Federal government to expand use of facial recognition despite growing concerns | Hacker News Reader

Federal government to expand use of facial recognition despite growing concerns

washingtonpost.com

138 pointsus0r43 comments

> The Department of Agriculture, for instance, said it wants to use it to monitor live surveillance feeds at its facilities and send an alert if it spots any faces also found on a watch list.

Ah yes, nothing dystopian about the fucking Department of Agriculture keeping watch lists.

"Took him down as part of Operation Corn Maze. He was growing illegal strawberries in three counties. Big score."

You kid but there was a story some years back about some authoritarian dragnet in Austrailia being used to facilitate prosecution of pork products distributors who committed some mundane crime regarding weights and measures.

I can't find the link but I'm 99% sure it was posted on HN.

Not sure how that’s a mundane crime when it’s literally stealing

Stealing is a mundane crime. Poisoning the meat supply would be an example of an extraordinary crime.

Compared to breaking the speed limit it isn't. Most people don't steal. I am guessing most drivers speed at least occasionally.

Fake USDA inspected meat products? Grind a mad cow into your hamburger supply chain and watch billions of dollars evaporate.

Just like the US Postal Service, The USDA has uniformed law enforcement and special agents who investigate crimes concerning the USDA, similarly to US Postal Inspectors who investigate mail fraud and other mail-related crimes.

Immigrants. They are watching for illegal immigrants. Many of them work on farms.

If The Department of Agriculture cared at all about illegal immigration, they would go out today and arrest or shut down the largest employers of illegal immigrants.

Nah, the cameras are far more likely to be at the fertilizer storage depots with a watchlist for terror suspects.. US ag. wouldn't exist without immigrants so they have very little incentive to "watch" for them.

Oh that makes more sense. Id like to retract my previous more inflammatory baseless accusation.

https://archive.is/aaBjD

I would buy a face mask or sunglasses today that produced known collisions with popular facial recognition CV software.

A novelty for sure, but it would be a fun product.

Perhaps it's more realistic to buy sunglasses with powerful IR emitters with a discrete design.

Every time biometrics is on HN i end up losing karma cause people disagree with me.

I did my PhD on biometrics and while i've transitioned to a different field since graduation, i'd like to think i have some insight into the field (which i still try to follow through journals like IEEE TIFS or conference proceedings from ICB/IJCB). Fundamentally, a biometric is both a _username_ and a _password_ at the same time. It identifies who is logging in (username) while authenticating them (password). There is some literature to address the elephant in the room about 'changing the password' where the key created and stored from the biometric can be changed. But again, fundamentally, the goal should be about how to treat the data like a username/password pair that's just as sensitive as something like a SSN. For law enforcement, i completely agree that it's useful, but for digital access i have yet to see proof that system architects are acknowledging that relationship when thinking about cybersecurity and any ramifications of a breach.

edit: LOL this just hit my RSS feed from HN -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28314993

I don't think people are having a hard time understanding what biometrics are. I think the issue at hand is that while getting your SSN requires some kind of involvement with you or someone you've given that information to, this particular biometric data can be gathered without your consent or knowledge.

I don't want to support the use of biometric data when anyone can grab it and use it for whatever they want by virtue of me existing in "their" society.

Well. I think the SSN analogy is actually really damning: because of the ubiquity of data leaks and of people asking for our SSN as "identification", we have vanishingly little control over who has access to it. Likewise, if someone is able to get a copy of my "password" by taking a picture of my face, then it's a terrible password, because it ain't private.

Sure, and that is definitely a separate issue that should be addressed.

The point of contention is that with data leaks of SSN-esque data, we have the theoretical ability to hold an entity accountable for that violation of privacy and trust.

If you're scanning my face with a discreet, pinhole security camera and then sell the data you gather to a 3rd party who then loses that data in a leak, what theoretical recourse do I have when I didn't even know the data had been gathered & subsequently lost in the first place?

Edit: removed some text that was poorly thought out and not representative of the point I'm trying to make.

I don't think it's specifically an HN thing. You just shouldn't argue with people on the Internet. We all do it, but it's widely a waste of time. Especially when you have domain knowledge to share; everyone is an armchair expert.

I feel like the American populis basically deserves this for endlessly electing the "practical" centrist candidates who don't have the political courage to change anything (or game show hosts, but Trump didn't seem particularly interested in dismantling the surveillance state)

We don’t vote them in. Walmart and Amazon place them there to uphold the status quo.

A very clear example of this, but with Citigroup: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html

Your source doesn’t claim that Citigroup wanted to maintain the societal status quo, though.

Depends on your definition of societal status quo. If it includes "not out of business", then I think the example still holds. Citigroup's positioning helped them secure $20 billion in government bailout loans following the 2008 crash, while most Americans wanted to let them fail.

That's a pretty lie that citizens in a democracy get to tell themselves so they don't have to take responsibility for the will of the people coming to a bad decision. Walmart and Amazon can afford to shape the news, but they don't hold the pen in the voting booth.

"Absolute governments, (tho’ the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs; know likewise the remedy; and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures." ~Thomas Paine

I like this perspective. I hear you.

It just seems that the list of candidates (for which we vote) is assembled by corporations with the intent of writing laws that promote their profits (at the expense of the people and other businesses).

I don’t see how we (the people) can vote who gets on the list in the first place. Until that happens I don’t consider it to be true representation.

The list is decided during the primaries. In the US at least, the biggest problem is that very few Americans seem to understand how significant primaries are; we usually see sub-30% turnout for those elections, but those are the elections where questions like "Trump or Cruz" or "Clinton or Biden" are decided (to say nothing of federal legislators, which are a full branch of government, or state government, which has more day-to-day impact on most Americans than who is President).

Yeah that is a serious problem. Is there a buy-in to participate in the primaries?

That's the problem with democracy. The people are not truly in charge but yet we get blamed.

> Athenion struts on stage before the crowd, then displays the sloganeering skills of a modern politician, saying: “Now you command yourselves, and I am your commander in chief. If you join your strength to me, my power shall reach the combined power of all of you.” Then March 86 BC, shouts and trumpet blasts rend the night air as Roman soldiers, swords drawn, run through the city. Blood flows in the narrow streets, as the Romans butcher the Athenians—women and children included. The number of dead is beyond counting. In despair, many Athenians kill themselves.

Idk man, a lot of people didn't vote for Bernie in that primary. They had the option and didn't go for it.

Remember when he was winning and then there was a "software failure"

This sounds like a dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory to me. All the sources have told me that electronic voting machines are 100% secure. So that must be true and you must be wrong.

The obvious triangulation against him by the party probably didn't help. I don't care about Sanders any more than I care about any candidate suggesting we step back from the brink, but it was so obvious even people who spend all day on Twitter calling everyone "Bernie Bros" (even people who aren't bros) got a little suspicious.

Same as happened to Ron Paul in some way. Candidate seek to change the course of a party and is stop by existing party interest.

I believe athenion was not actually in control of athens in 86 BC, but rather the tyrant aristion who had seized control. if athenion had still been in power, he might have followed the other city-states in surrendering to sulla. hard to say of course, but he did not have the same conflicting motives as athenion. I'm not really sure what this example is supposed to show.

My point was not about who was really responsible for the rebellion. My point was that the everyday people were blamed for what transpired, then they were massacred, and this was the end of democracy in Athens for a long time.

The people are truly in charge. If everyone opposed something so heavily, they'd be able to vote out enormous swathes of the electorate till they get said desire.

You either get agency, or the ability to abdicate responsibility, not both.

It's also possible you get neither.

They're not voting for anyone practical. They're voting for career politicians who are in the pockets of big corporate donors. That's why nothing changes, they work for the donors, not the voters.

I was at a bar a couple months back and met a guy running for one of the new US Congress seats. He stated, quite bluntly, that donors are much more important than voters when it comes to elections.

And it's not during the actual election either, the donors wield their influence way earlier in deciding who gets as far as the primaries.

If you can't self fund, you have to sell your soul to donors who will put up the money. Not to mention getting access to the party apparatus who will fuck you over if they have a preferred candidate that's not you: Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders managed to go it alone only to get done over by their own party in the end.

Even small doses of fear and pessimism is enough to make the majority of people accept mass surveillance.

In Denmark in 2017 we had a summer of daily gang shootings. That fear was enough for the government to fly military SIGINT and surveillance planes above Copenhagen for weeks. There was almost no opposition to this level of mass surveillance.

https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-vaaben-...

Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. We only get to choose between candidates who are corrupt in different ways. That isn't the fault of the people, it's the fault of the incumbent politicians who game the system to be most favorable to themselves.

If you want to blame us for something, blame us for enjoying the empty comforts of modern life over choosing civil war.

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