you in effect remove distinguishing features. That it is possible to create an absolutely convincing high-detail image that if blurred, gives the same "original" blurred image doesn't mean you have the correct deblurred image.

With not too fancy methods, I'm pretty sure you can make a blurred image identify as any multiple people.

I don't think this is a controversial statement either. In any case, this is a tangential discussion, since blurring to hide identities is a flawed method to begin with. With video recording, tracking, grouped individuals, etc, I'm sure reconstruction with good databases of likely subjects can have some surprising accuracy. So, better to avoid it altogether.

That said, one image, sufficiently blurred with a proper low-pass filter (i.e not a softer gaussian type, but one that just removes frequency ranges altogether), will absolutely not contain information to identify someone. The information literally isn't there. A large number of people are an equally good match, and then no one is. But, since combined with other methods I mentioned, it's a bad idea, then, yes, it's a bad idea.

I mean, if you have a prior probabilistic model for what a face looks like, you could combine that with standard deconvolution and get a scary good reconstruction I imagine

You can get a scaryly real like looking high detailed image that blurs to something really close to the original blurred image. Yet, it won't look like the original image, and won't identify the person.

> You can't reverse it if the data is gone.

That's the problem - the data you think is gone isn't gone. High frequencies are gone.... but you left all the low frequencies, didn't you? You can read a face from the low frequencies.

If you blur then mosaic, or vice-versa, then presumably you get rid of the low and high frequencies? Depending on the detail shown in the original image either, or both, might remove enough information to render the image anonymised.

How about replace each face with a "this is not a person" AI generated face, then blur+mosaic. Or just a non-person face using a deepfake system that matches the facial expression?

Why do all these complicated things?

Just draw a black box over faces.

Because the result is a lot more ugly.

Don't tell people what not to do. Figure out why they're doing it, and provide what they actually want while still achieving the goals (here: security).

Very coarse mosaic, add noise, then blur seems reasonably safe, and doesn't have to look like crap.

"seems reasonably safe" seems like a terrible cryptographic analysis. in fact, given that we already know that both blurring and mosaicing are individually reversible, and noise is easily removable from a sufficiently wide mosaic, this seems like a particularly terrible algorithm. that's not the point though: any man can create an encryption algorithm that he himself cannot break. maybe you can come up with an obfuscation algorithm that cannot be trivially broken, but that doesn't mean it's even remotely a good idea.

I was writing a HN comment, not a scientific paper, which is why I wrote "seems safe" instead of making stronger claims.

I'd also like to know how mosaicing is reversible, since it demonstrably reduces the total available amount of information from e.g. 20x20 = 400 RGB values to a single RGB value. This is not sufficient for text where you can start brute-forcing individual options because the search space is small and inputs can be reconstructed precisely, but I'd like to see an explanation why you think this is reversible for photos (even without noise added). I'd also like to know how you want to remove random noise applied to each mosaic block.

The mosaicing is supposed to be the security step here. The blur is optional eye candy not expected to remove further information.

In particular, if you claim that a face mosaiced with a large "pixel" size (e.g. so that the typical face is 5x5 "mosaic blocks" big), you're effectively claiming that you can perform facial recognition based on noisy 5x5 pixel images.

according to https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/2019/12/12/amazons-rekognition-..., current facial recognition software is able to distinguish faces in very blurry mosaics using statistics.

it doesn't matter though. as I've explained, it's far easier to come up with flawed schemes than prove them insecure. just because I can't explain why your specific scheme is insecure doesn't mean it stands a chance against real cryptographers.

The 20x26 example is indeed scary, but in line with what was known about facial recognition. (It also becomes a bit less scary when you don't look at a zoomed-in version of the image.)

Hence my suggestion to reduce a face to something like 5x5 blocks.

While I'm familiar with the crypto design problem, this is not a crypto algorithm. Sure, it can't be ruled out that someone in the future will find a way to do it, but the state of the art says that 5x5 pixels are not anywhere near enough to run face recognition.

And a solution that may be broken in the future is often much better than a solution that people don't use because it doesn't meet their needs, which in this case is not having fugly black boxes in their picture.

this seems like a false dichotomy. there's nothing stopping you from using a pink oval, as long as it covers the face.

I would be worried that a generated fake face would be similar enough to the face of a real someone, somewhere, to get that person in trouble. This isn't a crisp portrait photo; a blurry cell phone video with a lot of activity and noise already kind of leaves an opening for mis-identification.

Nit: when you blur high frequencies are not gone. They are damped.

The simplest being just scale the photo down and the facial details come back especially if the photo was high resolution to begin with.

I think people are stumbling over the word "reverse" here. A common use of "reverse" is to undo. And you're 100% right that you cannot undo the destruction of information.

But instead, "reverse" is being used here to mean something like analyze or to apply countermeasures to defeat the obfuscation.

Here's a very specific example, having to do with a much smaller data-set, the OCR font used for the routing and account number on cheques.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-uncover-blurred-information-in...

Very minor but interesting nitpick: the font used on checks is not OCR (optical) but MICR (magnetic ink). The design objectives are different and different font families exist for the two purposes. MICR as used on checks (more properly called E-13B) bears unusual, distinctive character shapes emphasizing abnormally wide horizontal components due to the need for each character to have a distinctive waveform when read as density from left to right, essentially by a tape recorder read head. Fonts optimized for OCR are usually more normal looking to humans because they emphasize clear detection of lines instead.

E-13B is a bit of an ideal use case for this method because of the highly constrained character set used on checks and the unusually nonuniform density of E-13B. The same thing can be done on text more generally but gets significantly more difficult.

If you do something really simple like a Gaussian blur (which is a type of convolution), it might be possible to find the inverse convolution (de-convolution) and restore the original image with some accuracy.

One method is the Lucy-Richardson deconvolution [1], which is an iterative algorithm, and here [2] is the best practical example I could find right away. Unfortunately the text is not in English, but the illustrations and formulae might be enough to give some intuition of the process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson%E2%80%93Lucy_deconv...

[2] https://habr.com/en/post/136853/

https://github.com/Y-Vladimir/SmartDeblur

http://smartdeblur.net/

Yes, that's it, thank you! And here's the English version of the article I linked above: https://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration1.htm

Yes this is possible before JPEG compression, because convolution removes fairly little information but once you compress using JPEG you remove the frequency components that make it reversible.

The data isn’t usually gone, just spread out!

Deconvolution was used to fix the Hubble Space Telescope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_...

Even more impressive, you can see around corners with similar reconstruction techniques

https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-aro...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk

Sorry.

So based n all the replies, can someone design the most resilient facemask that can never be understood by facial AIs?

https://cvdazzle.com/

But remember that facial recognition is far from the only way to identify protesters. Assume that the full power of the DHS is there (drones, Stingrays / IMSI catchers, license plate readers)

Best bet is probably just using a normal looking facemask that is highly reflective in the spectrum the camera sees.

Once a face is captured that image data can be retained forever while the image recognition continually improves and then repeatedly reprocessed for matches. Best not to show your face at all if you don't want to be held accountable.

A replacement for blur could just be black boxes. Seems easy and safe enough.

Make sure they are 100% opacity. A lot of people mess this up and use 90% opacity or similar and the original image can be revealed by messing with the color levels.

I've doxxed my Reddit username on my Apple phone doing that exact thing. The black marker is not opaque, even after a few stripes over the username. You have to do it many more times.

Easier to select an area and delete it from the layer entirely so that a transparent hole is left. Then make sure you cleanup EXIF and other metadata or you may have the original image still in a thumbnail field at reduced fidelity.

Free online metadata viewer http://exif.regex.info

Do not keep it transparent! The Gimp for example keeps the underlying colour data, and just sets the opacity to 0.

this bug (closed as Expected Behavior) has a demonstration: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/4487

It blows my mind that there are so many ways to screw up something this simple.

Edit: to be clear I meant this as a commentary on the technology, not the people making the mistakes

I think there is a need for a dedicated image privacy offline program. On a technical level its very easy to preserve privacy, its just the tools people are using were built for other purposes (Non destructive editing is highly desirable in normal cases).

All the program has to do is scrub all exif data, have a censor box/brush that is 100% black and rencode the image so there is no remaining unneeded data.

Good thought; it seems like something the EFF (or maybe the ACLU) would be interested in producing or publishing.

Is PPM a safe round-trip format to remove all metadata and transparency? I'd like to recommend it to a friend and as far as I know it really only contains RGB as text and has no extensions for exif or similar. But after so many gotchas, as listed here in the thread, I'm somewhat paranoid...

ASCII PPM supports comments, so it is possible that EXIF or other identifying information would get written into the comments by some tool.

I have only ever observed PPM comments right at the start of the file, so you could open it in a text editor and remove the comments from the start. Maybe check the very end of the file as well.

Binary PPM does not support comments, so that would be a better solution. PPM documentation here, you want possibly P3 or more likely P6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm#File_formats

I didn’t specify a program to use, but I did not know this. A step in my personal workflow I neglected to state is to flatten all layers but I’m not sure what the best way is, so I’ll just say I am open to ideas for better ways.

There should be a test suite for image editing applications which will validate the different ways of editing a file to see which ones work as expected and which do not. I’m thinking something similar to web standards test for browsers. Does something like this already exist?

As soon as deepfakes and "thispersondoesnotexist" started happening I wanted a tool that would replace everyone's face with a auto-generated face just so I could do street photography without feeling like I was invading people's right to obscurity

This is a cool idea. Oh to be a streamer with an auto generated face. Reminds me of A Scanner Darkly.

Should be slowly morphing between different faces, maybe 10 minutes or so per transition. Should be fairly unsettling to watch! :D

That's a really interesting idea. I'm not sure what the commercial value would be, but the artistic value (and gain in privacy) would be huge. I'm not sure what you'd do about identifying marks like tattoos, but perhaps that isn't the biggest concern when compared to faces.

Could you train a model with your own face as a start, and then run your photos through an existing consumer face-swap app? Or perhaps use a celebrities likeness? I wonder how much the visual 'likeness' of a stranger is worth.

Commercial value may be for filmmakers who would no longer have to worry about getting waivers from people in the background of live shots. (Not a lawyer.)

Also not a lawyer, and US-based in case it varies by country.

Do you know if a waiver is needed in this case? My understanding is that I can walk down a sidewalk, around Disneyland, around a resort, and film anyone / anything in plain sight. (I don't do that, by the way...) In other words, assuming you're not climbing over railings etc., if you can see it with your eyes, you can film it or photograph it.

Wonder if anyone here (plenty of legal eagles I'm sure) can confirm this or correct this. We don't need to get bogged down in corner cases & rare exceptions... for example, I think I heard that in some states, if the police ask (demand?) that you stop recording, you have to, otherwise you're in violation of the law... but even as I type that, as an American, it just sounds wrong... but I don't know.

Also not a lawyer, but I think it mostly has to do with commercial use. Filming people at Disney for your Instagram followers is different from making a feature film and turning everyone standing around on a busy street into uncredited extras.

This particular site is with respect to Canada, but I'm pretty sure the same basic idea applies everywhere:

"When publishing photos for commercial purposes: You need the permission of every identifiable model in the photo, even if the photo was taken in a public space. For example, if a photo has 10 identifiable models in the photo, you would require a model release for each of them."

https://www.lawdepot.ca/law-library/faq/model-and-entertainm...

I've always been partial to the laughing man from Ghost in the Shell. This would be a perfect use case :P

A tool that automatically turns background faces into the faces of random animals would actually do quite well.

Even better, replace the face with Kim-Jong Un and then blur it. When they apply those forensic techniques they'll discover that it was him all along!

I opened https://github.com/everestpipkin/image-scrubber/issues/5 to discuss how to encourage people to use this tool responsibly. Please contribute your knowledge!

Do you really think that altered in any way images without any exif can hold someone accountable? Even videos can not be trusted nowadays.

AIUI this is mainly to be used by news publications, which need to continuously build their credibility regardless, rather than as evidence in a courtroom.

Yes. There is a very low bar to pass to convince a jury that a defendent is guilty. 99% conviction rates should scare you.

We know leo uses parallel construction.

Even images without chain of evidence reliability might get you on "a list"...

Do you reckon cops invited to "run wild" with clearview ai _AREN'T_ gonna be running protester photos through it to see who to "profile"?

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-co...

Even being fairly familiar with deepfakes, I would very much prefer to avoid having to defend myself in court against prosecutors claiming to have "video evidence" of me murdering someone...

I recently found myself in a position where I had to blur a ton of faces from multiple pictures (about 100/day).

It’s really tedious to do it manually and something like OpenCV shines.

We found a repo [1] with python code that automatically detects and blurs faces. This script was one of many, except it had a very high accuracy. Over 90%.

Removing exif data is a great idea.

[1] github.com/telesoho/faceblur

I’m reminded of a reddit thread a while back about the US government paying a large sum to create an “unblur” function for photoshop. Someone in the comments was able to rotate and flip a photo and use the photoshop blur tool to effectively undo a blur for free.

Perhaps it’s better to remove the section of photo with a person’s face instead? Or draw a shape over their face and flatten the image? It seems to me as long as the pixels are there the identifying data is there for anyone willing to spend the time and effort to find it.

Edit: Apparently it was interpol, not the US government. I can't find the reddit thread but here's a NYT article with the photo: https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/interpol-untwir...

> rotate and flip a photo and use the photoshop blur tool to effectively undo a blur

I'm not sure I follow. Did he say "enhance" at any point during the process?

In the case you posted, the image is not blurred. Instead pixels are simply moved from one location to another via the "swirl" effect. Very little pixel information is lost in this process, and if you can recover the position transformation, you can easily undo it.

This makes 100% sense compared to "undoing a blur" by applying another blur (with negative radius?).

Blurring isn't that good at destroying information, I think we mostly use it because it's the best looking censoring attempt.

I would pixelate the faces to be just 4x4 giant pixels. It destroys nearly as much information as blacking them out while still not disrupting the image too much

I would guess that pixelisation for videos rather than pictures probably reveals more information the longer the video.

Yes, you would need to fix the pixels to an initial or average value. I remember Nintendo didn't do this a couple years ago, accidentally leaking the name of a new game mode [1] for Smash Ultimate.

[1] https://twitter.com/Lattie9001/status/1027204063811850240

Here's a good read on undoing blurs: https://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration1.htm

The short explanation is blurs are kernels that spread a pixel's value across other pixels, so knowing this, you can treat blurred pixel values as a system of equations to solve.

If final appearance is important, just blur a bunch of pictures of Trump and paste the appropriate one over the face. Or an unblurred face for that matter.

Shit, how about just pasting Trump’s face over everyone’s and not bothering to blur it? There’s probably enough pictures of him out there to match any angle and expression. Detect face, deep fake that area into Trump.

That wasn't really a "blur", though. A swirl like that is just moving pixels around. If know how the algorithm works, you can reverse it. Probably, it was done with a common program like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp or something. One could write a program that would just "unswirl" with various parameters and generate a bunch of images, and a human could pick out the one that looks like an unswirled image. If you can pick out the right paramaters to the unswirl, then no image information is lost.

That can't be done with a blur. In a blur, pixels are merged or averaged together and information is lost. In some cases you could sharpen it a little, but it's still not going to be as good as the original image. In a really good blur, even the best sharpen algorithm isn't going to give you something that looks like an identifiable face.

The swirl was done with photoshop, and Interpol got Adobe to create an unswirl tool. Interpol was involved because a man had been sexually abusing children, and photographing the abuse, and he released those photographs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil

> That can't be done with a blur. In a blur, pixels are merged or averaged together and information is lost.

I'd be careful with that assumption. The only thing that really loses information is the discretization back into 0-255 range, and that naturally loses very little information.

If you consider the pixels as a large vector of values, you're effectively multiplying it by a matrix (plus discretization afterwards). If that matrix has (near) full rank, you can restore (close to) all the information.

Consider an grayscale image with two pixels a = 10, b = 20. I apply a blur that transfers 10% of each pixel to the other one. I end up with 11, 19. I'm left with the information 0.9 a + 0.1 b = 11, 0.1 a + 0.9 b = 19. Clearly this system can be solved uniquely. Or equivalently, the blur matrix (and I don't mean the kernel but the full blur operation matrix) is [[ 0.9 0.1 ] [ 0.1 0.9]], which has full rank and is thus invertible.

You'd be surprised at the amount of image detail that can be recovered by filtering when the original distortion function is known. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution and the lower half of that page's "See also" links section.

What about in the case of a mosaic blur?

The matrix is far from full rank in that case - its rank will be the number of mosaic pieces instead of the number of pixels. If you have 100 pixels per block, you actually lose 99% of the information with this blur.

So it would seem we should use a 0.5x + 0.5y blur to be sure to lose information - something that makes the matrix close to singular.

Also, how to handle the boundaries? We select a box in the image and blur that; we'd want to handle the boundaries in a way that also makes sure we lose information.

Yes, you could set each pixel in the blurred region to the same color (i.e. each matrix entry is identical) - that could be black or the average of the blurred region. "Pixelation" does the same but in smaller boxes.

You actually do lose information around the edges (it's cropped). But not much; the images are pretty compressible, so you can just predict those pixels.

There is also the PixLab API which let you automatically apply a blur filter for each detected face or any other target regions you want using only two Rest API endpoints.

Python: https://gist.github.com/symisc/6ecdea76ba0d33d73ea7f23cade0d...

PHP: https://gist.github.com/symisc/d54808915093e5375fdcb841e4365...

Docs: https://pixlab.io/cmdls

Uploading images to a blurring service is probably a really bad idea. At least OP's link does it in-browser.

For meta data, exiftool is handy for removing metadata[0].

$ exiftool -all= foo.jpg

And even better, save image first as .bmp or other format that doesn’t support metadata. Then reload and convert to jpeg, and run the exiftool on this image.

[0] https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sau...

or if you're in a rush just post them to imgur where all exif data is dropped.

While I can't make useful comments on protests or strong anonymity, wrt photo metadata, I can say that I scrub metadata from photos that leave my possession, as a matter of course, using 'exiftool'.

Here is how you read the existing metadata:

  exiftool -a -u -g1 IMG_0708.JPG | more

... and here is how you scrub it:

  exiftool -all= IMG_0708.JPG

(you could read it again, after scrubbing, to demonstrate it is gone ...)

I've had this function added to my shell for years:

   stripexif () 
   { 
       exiftool -all= "$@"
   }

ImageMagick's `convert` also supports stripping such metadata, the flag is -strip.

I nearly always scale+compress photos that leave my possession, and usually using convert, so adding -strip is a nice streamlined way of doing all at once.

The protests were sparked by the lack of accountability of the police resulting in police brutality. The violent people among the protesters are subject to the same incentives. The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence.

Anonymizing photos of the violent ones is therefore likely to support their actions by making accountability less likely. To scrub ethically, limit it to the non-violent protestors. To support non-violence, better to help identify the violent people -- police or civilian -- the opposite of anonymizing them.

What's your plan, exactly, for making the program not work for you if you've smashed a window?

To add though: it's not easy to tell who are the non-violent and who are the violent protestors. Sometimes violent protestors hang out in the crowd and only strike at opportune moments. If they're blurred out like everyone else during the times they are not violent then it becomes harder to hold them accountable.

Given that this is a protest about cops getting away with brutality even when there's clear evidence I think "gather evidence against both sides equally" is unlikely to be convincing argument to protesters.

I doubt any criminal really wants to be captured on video. Having just watched a couple of videos this morning of "protesters" viciously kicking their unconscious victims in the head, I'm very much against the idea of anonymizing any of this.

Depends on how it's used. For example it could be useful for people protesting authoritarian governments, such as in Hong Kong. For blurring rioters during a crime spree, I don't think there's anything moral to be gained from protecting criminals.

Though I'm on the side of the Hong Kong citizens, I doubt this would help much, since the government is going to have extensive videos of their own. Not to mention a likely capability to capture immediately or almost immediately off of people's phones.

On a somewhat related note, I wonder if the thousands of people being recorded committing various crimes in the US right now realize that their faces are almost certainly being compiled in various government and private databases, to be matched via facial recognition for the rest of their lives. Yeah, not necessarily a good thing, but am I wrong?

I agree. Somebody should arrest all those protestors with shields in matching outfits that keep beating people with sticks and shooting stuff at them.

I even saw a video where one of them killed a guy while three others watched.

“Getting away with”

Who is getting away with what? They are under arrest right now. Or do you want them dragged through the streets?

> They are under arrest right now.

One of the four officers is charged.

With a lesser charge than some are calling for (third-degree instead of first-degree murder).

I don't think the other three officers are under arrest right now. Some people regard them as involved and getting off too lightly so far.

First-degree is premeditated. Third-degree is depraved-heart ("murder as a result of callous disregard for the value of life"). What evidence supports a first-degree charge? If you want him to walk, charge him with first-degree. Good luck proving premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt. The depraved-heart charge is a slam dunk, and is clearly the right one if you actually want justice.

In some, murder committed by acts such as strangulation, poisoning, or lying in wait are also treated as first-degree murder.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder#Degrees_of_murder

First degree does require prior intent, but it can be in a very short period of time (minutes, or even seconds). Basically, if you can stop and think about what you're doing at any point and prevent the murder, you can be convicted of 1st degree murder for having carried it through.

I think there could be a pretty compelling 1st degree case there, since the officer had Floyd's neck under his knee for so long. He could have stopped the assault at any point.

I understand that, but the prosecutor would have to prove that Chauvin decided he was going to kill Floyd, rather than that he was heartless and ignored the pleas of a man in distress. The latter is in the bag, done, slam dunk. The former is much harder to prove. If the AG thinks he can prove first, he can always add the charge, but it's just good sense to do the initial charge on the slam dunk offense, especially when they needed to get an arrest and charge on the books to calm the rioters.

First degree is harder to convict, better to send him to jail for a crime he clearly committed than for one we hope we can make a strong enough case for.

If he was charged with first degree murder, he would walk if the high bar was not met.

For the record I agree with you, I'm just saying strategically it is a smarter move to ensure he is convicted for his crimes

To clear up a minor confusion judging from replies, I wasn't describing my own views. I was summarising some facts, in response to the person who said they are already under arrest and asked what else did people want.

> They are under arrest right now.

Who is "they"?

Many organizers of protests in Furguson, peaceful or otherwise, have since been found murdered in ways that suggest they were literally hunted down and killed for their involvement. Multiple have been found shot through the head in burned out cars to destroy all evidence. If they broke the law it still does not merit being executed in the street. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie...)

In a situation where police feel justified to kill extra-judicially over a possibly fake 20 dollar bill, what hope do we have that protesters won't be targeted in unfair ways? Or worse, that organizers won't be hunted down like animals and murdered like in Furguson? It would be unethical to not do everything in your power to protect those in this position.

secondly how do you plan to identify violent vs non-violent protesters from a static image? How would you find their identity afterwards? There is overwhelming evidence to suggest these methods are at best ineffective and at worst racist, and in either case will lead to innocent people being charged.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109887-police-mass-fac...

This is shocking and should absolutely be more widely reported as it may change behaviour of present day activists. We need an anonymizing solution for protest organizing.

>it may change behaviour of present day activists

that's exactly what the murderers want to achieve

Behaviour change may be more / better masks, etc. I am shocked by the number of people clearly committing crimes without masks.

When I hear your first point, I consider the possibility that these are not retaliatory murders, but rather ways to keep something secret. If there was an agenda behind these riots organized at a higher level than these leaders, similar to what is being suggested by some during these current protests, and those higher level organizers wanted to keep the agenda or those who set it hidden, it could explain why lower level leaders are being picked off.

Edit: For those downvoting, is there a problem with considering this possibility? I think it's incredibly unlikely, but ignoring black swans can one day come back to bite you. Ideally, everyone should be aware of the theories out there, however ludicrous, on the off chance that they are correct and require critical and swift action.

Pure speculation can sound rational and thorough, but most often it leads towards the ideas that seem most dramatic and exciting, and that conform to your own preconceptions and prejudices.

I think that's right, but I don't think that speculation doesn't have its uses. The truth is probably somewhere between the speculative extremes, and asking questions about the extremes causes people to look into things, which hopefully eventually lead to the truth and a resolution, both of which are probably nowhere near the extremes.

Well, you asked why you were being downvoted. Stuff that you just make up can be corrosive the the public dialogue.

> When I hear your first point, I consider the possibility that these are not retaliatory murders, but rather ways to keep something secret.

That contains as much conspiracy as "somebody is hunting down the protestors".

There are simpler possible explanations, I believe, e.g. people who join (or organize) riots are usually not the stable boring kind that live long, predictable lives full of planning and quiet afternoons. Drugs, crime, violence and mental health issues are probably more prevalent in that group than in the general population.

There are definitely much simpler explanations, and they are true 99.9% of the time. I think it's worth considering the complex explanations for the exceedingly rare times they happen to be true, especially if the complex explanations claim the stakes are high.

This is pure speculation devoid of knowing anything about the particular people involved. Social justice organizers are often offbeat individuals, but they are usually sincere principled people that like most of us are not interested in dying. There's not a lot to personally gain from organizing, but there is a lot of baseless aspersions that get cast at you so thanks for contributing.

Here's the thing about "black swans". If you ignore "white swans" in your hunt for black swans, you're going to miss a lot more swans overall.

Ok, so don't ignore either. You can consider multiple theories at once.

For those who do not click through to the article: “Police say that there is no evidence the deaths have anything to do with the protests”.

From my time in Portland, working at the courthouse as a court clerk during the Occupy movement, when hundreds of transient “protesters” camped out in the park, it is not surprising that some of those folks would OD or end up dead for reasons entirely not related to protesting but instead related to their unfortunate life circumstances. I do not know if the same is true of Ferguson, but the article does not seem to provide any evidence of calculated retaliation against protesters.

Why would the police say otherwise? Nice critical thinking.

Does anybody have any evidence they are connected? I’m not saying thy are or aren’t, but it’s at least worth noting what the police say.

It's not really. Police lie constantly, especially when it would implicate them. Their statements carry zero information except where they provide positive publicly verifiable evidence. Unsettling and sad, but its the truth.

So I’ll take that as a “No, there’s no evidence whatsoever that these are connected. It’s entirely baseless speculation and conspiracy theory.”

Given the circumstances, I would say you're never going to know the truth about these deaths with the possible exception of documents declassified or admissions of guilt decades after the fact. The question is if you are a political activist, is do you take these deaths seriously even if you can't prove they are foul play? Given the record of the government, I just can't rule it out.

The article just has these people loosely connected or "active" in the protests. One of them attended the protests, one launched a tear gas canister back at the police, one's mother attended the protests, etc. These aren't the main organizers or leaders dying mysteriously, but rather random attendees dying.

Is this more or less than the number of attendees we would expect to die based on Ferguson homicide rates and approximations of the number of attendees? I couldn't find that in the article.

Also, what's the theory that this isn't a coincidence? The police are murdering random protestors for some reason?

All of those mentioned in the article were not just attendees but community organizers. Do some drake equation style math on the back of an envelope:

What percentage of young people will die in a given year?

What percentage of those will happen to be community organizers?

What percentage of those will die by being shot in the head in a car that was then set on fire to annihilate forensic evidence?

Doesn't take too many steps out to get into the realm of zero percent probability that this is random chance

No one has done the math, though.

Are they organizers? That's not clear to me from the NBC article.

"""

— MarShawn McCarrel of Columbus, Ohio, shot himself in February 2016 outside the front door of the Ohio Statehouse, police said. He had been active in Ferguson.

— Edward Crawford Jr., 27, fatally shot himself in May 2017 after telling acquaintances he had been distraught over personal issues, police said. A photo of Crawford firing a tear gas canister back at police during a Ferguson protest was part of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage.

— In October, 24-year-old Danye Jones was found hanging from a tree in the yard of his north St. Louis County home. His mother, Melissa McKinnies, was active in Ferguson and posted on Facebook after her son’s death, “They lynched my baby.” But the death was ruled a suicide.

— Bassem Masri, a 31-year-old Palestinian American who frequently livestreamed video of Ferguson demonstrations, was found unresponsive on a bus in November and couldn’t be revived. Toxicology results released in February showed he died of an overdose of fentanyl.

"""

One was "active", one sent tear gas back at police, one livestreamed parts of the protest, and one's mother was in the protest.

The first two people, who were shot in their cars, I didn't see the extent of their involvement.

How many were involved at this level or higher? Tens of thousands? How many should we expect to die of murder, suicide, and drug overdose, and how many have?

What is the theory explaining this? Do you think there is a group murdering Ferguson protestors after the fact?

What an amazing coincidence.

Given a large population of any individuals with only loose connections, is it not statistically likely that some will die? Especially given that those prone to protesting in the streets might have encountered trauma, or might have been from high risk populations in the first place.

Isn’t the point of civil disobedience that you know what you’re doing could have consequences? All I’m hearing is “we should let people trash entire cities and not be held accountable.”

You're saying is that people should expect and accept to be shot in the head when they commit civil disobedience? Really?

Respect to NBC for reporting the African American male victims of homicide (50/65) but not the culprits (14/15).

Sometimes the "other side of the story" (as White Supremacists would say) does NOT need to be heard. Not now.

I don't know what your cryptic numerology means, but victims and killers are different categories and can't be directly compared, and being victim of a homicide has a much smaller personal-choice component perpetrator.

Of 65 St Louis homicide victims for the year, 50 were AA males; of the 15 identified killers, 14 were AA males.

I'd caution against implying that this is a choice at all. It's not as if 15 times as many are 'choosing' to murder because of the colour of their skin.

That's why I'm glad this fact was omitted - it's not hard to imagine how it might be misinterpreted or exploited.

> How would you find their identity afterwards?

Only responding to this part. I've seen enough people get dox'd on the internet from static photos that I continue to be impressed each time by the skill of volunteer/angry people on <internet forum>

I agree, and I'd go a step further and say that if you destroy evidence of someone burning my city down or looting, you're an accomplice to that crime.

What if you stop an EMT from checking the pulse of somebody who your co-worker has been choking to death for minutes? Does that make you an accomplice, too? If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down; cure your disease and the symptoms will go away.

Yup, I'd love if we were able to be a unified front and collectively say the mayhem will not stop until all four involved are charged. And if they're not convicted... 1992 will look like a joke.

This whole situation sucks because most people are rightly outraged about police violence, but their anger is totally misdirected. These businesses had nothing to do with the death of George Floyd.

I live in Portland, Oregon now. Without going into too many details, we have an expensive pension program. Many feel that the pension program is too generous, and there has been a lot of thought put into how we can fully fund both pensions and everything else. Last year there was a bill in the Oregon Senate (SB1049) that proposed some modest changes to how pensions work. It passed with bipartisan support, and the public unions went nuts. They said they'd never support a candidate who voted for SB1049.

Last month we had our primaries. The most important primary was the Democratic primary for the Oregon Secretary of State. If the governor were to step down for any reason (to take a cabinet position in the Biden administration, for example), the SOS becomes governor. Someone who opposed SB1049 joined the race at the last minute, got over half a million dollars of union money, outspent her candidate, and won the election.

This is just one of many examples. Even though the unions are only spending a couple of million dollars per year in Oregon, they're really smart about it, and as such, they get what they want. In the Secretary of State race they hit a home run. For half a million dollars, they pushed their preferred candidate through and sent a message that if you oppose them in any way, it will be a career limiting move.

The reason I mentioned that is because I think it is a good contrast to what we're seeing today. With smart leadership, we would have a better chance of solving this problem. But people are enraged and not thinking clearly. And there's no reason to believe that these riots are going to be more successful than the Baltimore riots, the Ferguson riots, the Oakland riots, or even the Rodney King riots.

aaugustt says>"And if they're not convicted... 1992 will look like a joke."

So what if a jury finds them innocent, which is highly likely? What do you mean "1992 will look like a joke"?

A billion dollars of property damage and the targeted destruction of businesses operated by Korean immigrants, but multiplied by a factor that will ensure laughter at the memory of those killed in the '92 race riots? I don't know how you could more charitably interpret the "wish".

tal8d said 3 hours ago>'A billion dollars of property damage and the targeted destruction of businesses operated by Korean immigrants, but multiplied by a factor that will ensure laughter at the memory of those killed in the '92 race riots? I don't know how you could more charitably interpret the "wish".'<

I believe you're having problems thinking clearly. Here, in a public forum, you threaten

"A billion dollars of property damage and the targeted destruction of businesses operated by Korean immigrants..."

which is little more than a megalomanic wish. Shouldn't you be taking some medication or, at the least, seeing a psychologist instead of wasting our time here?

lol, either your reading comprehension is poor or your understanding of the '92 riots is... or both, I guess. That was a response to your question about what one could mean when saying "1992 will look like a joke", and I answered that question exactly. Do you not understand how usernames work?

> Shouldn't you be taking some medication or, at the least, seeing a psychologist instead of wasting our time here?

Isn't this way below the HN discourse bar?

"1992" refers to the riots in LA which were triggered by the acquittal of four police officers who were caught on tape beating Rodney King.

I assume the GP means the civil unrest that will happen if there is an acquittal would be much worse than the LA riots.

But once you all agree on your demands, methods and victims it's no longer mayhem, just organized terrorism.

If they don't get convicted, will you be terrorizing only the jury, or do you plan on victimizing other innocent people too?

I sure hope you don't, but if you do get your wish please remember to have everyone print and sign their names on the petition/ransom note/demand letter. When choosing targets for arson just be aware it will take longer to comply if you burn down the courthouse(s).

>Does that make you an accomplice, too?

Yes, deliberately preventing anyone from providing care or defense for a person who's being murdered makes you an accomplice to the murder.

>If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down

Doubtful. Here's a video of East 4th street in downtown Cleveland being destroyed by pillagers last night: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland-met...

There's over a thousand service industry workers who've already been out of work for months due to the pandemic that the businesses on this street support. Many of them have struggled to get enough financing to even reopen, some have had to permanently close. Many (possibly most) of these businesses are destroyed and can not afford to rebuild. Who should the city of Cleveland have charged justly to prevent this? How many more innocent and unrelated people's livelihoods need to be burned down and how many more times (this has happened before, more than once)? There seem to be a lot of accomplices in the video.

>Yes, deliberately preventing anyone from providing care or defense for a person who's being murdered makes you an accomplice to the murder.

Are we in agreement that this was documented as happening, and the other cops present were accomplices in the murder of George Floyd? If so, why do you think they aren't being charged?

>Who should the city of Cleveland have charged justly to prevent this?

I assumed GP meant Minneapolis, which I feel is reasonable given the context. But okay, random US city accepted. Let's see if your city has a history of letting cops get away with killing innocent black people... oh yeah, one of your cops killed a 12 year old kid who was playing airsoft in the park and was subsequently hired by another police department in the same state without facing any charges.[0] So maybe charging Tim Loehmann would have helped make your city less sensitive to this pattern being repeated elsewhere in the country.

I don't think violence against businesses is helpful, but I do think violence against the government is helpful; it seemed to get a cop charged. They need to stop this pattern of violence ASAP, and they need to face time for crimes committed.

[0]: http://archive.is/jDQv3

Semantics... We likely agree on the other officers' responsibility/duty both to police the unlawful/unjustified actions of their colleagues and to protect the life and liberty of Mr. Floyd in this situation.

I think murder requires some threshold of intent deliberation and I'm not very familiar with the details in this incident just yet... but on it's face it's doubtful the officer intended to kill George Floyd and choose a slow, public asphyxiation concealed by the unreasonable/illegal restraint while having him legally detained as a forgery suspect. That, of course, doesn't absolve him of being directly responsibility for this man's death. They are not being charged (yet) because: it's only been a few days, only a very small percentage of crime commission results in charges, having charges at this point in time would have required the suspects to issue charges against themselves/each other and if one of them had that much integrity, George would probably not be dead in the first place, convicting the officer of murder may be difficult, so accessory or accomplice charges will require careful deliberation, information still being gathered, among other reasons.

FWIW, the people filming and/or spectating as George Floyd was killed bare some moral/ethical responsibly for their lack of (or cowardly?) effort to physically interject, although I'm aware many will not agree with me here.

Concerning Tamir Rice, a person called in to report 'a man in a dark hoodie at the park playground, waiving a handgun around pointing it at kids, they think it might just be a realistic looking toy gun' or similar to 911. The dispatcher called a unit to respond but did not include 'think it may be a toy gun' portion of the callers request for a police response. The officer spotted Tamir, standing alone, from 100 yards or more across the open field in the park. The one driving speeded across the field toward Tamir and pulled up close with officer Tim Loehmann in the passenger side, putting him directly in front of Tamir. Allegedly Tamir brandished/pointed/pulled out the gun and officer Loehmann fired in response and fatality wounded/killed the young boy. It was tragic and there were dangerous mistakes made by multiple people but charging the officer who gunned Tamir down with murder would have almost surely resulted in acquittal. Mr. Loehmann then fraudulently concealed his background and got hired as a rookie officer in a small town across the state, then was subsequently fired upon discovery of his past.

The amount of violence, fear, division and destruction I have witnessed in the name of 'Justice for Tamir Rice' is also tragic. Protesters blocking roadways, terrorizing restaurant patrons and vandalizing or destroying uninvolved businesses every time someone else with a similar color skin dies unjustly does not help prevent the CPD from shooting innocence black children.

It seems that 'rules of engagement' between police and civilians have been eroded over time while executive authority has been expanded. This current state of anarchy can be greatly improved with discussion, consensus, enforcement, and public awareness of these rules. Until then some police will continue to act like mobsters and most will accept, take advantage of or enable some level of legal privilege because of their position. Body cams show us that unequal, crony, illegal, racist, and biased enforcement is widespread. Police in America conduct silent home invasions for non violent drug charges, shoot innocent people and pets without consequence (sometimes at a mistaken address), routinely profile otherwise cooperative non violent people as a threat in order to unlawfully discriminate. They point guns at these threatening people with impunity and treat them as hostile while being so threatened by guns that they can justify driving up to a 12 year old in a park with a fake plastic gun and open firing, no words exchanged. This is an area where legal reform and awareness severely needed.

Burning down Wendy's may have influenced a reactionary, politically motivated, premature legal filing. It will probably compound the hardship of those peoples and family's whose jobs and paychecks were destroyed. It will surely hurt a struggling economy and further stress the community by destroying a busy, low-cost prepared food resource and it will deprive the Dave Thomas Foundation of all future donations during a time of intense need.

I would recommend watching the George Floyd murder video, and not for morbid reasons. I think it helps to understand how calmly, with his hands in his pockets, this cop sat on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes (the last 3 of which Floyd was unresponsive for) while an EMT asked for a pulse to be checked. This was not an accidental death.

I don't think the man who killed Tamir Rice understood that he was shooting somebody holding an airsoft gun, but if the killer wasn't a cop then I seriously doubt that they would have decided his actions in that situation were reasonable as self defence -- they probably wouldn't clear me of all wrongdoing if I claimed that a 12 year old kid pointed an airsoft gun at me before I killed him. There's a double standard. Despite the victim being a 12 year old, I can see how this is less egregious than what I consider to be the clearly intentional killing of a known-to-be-helpless George Floyd -- I brought it up as an incident in your specific community where this pattern of violence bubbled up so dramatically that it received nation wide news coverage. I think you misunderstood some facts around the hiring and firing of the cop. He lied on paperwork at the original (Cleveland) police department, which is the technical reason he was fired -- it came up during a review of him following the shooting. The other (Bellaire) police department knew what they were buying. A quote from the link in my last reply:

>“He was cleared of any and all wrongdoing,” the Bellaire police chief, Richard Flanagan, told The Times Leader of Martins Ferry, Ohio, adding that it was unfair to “crucify” the officer. “It’s over and done with.”

I could see there being a causal link between how your city handled this incident (as well as others like it) and how much violence you're seeing now, a few years later, when everybody is focused on this other prominent example of the pattern.

"...a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?" -- Martin Luther King Jr.

You mention the pandemic. Somehow, our Congress has passed (in nearly unanimous fashion) five giant "bailout" laws supposedly in response to the health crisis, which have given trillions of dollars to powerful interests and pennies to normal citizens and none of the blessed laws have done a single blessed thing to provide health care to control the blessed pandemic! Meanwhile, comparable (though mostly poorer) nations have provided state-supported healthcare to all citizens, for decades. Are we sure the protests are only about racist cops? Besides, when they burn down the Nike store they aren't destroying too many American jobs.

I believe you were looking for this term: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/accessory_after_the_fact

Thanks, I think that's a better term.

The more that protestors refrain from violent property destruction, the less likely it becomes that the three cops who were accessories in the murder of George Floyd get charges brought against them. Burning down one precinct got one cop charged (albeit with a 3rd degree); I would really love to see the other three charged, even if it requires some anonymous protestors to light up three more precincts. I'd gladly trade in police destroying citizen lives for citizens destroying police property.

Ah justice.

  It is better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty escape.
  -- Bizzaro William Blackstone

The topic of the week is an extrajudicial murder committed by a team of four cops; where was our restraint in deciding the fate of George Floyd? Do these officers deserve nicer treatment than this system gave Floyd? Did Floyd deserve this treatment, too? If so, why didn't he get it?

George Floyd absolutely deserved the right treatment. He didn’t get it, and the perps should be brought to justice. Getting revenge for George’s injustice is not justice. It’s not what civilized society is built on. In the end, we were a society that protects even the murders and rapists and the worst of the worst offenders from extra-judicial revenge for their actions.

In this pattern of cases, the system is the perpetrator of extra-judicial violence. We've had plenty of time for the system to correct itself, and it hasn't. Now a precinct gets burned down, a cop gets charges the next day, and I'm like, okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that seemed to work. It's not about revenge, it's about fixing the system by any means necessary. Fire works, protest signs haven't been.

Is this meant to be sarcasm? (Honest question)

Yes - the actual phrase is "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

Thanks for clarifying for me.

Still, I would hope that as police are investigated they are held to a high standard of behavior. They do after all have a near monopoly on the lawful use of violence.

I absolutely agree that cops should be held to a higher standard, but that is a very different discussion. Imagine trying to steer the conversation similarly for any other class of crime: "You can't blame the school shooters... they naturally strike out at what is within their reach, they should be given space to express their outrage. We need to talk about bullying."

Since police are in the habit of teargassing people who are not engaging in any violence that seems pretty inequitable.

> The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence.

The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression for fear of being identified in a protest is marginal, specially during catharsis, otherwise you wouldn't see for instance people burning police cars in front of a camera.

Keep in mind also that many (most?) of these "violent protestors" are simply reacting against violent cops in a power trip. I can't say I wouldn't react violently against a cop intentionally running over me and others with its SUV, but I can say that I would be thankful if my face was anonymized no matter how I reacted.

> The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression

Actually, a lot more whites are killed by cops than blacks. And before you say that's because there are more white people than black people, blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime. So, you are less likely to get killed committing a crime as a black person than as a white person.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer...

Your first link shows: more black people are killed per-capita by cops than white people. Y Your second link shows: Black people are more likely to be convicted of homicide than white people.

You've made a number of unfounded leaps on top of that: That "Black people commit 52% of crime." This is wrong in several ways. You're assuming that conviction rates accurately represent rates of crimes, and also that "all crime" has the same statistics as homicide. But instead, we see that black people are convicted of only 27% of overall crime. That's including the fact that certain categories are known to be racially disparate in conviction and sentencing - e.g. white & black people use marijuana at approximately equal rates, yet black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for it. That the people killed by cops were all committing a crime at the time. I don't have statistics on hand for this, but a well-known counterexample is Tamir Rice.

> Your first link shows: more black people are killed per-capita by cops than white people. Y Your second link shows: Black people are more likely to be convicted of homicide than white people.

Yes, that's right. See the connection between crime and cops killing civilians?

> But instead, we see that black people are convicted of only 27% of overall crime.

Where do you see this? I can't find this anywhere.

> That's including the fact that certain categories are known to be racially disparate in conviction and sentencing - e.g. white & black people use marijuana at approximately equal rates, yet black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for it.

That by itself doesn't show anything. It depends on how and where marijuana was used. Smoking a blunt and driving around the neighborhood with the top down is going to picked up a lot more than someone sitting in their home smoking. You need to show situations that are the same which have more blacks being arrested than whites.

> That the people killed by cops were all committing a crime at the time. I don't have statistics on hand for this, but a well-known counterexample is Tamir Rice.

Yea, I'm sure you don't... that subset has to be so minor it has to be insignificant. Oh, an anecdotal incident where a 12 year old boy carried a replica of a pistol and aimed it at an cop, who didn't know it wasn't real. I don't see how your example justifies this as a big problem.

> Where do you see this? I can't find this anywhere.

Maybe check real sites instead of your usual racist ones? Google is a good start. Here's the first link! https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-...

>blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime

Odd, my dogs are barking

"Ferguson, Mo., Activists Are Dying and It’s Time to Ask Questions"

https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-...

"Crawford was found shot to death Thursday night in his car, just like activist Darren Seals in 2016 and protester DeAndre Joshua the night of the Ferguson verdict in 2014. The latter two had gunshot wounds to the head and their cars were lit on fire. Crawford, it is believed by police, shot himself in the back seat of his car either in an attempted suicide or by accident."

I agree entirely. Can we not blur out the faces of people who are looting (stealing), destroying property, defacing city and national sites and violently attacking people and store owners? This is super fucked.

When the US inevitably does turn into an authoritarian dictatorship, I think people would be happy if there wasn't copious amounts of proof they were on the streets protesting.

I should add: In all of the streams and pictures I've seen, all (most?) the looters or violent people were wearing masks, ensuring their anonymity. If anybody's being protected by measures like this, it's your average peaceful protestor.

Really weird that nobody in the thread is pointing out that this is basically a website that says "give me your photos, specifically from protests, which have details that you want to keep private".

It doesn't matter that it theoretically all happen in the browser. You can serve different versions to different IPs etc. Every heuristic in me would be screaming don't use that if I would have a need for such tool.

It's a simple static site with no server involved. Everything happens client side. You could turn off your internet while you're using it if you wanted to make sure no data is exposed.

Would a service worker running in background be able to upload your sensitive data once you are back online?

True, but it's only safe if you do that. You have to either inspect the code every time you use the site or run it locally. Until subresource integrity [1] becomes widely used & the capability to 'pin' a given script to a specific version, web applications can not be used without at least trusting the owner of the domain.

A better example is Protonmail, a secure email service. It has a nice web client and there is an 3rd party desktop/electron version of the same size called Electronmail. While both essentially run identical code, the electron version is more secure because even Protonmail insert a backdoor for a single or # of users. They would have to at least publish the backdoor in the vanilla code at which point, the maintainers of Electronmail will probably raise the alarm.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

Write a little piece of open-source client software to take a hash of the source code. Check the hash every time you use it. Spread the tool around to a community of people who review every time the hash changes and publish (separately) a history of attested hashes.

Or, you could download the repository, validate it once for yourself and then use it repeatedly. It is open source, after all.

For linux users you can "turn off" internet for a single program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21146655

I actually wrote an even better way to do this, since my build system drops network access after downloading SHA-256 validated source (to ensure that source can't go out and fetch more things during build):

https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/bash-drop-netwo...

A bad actor could selectively serve a different version to those they want to target.

There's no way to obtain and execute source code that you didn't write and hand-compile for which this risk doesn't exist. (And it applies in its own sense to books, paintings, phone calls from mom, letters from an old mentor, DVDs, rental cars, ...)

Download, verify keys and signatures. You could run a checksum or even read the code yourself depending on how paranoid you are. Otherwise, you're just hoping mycrimepics.net/dontsnitch wasn't subpoenaed between your last visit and now.

If it's all served in the browser, then simply download the page and use it offline.

I just confirmed the downloaded page works offline

In this case thats probably fine. It does remind me of a time when a bitcoin keygen site was declared safe because it didn't make any network requests. Only to find out later that it had a malicious random number generator that generated predictable keys.

In this case its possible that the site encodes the data back in to the image but that seems unlikely.

It's a static site running on GitHub pages, over HTTPS, directly out of a linked repo so you can examine the source code. I literally could not imagine a more transparent way to serve this application.

The only way an attack vector is possible here is if you think GitHub themselves would maliciously inject an altered version of the code in the repo, and even then you'd be able to see the code and network requests in your developer tools.

> I literally could not imagine a more transparent way to serve this application.

Just distribute the code for local execution? Sure, it's less accessable for the target audience, but it is more transparent.

But what else is new? Most users are willing to sacrifice privacy and security for convenience. That's how we got into this whole mess.

People are free to use the source code and run it themselves.

> Just distribute the code for local execution?

I mean, I get what you mean, but this is literally what's already happening. It's distributed via HTTP, and executed in your browser. You can save it (Ctrl-S, still a thing browsers do), and -- since it's distributed in source form -- easily inspect it, or reopen it later, in a different browser on a different computer. A zip file of the same thing is available on the repo (it's a zip of the repo).

If you don't trust that it won't access the web, disable your internet while running it or some such, as with other code you don't trust. If you don't trust it to mess with your files, well, you're in luck because modern browsers are probably the best audited sandbox out there.

I say I get what you mean, because most people won't do any of it. Instead of saving the page and running what they trust or have verified to be a safe snapshot of the page, they'll reopen the hosted version, trusting that it's still safe, even though the page may have been replaced with one that does upload their files.

Hmm 1. This is local execution 2. What's so secure about a downloaded executable run directly from the OS? It could send information to a remote server just (or more) easily, and less transparently

> What's so secure about a downloaded executable run directly from the OS?

I did not suggest distributing an executable. I suggested distributing code, so that the user could audit it before execution.

I did not realize this tool executed all of its logic in the client when I made that post. It is rare to find websites with plainly-written, unobfuscated, uncompressed, vanilla Javascript that don't rely on any server-side processing.

That's assuming the author can be trusted. The link is not pinned to a specific commit so their is no way to know if the code is updated later without auditing it every time the tool is used.

Can you imagine yourself being convinced somehow that this is safe to use? I've had similar ideas before that I ended up not pursuing precisely because I knew I couldn't find a way to convince people like you.

haveibeenpwned is explicit about not entering passwords you use. If you want to check a password that you intend to use then download the database and check for yourself.

I don't get it. If I check for a password I used before, presumably I want to keep using it if it's safe. Otherwise what's the point?

FWIW, I don't think the post you're responding to is correct? At least, I couldn't readily find a place where HIBP tells me not to fill in the form. And it bothers assuring me that it goes to great lengths not to make it obvious what password my client is checking.

Your question is on target--one I've wondered myself--but I've come to the conclusion that it isn't for people who already have the sense not to put their passwords in random forms on the internet.

I can only assume it has 2 main uses:

1. Poke (some) holes in the bubbles of people with dated password hygiene practices (and a poor sense of how good other humans are at helping attackers reduce the possibility space) by giving them a playground to make new passwords against for a while.

For example, I decided to enter "silverfish3" in the form because I know more than one person who still uses <noun><number> passwords that are multiple characters shorter than this one. It's still turned up in the database 40 times. "dichotomy14" hasn't been pwned yet, but "dichotomy7" has already been pwned 5 times.

You don't have to use a real password of your own to discover that your schema is well explored.

2. I can only hope HIBP password search has scared a few thousand of the kind of person naive enough to fill in the form with a real password straight.

Pop open dev tools and take a look at the network traffic when you put "silverfish3" into that form:

It sends a GET request for "https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/89F5D"

and gets back 548 rows of the form:

001F74CD3E241B7820C996DA4FB3BDF9FE7:2

...

54C7FB299EC06A0B979C5DE14F1AE61F653:40

...

FFE6FF5698CEC527CD18269D1B7697C8743:1

Note that middle example row with ":40" at the end? Prepend "89F5D" from that GET request the javascript generated to that row's contents "54C7FB299EC06A0B979C5DE14F1AE61F653"

Now compare that to what you get when you run this (This is a macOS specific invocation of the command, but something very similar should work pretty much anywhere):

$ echo -n "silverfish3" | openssl sha1

(stdin)= 89f5d54c7fb299ec06a0b979c5de14f1ae61f653

You might (perhaps rightly) not trust Troy's site to not switch out the javascript underneath you, but you _can_ trust the API, and could always run:

curl https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/89f5d

Or, if you're testing that "dichotomy7" password:

echo -n "dichotomy7" | openssl sha1

(to get (stdin)= 772be5bd14dc626ec7fa952b51ae28c482e92d39)

then:

curl -s https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/772be | grep -i '5bd14dc626ec7fa952b51ae28c482e92d39'

will show you your result of that dichotomy7 password having been seen 5 times.

You've only revealed the first 5 characters of the 40 character sha hash to the server. That might have been one of the ~500 passwords with that same hash, or any of the rest of the 150 bit space of other strings that hash to that prefix that are not part of their database.

I would be perfectly happy running echo -n "{{a real valuable password of mine}}" | openssl sha1 locally and then feeding the first 5 characters of that into "random apis on the internet".

I think maybe you've mis-read me. I'm well aware of how HIBP does this.

But it doesn't matter what you or I can prove the site does or doesn't do with our passwords; my dad or aunt shouldn't type their passwords into random forms on the internet. Whether it tells them it's using k-anonymization or not.

You still wouldn't pop your dev tools open but then type your real password into a random form on the internet before you'd kicked the API-tires with some fakes.

Anyone who isn't prepared to kick the tires and hasn't established a trust relationship has no business doing it.

If you think a password has been compromised then change it.

HIBP offers you a way to validate a password has been compromised, HIBP does not offer you a way to determine it has not been compromised or is otherwise suitable for use. It’s a service for excluding compromised passwords from use.

> It’s a service for excluding compromised passwords from use.

How does this work?

2 cases:

1. I know password P is compromised. I check it in HIBP. If compromised, great, but I already know that. If not, well, too bad. I still can't use it because I know it's compromised. - decision doesn't depend on the result of HIBP.

2. I don't know if P is compromised. I check it in HIBP. If compromised, I don't use P. If not, I don't use P because I already put P in a text box connected to the internet. - decision doesn't depend on the result of HIBP.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the value of HIBP. I'm just arguing about this particular use case.

On haveIbeenpwned (at least last time I used it), you can either check the hash of your password, or the first N characters and it will return a list of leaked passwords that match

hibp doesn't let you check passwords (at least not any more). It lets you check truncated hashes of passwords.

https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-v...

Imagine how much scarier it would be if it wanted to run code natively on your machine, outside the browser sandbox.

I have a many sandbox and virtualization tools at my disposal that are both more comprehensive and flexible than a browser sandbox.

Are you packaging these sandbox and virtualization tools for normies to use from their smartphones?

(Sorry for commenting on you twice in this thread--I promise I'm not trying to follow you around. I'm all about dissecting the quality of a system or toolchain! A false sense of security can be more dangerous than naïveté! Caution and skepticism are often our only protection! Trusting random websites is Not a Good Idea! But, security tools average people can't use are also meaningless here.)

Isn't this the same issue as with a website like HIBP, and other sites that appear after a data breach/leak?

Users are disclosing to the website what they hope has not been discovered by someone else -- e.g., usernames and email addresses, or in this case photos, they hoped to keep private. Unfortunately, the website is "someone else".

It's better to black out faces than to blur them. It's feasible to unblur / un-pixelate faces, especially if there's more than one frame.

The timing of the release of this tool seems a bit innapropriate, given the state of rioting in a few US cities now. It's going to be incredibly draining on law enforcement in the US for a few years to identify and prosecute criminals involved in riots. Most victims already who have lost their homes, their businesses, and even their loved ones will mostly likely never see the criminals brought to justice given the scale of the violence.

It could be useful to protect people from relatiation under an authoritarian government, such as in Hong Kong. I dislike the idea of a government using mass automatic identification, that could be used again by authoritarians for terrible goals. I also dislike the idea of the opposite and using automatic anonymizing to protect criminals during riots. We're probably going to keep seeing an arms race in this, with good and bad actors on all sides.

I admit the protest in Hong Kong was largely peaceful, but it's hard to deny that a fringe of protestors were looting and resorting to violence as well. There is no key difference between law enforcement by police in HK and the US.

One wonders whether the American protests are getting quite so much CIA cash...

What about identifying the police who are breaking the law? Not just the ones attacking peaceful protesters, but the agents provocateur?

Peaceful protest is being squashed and de-legitimized. This is the flowering of fascism.

"Peaceful protest is being squashed and de-legitimized. This is the flowering of fascism."

This is really not true. The protests turned quickly into riots and the more heavy-handed police tactics literally started only days later.

The rioters burnt down a police station for gosh sakes.

There are no 'protetors' clashing with police in a violent way. I think decent folks move on after curfew.

It's the adventure-seeking rabble, those out for some photos, who want to see the action first hand, who might want to light something in fire. The people not dispersing at curfew I don't think are ideological or protesters in any sense of the word. It's just youth in antagonism for every and all reasons, as old as time.

Looting and rioting and attacking shop owners trying to save their businesses and burning down cars and buildings. Not peaceful protests.

And agents provocateur. Violence is part of the plan.

> It's going to be incredibly draining on law enforcement in the US for a few years to identify and prosecute criminals involved in riots

Good. Black people factually live under an authoritarian regime in the US.

They should really have the right to vote!

Yes, and if it weren't for the constant campaigns of voter suppression targeted specifically at their communities, you might be making the point here that you imagine yourself to be.

Even ignoring voter suppression issues, being in a minority group in a democracy does not preclude authoritarian oppression. This is simple math, known as "tyranny of the majority", and is why the US Constitution is longer than just a paragraph about democratic elections.

This comment is why it's important to be more precise than the word "authoritarian." We all live under an "authoritarian regime" to one degree or another.

The problem in this case is that its institutionally racist towards, and extrajudicially assassinates, black people with impunity.

We must be more precise because otherwise it allows _this_ to happen.

What are the facts supporting your claim?

This definitely seems like a good faith attempt to litigate the history of black oppression in the USA from first principles.

I am not aware of facts supporting the claim that african americans live under an authoritarian regime.

I am aware that a number of african americans have been unjustly killed by police. That is a different claim than african americans are systematically oppressed by the US government.

For instance, compare what is happening in the US to a real authoritarian regime such as the USSR. The government made millions of innocent civilians disappear into the gulags en masse. Try to imagine even the hint of due process, let alone rioting and protests, within that regime.

Or compare what is happening here vs what is happening in China. The CCP places millions of Uighurs into concentration camps for no reason. In the US, we have thousands rioting violently in the streets, and I suspect the majority of the rioters will see little to no consequences for their actions.

Why do you believe what you're told about a faraway land, but disbelieve what you can see for yourself in your own community?

why are you asking loaded questions?

Just trying to help! How do you know what you think you know about people you've never met?

i would ask you the same thing

you have never met me, but seem to know a whole lot about what i do and do not know

how did you get this information about me, and how do you know it is true? or are you just making a bunch of baseless assumptions?

Everyone in this thread knows you live closer to Minneapolis than to Ürümqi. You started the thread by discounting the difficulties of black people in USA. You wanted someone to give you some "facts" to "support" the claim that racism is a problem. All of us made the same assumption based on that evidence. We don't need to imagine anything else.

I, for one, have no idea where yters lives

how would you characterize your efforts to understand what i am saying and communicate in a clear and unbiased manner?

I've made no particular efforts in that vein; you are an open book. In reply to this observation you'll whinge on about how mysterious and unique and totally-not-racist you really are, but will offer no discernible arguments in favor of that proposition. It's really an HN trope by this point: say something totally privileged and douchey, and then insist that you may only be criticized by perfect and omniscient beings when other people call you on it. You're not the first person to do it; you won't be the last.

it seems you believe i am racist. how did you arrive at that conclusion? or do you assume people who disagree with you are racist?

It would be nice if our law enforcement had legitimacy and credibility, because then we could know that showing someone’s face would lead to them being arrested and facing a sentence commensurate with what they had done. But unfortunately this is not the case.

Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine, or some light jail time. It will lead to extrajudicial retaliation and possibly death.

Again, it would be nice if that weren’t the case and we could trust law enforcement to behave appropriately. But given that they and their supporters are known to hunt down and kill people who protest against them, we cannot in good conscience make it easier for them to do so.

If we are to trust the cops again, they need to show us they are worthy of trust. And they sure aren’t doing that right now.

> If we are to trust the cops again, they need to show us they are worthy of trust. And they sure aren’t doing that right now.

What I've seen in the past 2 days is that the police are doubling down on being oppressors, not public servants. I expect it to get much worse before it (possibly) gets better. And it may not get better.

This is not fair at all.

Protest turned to riots, literally burning down police stations. Police action wasn't until much later, and they were perfectly fine with the daytime, civil unrest. During the evening, the 'protestors' went home and the agitators came out to fight police, and that's that.

When people are looting every store on a street, the police have no choice but to physically move in. There are very few options for anyone at that point.

> This is not fair at all.

Nyet, comrade. My points were perfectly valid and to not acknowledge them is willful ignorance at best.

Black bloc and others are a problem but that actually feeds into what the authorities want, which is to completely suppress protest and civil disobedience.

Challenge: explain away the arrest of compliant CNN reporters on live tv, as well as the intentional targeting of reporters elsewhere (with rubber bullets), and last, but very much not least, the police shooting people in their yards for the act of filming them.

That police, in some instances, act irresponsibly, does not invalidate the absolute need for police to use some degree of force given the prevalence of a variety of violent agitators.

As for the journalist - in a riot situation, people are often detained temporarily as police are clearing areas. Once a riot hits, the police are within their rights to clear out areas. While the legality of temporary detainment varies, you should consider why police are all carrying handfulls of plastic ties ... to detain people.

In some cases, the police were shooting rubber bullets in the direction of protesters wherein there were reporters - there's nothing wrong here.

In some cases, the police were shooting pellets directly at reporters, I don't think this is fair or right, but it still doesn't abnegate the need of cops to be there and to clear people - also - we never know the full details. Maybe the police had warned the crew to leave several times before.

Once things turn into a riot, it's going to be a little bit of a fight, there's no other way about it. If this were 50 years ago there would have been batons cracking heads, thankfully we don't have that. We have have now is actually fairly mundane.

Also, the regular protestors, during the day, are allowed to do as they please generally speaking which is fine.

So to summarize your assessment: you have no real problem with the state of police conduct in the U.S., and that these protests cause all the trouble.

I think the only way you would ever change your mind is if you went to one of these protests just to observe peacefully and respectfully, and then get caught up in a sweep. Experiential learning is powerful stuff.

Please bear in mind that this topic is not about denying rightful enforcement of law, it's the exact opposite: ensuring enforcement of the law is just and in the interests of all.

Let's talk about these instances of police violence then [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. You can pick any one of them. What is the police's justification for them, other than to further confirm how much of a police state we live in.

[1] https://twitter.com/imactuallynina/status/126691262719377408...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/nypd-officer-shoves-woman-ge...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-p...

[4] https://twitter.com/tkerssen/status/1266921821653385225

[5] https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1266384227492335616

I don't quite agree with your logic.

You're legitimising mass violence, and then condemning those trying to stop it, who in some instances might step too far.

A police Officer and others have been killed, the riots are spreading and it's obviously a problem.

There are riots in major cities - fairly aggressive violence and widespread property destruction.

This absolutely necessitates a physical response by police.

There is no way around that.

To expect absolutely perfectly defined behaviour in a perfect legal sense from some people in a situation, and then to completely ignore the violence by others, which is the cause of underlying problem, is some really difficult logic. Obviously the bar is higher one side, and accordingly behaviour is mostly better.

There are thousands of people looting and rioting and destroying things.

The police are responding fairly proportionately.

The 'daily protests' it seems are going fairly well, peacefully, but the evening situations are basically just riots.

As for your 'examples' ...

If police are slashing tires and tazing people arbitrarily there's no excuse for that, they should be punished.

But a woman was 'shoved'? Why does anyone think we have the right to physically or verbally assault government workers or anyone else, and for there not to be some kind of reaction, and in some cases overreaction, that is frankly, somewhere in the range of proportional, and not a big deal. We didn't see exactly what happened, but there is clearly a physical confrontation going on, while I wouldn't support at all an officer just arbitrarily shoving someone, there's a lot on that table to discuss.

The 'press officer arrested'. This again, I don't think is a story. In a riot, if police are asking people to move somewhere, and they don't, it's very reasonable for people to get detained for a few minutes as they are moved out of the way. In fact, that's a pretty 'civil' example of unrest and the management of it. I don't know all the details actually, but as police are clearing a riot scene of mass violence, having to temporarily detain some people seems reasonable.

There's also the issue of a 'freelance journalist' hit with pellets or something along those lines. A lot of people were hit with pellets - just because someone is carrying a camera, does not give them some kind of legal immunity. Again, we're missing details - if she was standing out of the way, where she was clearly not participating and the cops just 'shot her way' for no reason, well, that's bad. On the other hand, if she's thick into the riot and pellets came her way, well then I think it seems rational, if tragic, that this would be the outcome.

If those thing were happening without any riots or legitimate need to be respond, then it would be really bad, but in the context of literally trying to suppress riots, that's not a 'police state' - that's literally just police dispersing a riot and getting people to go home or indoors.

Already a Police Officer has been killed, one protestor has been killed purposefully, and another killed while accidentally dragged behind a vehicle? And there's probably a billion or so in property damage and lives ruined? This is serious stuff, far beyond the legit protests we're seeing mostly during the daytime that nobody has a problem with.

You're going out of your way to rationalize innocent people getting hurt because some people in an entirely separate city and incident are looting or causing property damage.

All of the videos and incidents I linked showed 100% from multiple angles that the police were the ones instigating the issue. They shoved a woman out of the way because she was just standing there and sent her to the ER. Journalists were blinded because they were simply doing their job and the police decided to take potshots. You're arguing about 'legal immunity' when we're talking about cops blatantly breaking the law and abusing their privilege as police officers to get away with it. And the reason why this entire incident occurred was because of police murdering someone so obviously that people couldn't look the other way. Maybe you should start by blaming them for instigating this whole mess.

"the police were the ones instigating the issue" - absolutely not true.

The reporter shot in the eye and the reporter temporarily detained were literally at riots in Minn. Being at a riot when the police have lawfully asked you to leave is 'instigating'. Literally requiring the police to come and use force to move them, and 'the police are the instigators'? This defies reason.

And the 'shoved' woman in the video walked right up to the police officer and was clearly saying something - I don't think it justifies the response but she was literally instigating a confrontation.

" Maybe you should start by blaming them for instigating this whole mess."

I don't 'blame police' because one of them did something egregious, I blame that officer, just as I don't blame 'Americans' or reasonable 'protestors', for looting, murdering, destroying things - I blame the people doing it.

> Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine, or some light jail time. It will lead to extrajudicial retaliation and possibly death.

What? I’m not sure what country you’re talking about. Are you talking about America? Our police find rioters and shoot them dead in the street?

Man, I feel like you live in a different country than me, and I’ve lived in 9 states in every part of the country, and across nearly every income brackets (save extreme poverty or extreme wealth) and feel like your perspective is so disconnected from reality.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...

This is the country you live in, if you want ignore that fact its on you.

> I feel like you live in a different country than me

Yeah, white America. We call it "fascism" when that gets ruled the same way black America always has been.

>a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine, or some light jail time. It will lead to extrajudicial retaliation and possibly death.

Would you like to provide an example of someone being killed for smashing a window?

Sure thing, to pull from someone else ITT: https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...

Uprisings are always bad when you don’t agree with them.

The US leadership's is widely considered authoritarian already. Trumps response to the unrest has only fortified that perception.

Removing EXIF data is not enough.

> “Like snowflakes, no two smartphones are the same. Each device, regardless of the manufacturer or make, can be identified through a pattern of microscopic imaging flaws that are present in every picture they take,” says Kui Ren, lead author of a new study describing the smartphone-identifying technology. “It’s kind of like matching bullets to a gun, only we’re matching photos to a smartphone camera.”

https://www.futurity.org/smartphones-cameras-prnu-1634712-2/

I wonder if there are tools for removing (or repatterning) these as post-processing. In fact, you’d think single pixel defects might get washed out in conversion to a lossee image format.

The protests are being live-streamed on Facebook, twitch, YouTube etc. So while they is interesting, it is ultimately useless. The data is already out there.

And anyone who wants to gather intelligence can simply take their own photos and videos.

Doesn't mean we don't have to make it even easier, though.

Not if you hijack the camera directly* :)

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/creativetech_tensorflowjs-bod...

I'm not sure what is the purpose of this extension since you can have audio meeting or audio conference call if you don't want to show your face.

How do you expect that to work on a phone and still provide viewers with a clear idea of what is going on

How resilient is blurring against deconvolution?

Can deconvolution create new data? I thought it was just a way to upscale images.

If a blur filter uses a convolution, then it's invertible through a deconvolution.

There will be some information loss from edge effects and quantization noise. But mostly invertible.

You're not wrong but invertible filters, noise or no, are simply not anonymizing and should not be used for that purpose.

Deconvolution is any attempt to recover data that has been passed through some known transformation. It can "create new data" because it is effectively mathematically-educated guesswork.

In the case of upscaling an image, deconvolution involves looking for images which, when scaled down, resemble the original image being upscaled. That kind of pre-image approach can be applied to blur as well (if the blur process is deterministic).

It can't, but blurring might remove less data than what you want.

I think you may be confusing deconvolution as the term is used in neural network literature with deconvolution as defined in mathematics/signal processing.

> How resilient is blurring against deconvolution?

This depends a lot on the implementation details. If you blur an image using arbitrary-precision real numbers, then blurring is invertible. If you add a bit of random noise, or quantize your pixels into a finite-precision data type, then it becomes essentially one-way, and you cannot recover the original image.

> you cannot recover the original image

Technically you are correct - you cannot recover the exact original image. The same is the true for saving an image as JPEG. But the question at hand is whether you can still recognize faces, not whether you can restore a byte-for-byte of the original. And whether JPEG or blurring, the answer is generally "yes".

It does depend on the implementation (and whether you know the implementation) how close you can get.

Yes, my point is that it depends a lot on the specific blurring. If you just average a square neighborhood of 4 pixels around the center, and add no noise, it is very likely that you can "enhance" the resolution back to almost the original image. Yet, if the blur kernel is much larger (say, a gaussian of width 40 pixels), and you add some noise after te blur, it is very likely that you have completely destroyed the information.

It uses StackBlur which seems to be reversible.

Instead of blurring you should add a significant amount of extraneous information (random noise) and then mosaic (downsample).

If you’d like to have a smooth looking censored image you can then blur the mosaic result to have a smooth transition between the censored and original image.

If you simply blur or simply downsample there’s a significant ability to recover data or iterate over data to recover likely inputs. Other posts have discussed deconvolution, but think of a downsample as a hash - you can build a rainbow table of inputs, easily for numbers, with more difficulty for faces. If you have a limited pool of “suspects” this technique can work well. Just as with hashing, you should add a salt to the image before downsampling or blurring to make recovery of the original input more difficult. In this case the “salt” is random noise.

Timely article, but what about violent criminal activity during protests? Peaceful protests are wonderful and have been very effective throughout history. The protests we've seen for the past few days are not helping anything. Yes, people are angry at the criminal behavior of the police officer/murderer, but manifesting that anger by destroying property, looting, injuring, and threatening others, is only going to justify the use of more police violence.

I’ll just play the devil’s advocate, but when have peaceful protests ever helped the cause? Those are forgotten as soon as they are over.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gandhi-leads-civ... https://time.com/5101740/martin-luther-king-peaceful-protest...

Indian independence? Martin Luther King?

In both cases, the protestors were violently attacked over and over. Also, both Ghandi and MLK were murdered for their efforts.

Yes, a peaceful protest can be violently attacked and still be a peaceful protest.

It's not required that the police be peaceful, only the protesters.

And that is exactly why they were successful. When governments/police crack down on peaceful protests, it shines the light on the oppressor's behavior and creates a strong sympathetic reaction. That reaction is what evokes the change.

Ghandi is the face of that movement but was just the tip of what was a very bloody revolution. It is important that we think the movement was "non-violent" such that we can point to it to dissuade people from challenging the status quo in a material way.

Gandhi was also not a pacifist. He strongly believed in the right of self-defense.

Would you say that his protests didn't change anything and were forgotten as soon as they were over?

No, the history taught about ghandi carefully selects instances of "non-violence". I don't think ghandi is responsible for how we learn about ghandi in the west.

Just like MLK is regarded as "peaceful" when in fact he and others spoke quite a bit about the fact that there was never any response from white people unless property was attacked.

Poland, Gdansk, Lech Walesa

Of all the civil rights leaders, I’d say people remember Martin Luther King Jr the best.

It’s probably also worth asking: when have violent protests ever helped the cause?

I think that the violence of the protests helped to get Derek Chauvin arrested. But I’m not sure that continued violence will help the broader movement.

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” "

MLK, Letter From a Birmingham Jail

I actually agree with the protestors, not just in their goal but also in their methods thus far. Like I said in my earlier post, I think this helped get the police officer fired and arrested.

I hope this doesn’t get me labeled as “white” or “moderate” (I am neither).

All you need to do is watch videos of protests anywhere to see cops aggressing on protestors, shooting people on their lawns, arresting and shooting reporters for major news networks on camera. When people are aggressed upon by armed security forces in other countries I'll bet most dont take the side of the people with the guns, so why now?

There are examples of pure looting. E.g. The Grove in Los Angeles: https://youtu.be/hpXdXLaJhKE

Ugly but beside the point. Why arent the police protecting these businesses, if looting is such a concern, rather than instigating peaceful protestors? Besides, these businesses are all insured; Im certain that Apple and Luxottica, some of the richest companies in the world, can write off the loss.

By contrast, nothing will bring back George Floyd, let alone the countless black people afflicted by police brutality that weren't caught on camera. With millions still unemployed and a sense that society has left so many behind, COVID in the US was a powder keg looking for a match, and a breakdown of order shouldnt really be unexpected.

I'm pro-protest and pro-police-accountability-reforms, but some of your logic fails.

> Besides, these businesses are all insured

Some of them are. But having to claim on insurance is an expensive proposition that eats into profit margins (which is extra difficult in the middle of a worldwide depression).

> Im certain that Apple and Luxottica, some of the richest companies in the world, can write off the loss.

Most companies aren't multinational megacorps in high profit businesses.

I drove through South Central Los Angeles about 1 year after the Rodney King riots. I don't know what proportion of the businesses were rebuilt, but it was pretty clearly that many of the buildings hasn't been rebuilt. Large scale building damage takes a LONG time to rebuild and probably means the business can't run until it's done.

I appreciate the counterargument. I would never advocate looting, especially of small/family businesses. The part of Los Angeles where I live has been hit hard by looting this weekend, including many small businesses, and its painful to see. I would highly prefer peaceful protesting and peaceful policing. But there is really no comparison of a line item on a multibillion dollar balance sheet--the linked video is all luxury multinationals--with peoples' actual real lives. The response of "what about the looters?" is a distraction from exactly that.

> The response of "what about the looters?" is a distraction from exactly that.

Yup.

And I personally think that a lot of the violence isn't the average protesters who care about police accountability, but people who are just using protests as an excuse to wreak havoc with less chance of being singled out for arrest.

Yeah, and insurance isn't going to cover the lost income whilst rebuilding - if it even covers rioting at all. For example, America's oldest indie sci-fi bookstore was torched as part of the riots, totally destroyed, and the owner isn't expecting to get a single cent from insurance due to the exclusions: http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml

They tried kneeling and it was super effective!!

But you know that they kneeled. Their marketing broke through your attention defenses.

The problem is converting that into something tangible that furthers their goals.

Oh, I don't know. Peaceful protests of police violence have been a regular feature of life here in Baltimore, thanks to our famously corrupt and racist PD, but it took the 2015 Freddie Gray protests - which occurred in the wake of the same kind of murder as was done to George Floyd, and were violent enough to garner nationwide coverage - to spark the federal investigation that led to the 2017 consent decree and the ongoing scrutiny that, among other improvements in police behavior and in response to police misbehavior, looks to have so far at least kept Baltimore noticeably absent from the lists of cities seeing significant violence this time around.

So, at least in my town, it looks a lot like violent protests of the sort you decry do help. Certainly nothing else has done as well.

I've heard the 2015 riots resulted in a stand down of the police force in Baltimore, and since then crime in the city has increased significantly. Sounds like the reason criminals are not rioting is because they won. Great for the criminals, but not great for their victims, which are probably mostly the improvished, not the affluent who can afford a replacement for the missing police.

In all these riot situations, it is portrayed as the poor sticking it to the rich, who presumably are using the police to oppress the poor. But I suspect that in reality it is mostly the poor becoming even more downtrodden by the criminal elements, and the rich remain unaffected. Perhaps the rich even profit a bit from what happens, such as politicians winning more government money to "help with all the troubles".

Leaving aside that the next plea I hear from black Baltimore for more policing on the BPD model will absolutely be the first - I find it odd that you know so much about this, and so little about other things people have said in this thread that you also disagree with. You've asked others to cite their sources. Why be so unforthcoming with your own?

There's the homicide rate, which jumped from 33.8% in 2014 to 55.4% in 2015, and has stayed above 50% since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore#Crime_stati...

A little further down:

"Homicides in Baltimore are heavily concentrated within a small number of high-poverty neighborhoods."

So, my prima facie impression from these data points is the stand down has not benefitted the poor.

Would that be the homicide rate that's shown no significant first-derivative variance from the national rate since 2015? - the homicide rate that you're not even bothering to cite correctly? Those are figures per hundred thousand, not per hundred as you give them here.

In either case, you're massively misrepresenting the "stand down" order, which was not a policy of indefinite disengagement, but rather a specific instruction given in the scope of the 2015 protests in an attempt to avoid further escalation. Whether or not the order was successful in that sense is a matter for separate discussion, but to claim it's a permanent thing, the way you are doing, is simply false to fact - which is probably why you still haven't sourced that claim.

While we're on the topic of BPD actions during the 2015 protests, have you heard about the cop who used the opportunity to loot drugs from a pharmacy and later sell them on to street dealers? [1] I suspect not; for all your apparent interest in the doings of the Baltimore PD, you seem surprisingly ill informed. That's far from all the Gun Trace Task Force got up to, either [2], nor were they alone in their corruption. These are things you need to know about, if you want to talk about policing in my town and expect to be worth taking seriously. But here you are, needing to be told about them. I wonder why that is.

[1] https://archive.is/UeB7E

[2] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2018/2/...

This article from USA Today in 2018 implies the effect has been indefinite. Interesting graph, too, that shows the drop in police actively stopping petty crime correlates with a growth in homicides. I heard a Baltimore radio show in 2019 that said pretty much the same thing, highlighted by the police commissioner getting mugged in broad daylight as he was walking down the street with his wife.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...

“These guys aren’t stupid. They realize that if they do something wrong, they’re going to get their head bit off. There’s no feeling that anybody’s behind them anymore, and they’re not going to do it,” he says. “Nobody wants to put their head in the pizza oven when the pizza oven is on.”

How does a reduction in police-initiated enforcement actions square with a rise in homicides? Homicide is, pretty much by definition, not a petty crime. Or is this that hoary old "broken windows" theory of policing that's taken such a well-deserved beating over the last couple of decades?

The article also, despite a clear editorial slant, can't quite avoid hinting at the kind of solution that actually does need to happen: not for police officers to simply abrogate the responsibility they accepted with their oaths when the public makes clear their conduct has been unacceptable, but for police officers to improve their conduct, and discharge the responsibility they took on, to actually protect and serve.

I grant that that lies outside the false dichotomy you choose to draw, between police doing nothing and police continuing in the massive abuse of power status quo ante. But, after all, it is a false dichotomy. You can do better.

I hope you can do better, anyway. For one thing, you promoted the deputy police commissioner, which I'm sure he appreciates, and spun the world clear around on its axis so he got mugged in the daytime, when he didn't, instead of at night, when he did. (cf. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/20/us/baltimore-deputy-police-co...)

These are very strange errors of fact to go on making with, it seems like, every single claim you've introduced so far. Wherever you're getting your information from, you might consider finding sources that do a better job of sticking to facts, because whatever you've been using up to now seems not much good at anything beyond leading you into error.

The point is clear the police withdrawing has not improved things. The solution clearly lies elsewhere. And the 2015 riots did not make anything better.

Well, now you're just reiterating things you've already said and failed to support the first time. I guess that means we're done here.

I showed the crime rates went up after the riots because the police have stopped actively cleaning up crime. You never showed how the supporting evidence is wrong, nor why my inference was incorrect. You mainly nitpicked insignificant details. I would be genuinely interested if you can show violent riots have made life better for law abiding citizens in Baltimore.

look, i get the point that riots draw attention and show people are fed up. that makes sense

but, in baltimore that just led to lax police, more crime, and more homicides

i believe the same will happen with these riots. police will withdraw from blac neighborhoods, and the criminal element will have free reign. that is a bad outcome, and more innocent people will suffer than will benefit

we are trying to make life better for innocent black people, but being scared of the neighborhood gang bangers is not a step up from being scared of the police

and this will not bring justice for the victims, police may throw some sacrifices, but they otherwise will just be less caring about black neighborhoods and police mistreatment of black people, and the gulf will widen

I think its root is in "direct action"[0], and intentional/encouraged by at least some. Others are just opportunists, for their own gain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_action

These are two separate things happening at near the same places. This is being done on purpose by people with anarchist tendencies -- to hide among legitimate protesters.

Some agitators are anti-government. Others are full on anarchists. Others want to bait people into race wars (a la the Turner Diaries, cited by white nationalist mass shooters and the Oklahoma City bomber).

Do not forget about the Trump "resistors". I'm assuming that they are out with the mob too.

Why does one need to scrub faces from protests images? Does it even matter with the volumn of images being captured?

Is it because people are committing more crime than the original offense?

Could it be that sometimes the police, government, etc. will make your life miserable even if you haven't commit a crime because they don't like something you did?

Nah. They would never do anything like that.

As everyone knows, all police are paragons of moral excellence in every country in the world at all times.

Governments have definitely never, ever gone after innocent protesters.

</sarcasm>

How much worse are the police from other profession?

i.e. how skewed are different professions w.r.t. morals?

Do you think lawyers are worse? Politicians? The Media? Where do police fit into this spectrum?

Are all police bad? What percentage?

<perspective> (you can close this tag if you wish)

IF they are identical morally there's still a problem, because they are not identical in power.

With power comes a responsibilty to be better than others, and if that's not something you can count on, which it isn't, we need to protect others.

Well they aren't equal, nor has humanity never complained about those in power...

Was the police violence worse during the time of the civil rights? Were the protesters ever violent or turn to rioting?

What would Dr King say about the protests?

It’s not hard to find, because he said these words in 1968 before his assassination:

“…it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?…It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” (“The Other America,” 1968).

Funny, it sounds just as true of 2020 America as 1968 America. https://www.history.com/news/for-martin-luther-king-jr-nonvi...

He would understand. He would probably be out there. He might try to be a calming influence—or he might act as a street medic. He might have turned as militant as Malcolm X over the last fifty years since his assassination. His tone was changing even from his 1966 Mike Wallace interview where he said:

“I contend that the cry of "black power" is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlk-a-riot-is-the-language-of-t...

Dr King was heavily involved in protests. He did everything he could to keep his protests non-violent, but he faced extreme violence from the ~slave patrols~ white racist cops of the time. His son is on Twitter…and is being MLKsplained to by white people who consistently misunderstand what MLK said and meant.

https://twitter.com/OfficialMLK3/status/1266040838628560898 (follow the thread)

MLK’s position initially was very much the same as Michele Obama’s “When they go low, we go high”. But he never said that people should just _give in_ to the violence of the state, and so it’s pretty clear that he would not have completely condemned the protests or even the riots.

(In other words, there’s multiple MLKs, and most people—especially white people—remember the sanitized “I have a Dream” MLK that is taught to us as history. That MLK is _not_ the MLK that existed at the time of his assassination.)

Sibling poster, thank you for the very excellent response

This is great for some situations. However, my personal policy is to upload my protest content to Google Photos asap (if appropriate). This makes sure your content is off your device if your phone gets confiscated AND it provides (be it thin) layer of authenticity/validation of the content.

Can't they find photos from others, examine the angle of your photos and prove it was you that took the pictures? They can also subpeona your carrier for records indicating you were a location at a certain time.

I can see some diligent prosecutors going back and looking at data to gather evidence.

I think the point is protecting custody of the photo rather than disavow taking it.

See also, the ACLU Mobile Justice app: https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...

> "...Google Photos..."

everything you said was good except this. google is not your (or the protesters') friend.

You might also be interested in the CameraV / InformaCam project: https://guardianproject.github.io/informacam-guide/en/Inform...

Google Photos isn't going to provide you with any authenticity claims, and metadata gets scrambled by both their "high quality" and "original" settings.

If you want to make sure the actual, original image gets stored safely on another device automatically, use SyncThing or Resilio Sync.

> metadata gets scrambled by both their "high quality" and "original" settings.

This is NOT true, at least for the "original" setting. Upload an image, download it again - the checksums are identical.

If you modify the time/date or add comments within Google Photos, that new information is kept in a .json file instead of the exif data, but Google NEVER modifies the original photo if you select "original" quality.

That's not my experience with a couple Google Pixels, using original quality.

If you fetch your image via takeout or via the API, the image bytes are the same, but the EXIF headers have been changed.

I've tried in both a standard Gmail account and a custom domain. Same behavior.

Are you saying your file SHA is the same from your device and your takeout?

I wonder if I am seeing US-account-exclusive behavior?

Yep, the SHA1/256 checksum of the original on my Android device is the same as the one from both Google Takeout and downloading from the Google Photos Web UI.

Same for the .heic files on my iPhone, too.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I wonder what's different between our accounts and devices.

So I might look silly here but what I do is take a snip of the displayed picture and save and use that. Was I doing it wrong?

All I was really concerned about was getting rid of metadata tied to my phone.

was thinking about a way to do this for live stream video. I think it is doable but would probably cause too much battery drain on the device.

You could stream to your computer at home and then to the world. But it's weird that the live streaming websites don't offer it as feature.

A general tool for metadata removal:

https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/ https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2-web/

Assuming this tool was intended for those who want to share photos on social media, Facebook and Instagram already strip metadata out from the photos you share otherwise anybody could scrape the photo and get metadata. I'm not sure for Twitter tho but I think it is the same.

Twitter also strips exif data from displayed images. That said, I would assume that all social media platforms permanently store that data (even though it's not in the displayed image), and would be forced to give it up under subpoena.

"all social media platforms permanently store that data" exactly but storing metadata has 2 purposes; one for security reasons and second for analyzing the data and creating advertising solutions based on that data.

How much do you trust them not to save that information?

I would rather trust multi billion dollar companies than smaller ones which are trying to make a quick buck out of my data. And big companies are under much more scrutiny than smaller ones.

It's a good default thing to do, because one day, like me, you realize that services like Slack don't wipe metadata in photos: https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/11/slack-strips-location-data....

Twitter often shows geodata for users, but I think that's app-based and not derived from photo uploads.

Regarding metadata: Considering windows already lets you strip metadata from images directly from the properties menu, is there anything this tool or other metadata stripping tools do that goes beyond what windows offers? Is it risky to rely on the built-in tool?

Nice. The most identifying EXIF data is probably the GPS location. What else have to be scrubbed?

The tool blurs faces.

Sure. I'm just interested to know what else in EXIF could be identifying.

Camera serial numbers. If you ever have your camera stolen, you can put the serial number into Stolen Camera Finder. It will show you the images uploaded to the Internet with your camera’s serial number so you can recover it.

https://www.stolencamerafinder.com

Is this data included in iPhone photos? I don't think so.

iPhone metadata includes several fingerprints that can be used to differentiate between different devices, including a serial number, uptime in seconds, and shutter release count (depending on the model of iPhone you have).

(source: me examining as many different iPhone models and instances to build deduping heuristics for PhotoStructure)

Interesting! That's more information than I thought. Thanks for informing me!

I guess that is more about hiding the identify of the photographer instead of the people pictured, but since browser fingerprinting works by combining seemingly innocuous data to identify individuals, that suggests that removing everything is probably safest. The camera model, software versions and other explicit labels are one obvious thing. The ISO, focal length, and shutter speed could narrow down what sensor was used and maybe what software, especially if you had multiple images from the same camera. Maybe manual settings changes that the photographer made could show up in the same data. Possibly small amounts of clock drift? If you saw the news story that combined multiple security cameras' footage with phone video around the time of George Floyd's arrest, clock disagreement was something they saw, and the events in the images themselves allowed them to figure out the clock difference (which was huge there, like 20 minutes, but you could still do for a smaller drift.)

Other things are external to the EXIF but could be combined with it. The sequence numbers in the filenames are the most obvious signal. The precise number of megapixels of the image might also tell you what sensor was used -- so maybe an anonymizer should resample the image to a new size.

I guess these seem unlikely to be investigated, but then again nobody initially thought that telling every web server what fonts you have installed on your machine would be used against you, or that the existence of "Do Not Track" would make browsers easier to track. It just depends on how much it's worth to someone to write this stuff once -- then it's free for all future uses.

I just looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif and there are lots of interesting possibilities.

There's data like the camera model which can be used for de-anonymization. Though, if de-anonymization is a concern in your threat model, you need to worry about sensor noise providing a unique fingerprint:

   http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/double.pdf
   http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/EI7254-18.pdf

If you're worried about attracting that kind of attention, use a burner device.

Can someone package this as an iOS and Android app and get it into the app stores?

There are quite a few apps for iOS at least that remove metadata https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/photo-video-metadata-remover/i...

There are also a few that do face detection and blur on the AppStore.

Great concept!

There should be an undo button, though. Especially without a brush size preview.

Awesome tool!

Unfortunately it isn’t fully functionally via safari mobile.

Protests or riots?

Now I would hope everyone is wearing a mask

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law

Health overrules those mostly.

Since the Antifa will be designated as a terrorist organization[0], I don't suggest you guys to trust github pages, google photos, drive, etc. Tomorrow there may be a subpoena for the IP addresses who use this tool. It may not be enough proof but it'll cost you a lot of money and time. I'd be using local tools like exiftool or gimp.

[0]: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12671296442282475...

This is an ideal tool to be hosted on ipfs, to prevent tampering with the code in the future.

It is hosted on github pages. Not sure if it would violate ToS. You may host it elsewhere.

Reference: https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...

What policy do you think this tool violates?

Can face blurring be regulated as a protected form of encryption?

Site won’t scroll on iOS keeping me from reading the full readme.

Need this but for video

Simple and effective like a charm

As of today, the president is designating antifascist protestors as a terrorist organization.

Not following the news for my sanity. Was he referring to antifa or actual anti fascists?

Antifa is an umbrella term. From Wikipedia:

> Antifa is not an interconnected or unified organization, but rather a movement without a hierarchical leadership structure, comprising multiple autonomous groups and individuals

In his tweet, I do believe POTUS was referring to Antifa in the same way as the question--as a fictional, hierarchical organization.

He said "antifa," but that's a term that's about as meaningful as "Christianity" or "the free software community." There's no single, overarching organization, there's no membership rolls (individual groups that share affinity with the movement might have some idea of membership, but there's nothing beyond that), and there's even a fair bit of internal disagreement on who really counts.

The practical effect is that if you're accused of being a member of "antifa" there's no coherent way to demonstrate you aren't, and certainly people opposed to fascism, whether or not they themselves identify with the label, are going to get accused of being "antifa."

(Also, to be clear on the news, he simply said that he intends to do this in a tweet - even if it were a coherent thing to do, there is no procedure for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations.)

“Antifascist” “protestors”

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23371330.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com