Europe Is Building an International Facial Recognition System | Hacker News Reader

Europe Is Building an International Facial Recognition System

wired.co.uk

Canada made it illegal to wear a mask while protesting a decade or so ago (a rule that was probably not enforced during the freedom convoy protests because of Covid).

Imagine a world where every single protestor is on record forever as being at x and y events, leading to profiling and being turned down for jobs and future police harassment. Protesting anything is extremely dangerous from here on out

it happens all the time to people of color who get busted for weed in a non-legal state. it’s actually been this way for years in america, a lot of these overextending started from the red scare, terrorism but yeah a large part was based on the war on drugs which largely has been an expensive failure

Why specify PoC? I have several non-PoC friends busted for minor possession (weed) while in grad school and found themselves unhireable upon graduation with masters of engineering degrees.

How does this work in practice? Do “all” companies do background checks that include criminal records?

Every job I've gotten outside retail/customer service has done background checks. Criminal record is basically top of the list for what those checks are looking to uncover.

A simple glance at the statistics would show you why.

The drug laws have race at their roots. If you don’t have time to look up the history I’ll give you an example: during the “crack cocaine epidemic” in the 80s and 90s the focus was on a version of cocaine mostly used by the poor and not on the use of the powdered stuff by the middle and upper classes — in fact that usage was celebrated.

Oh but wait: I didn’t use the word “race” in that example. Just look at the wealth and access to the middle classes for Black people in the US and decide.

Note: I haven’t looked at this for meth and fentanyl. Pot and cocaine in the beginning of the 20th century (the origin of the US recreational drug laws) were chosen because they were common the Black community at the time. I don’t doubt your experience (that of your friends I mean) but the burden is not spread uniformly.

> The drug laws have race at their roots. If you don’t have time to look up the history I’ll give you an example: during the “crack cocaine epidemic” in the 80s and 90s the focus was on a version of cocaine mostly used by the poor and not on the use of the powdered stuff by the middle and upper classes — in fact that usage was celebrated.

I won't deny that there are racist reasons for that, but another part of the explanation might be that the poor classes commit more violent crimes, and thus focusing on crack cocaine helps fight violent crime more. Which then would invite the subject "Is focusing on violent crime (vs "white collar crime") better for society or another form of racism?". I don't have an answer to that one.

Prosecuting low level drug offenses is usually an alternative to going after violent crimes which can be dangerous.

I bet that is little consolation for non-PoC victims of bad drug policy.

Your statements come across as suggesting that the non-PoC experience doesn't matter, since a random PoC has it worse. I hope that it wasn't intentional.

That’s your read, not mine. I was simply responding to the question.

It is incumbent on the communicator to word their point in such a way as to clearly relay their intent. It was my "read" because that's how you worded it.

Because its the world they live in, and its real to them. Why the fuck would they go out of their way to avoid what is probably a mundane fact for them. Why did "you" have to specify that your "non-PoC" friend got busted. Just because someone calls out a specific attribute of a story doesn't automatically make it an agenda.

I was thinking about a documentary where a Californian farmer was trying to recharge the groundwater by flooding his farmland and seep into the ground instead of letting the water run off. It didn't look like he had any permits to do this and he was most likely breaking the law. I can already imagine an overzealous police department looking for easy to prosecute crimes using facial recognition to arrest this man.

> Pictures of people’s faces shouldn’t be combined in one giant central database, the official proposal says, but police forces will be linked together through a “central router.” This router won’t store any data, the European Commission spokesperson says, adding that it will “only act as a message broker” between nations.

From professional perspective, interesting to see real relevant use case of data mesh structure.

From practical use case, what difference does it make for anybody outside IT?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just the same abstraction as the Internet? Lots of separate databases linked together by a router (well, millions)? With something like Google as an obvious way to search and index it?

What exactly do you mean by 'data mesh structure'?

So instead of one big centralised database they'll make couple of smaller ones which are all connected. In other words, same result, different implementation.

No, not really. For example, if one of the databases get hacked they can't just dump the pictures of all european citizens, just from the database they got access too

It's slightly less worse.

The obvious one is that each national level server will be firmly under the national data protection authority, and so can be ordered censor or even completely withhold replies to (some) outside requests.

There are subtle differences in the sense that individual databases can be detached, queries can be monitored and throttled by local authorities, etc. It will be much harder to have a single breach leak the whole database (e.g., the OPM hack [1].) It also makes automated surveillance (e.g., "track this person around and constantly notify the secret police of their location") much harder to implement without at least a few different countries cooperating to implement the system.

However, as far as the core functionality ("look up a face, find a match from any country's data") the operation of this federated database will be nearly identical. I suspect that politicians/regulators either don't fully understand this, or else they don't want their constituents to understand this.

[1] https://www.opm.gov/cybersecurity/cybersecurity-incidents/

Why would they hide that from their constituents? What is the reason to go "Hey, I worked to cripple the ability of our law enforcement to identify the criminals coming to our country from abroad! (Only secretly the system actually works fine)"?

Probably anticipating arguments about losing their sovereignty over domestic data. This way they can claim that data bout their citizens is still owned by their citizens and not other nations in the EU?

Well sure, they could want to stay out entirely because of data sovereignty concerns.

But I don't see why you would join a intel sharing system holding the position that you won't share your own intel (nor why you would be allowed to join).

My guess is that there is some tension in the voting population between wanting police to use this tech to solve crimes, and fear that a continent-wide database will enable surveillance abuses. A federated solution might reduce the abuse potential. But more cynically, it allows for the effective creation of a continent-wide database while reassuring voters that there is no continent-wide database.

The meme over the last decade has been "evidence based policing/medicine" causing me to ponder why there was ever anything BUT evidence policing/medicine. We're moving towards "algorithmic based policing".

The alternative to "evidence based medicine" is "biological plausibility", where you'd construct a model (say "humans have 4 humors") and reason about how the symptoms are caused via the model.

So you might say: oh, high blood pressure causes the heart to be stressed, which causes heart attacks. So if we have the person eat less salt and drink more water, their blood pressure will go down, reducing their risk of heart attacks.

In evidence-based medicine, the mechanism doesn't matter. You just need to show that X has an effect, it doesn't matter _why_ X has an effect.

See here for more info: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8blgcc/has_a...

Should only be permitted for serial criminals; debasing the rights of ordinary people. Debasement is a trend and possibly a current thing; do not support

Isn’t any system a debasement of the rights of ordinary people? Their faces will still be scanned. There may be false positives. The definition of “criminal” may change.

Unfortunately, this is likely to result in charging people with crimes more frequently so they can be considered serial criminals. Been to three unlawful assemblies? Well, now you are a serial criminal, and we'll track you everywhere.

In America, people are paying to buy Ring and Nest cameras to further the privately built surveillance state. The best part is that the most common reason for doing so is package theft, but police won't really do anything about your stolen Amazon package, so what do cameras really facilitate?

We have people in our neighborhood posing as repairmen trying to get inside houses. I would like to have a buffer between me and the person at the door. Police might not do anything about stolen packages, but they will take incidents like this seriously. I also show the footage to my neighbors to give them a heads up.

Don't worry. You will be required to accept 74 cookies and read 3 privacy policies before they can scan your face.

Yeah but this won't matter when they make it mandatory.

Plus, you'll still have to accept those cookies and privacy policies...

Luckily in our lifetime we won't have to worry about this since it's a government IT project so it will be way over budget and way over the deadline before it will eventually be canceled

Technology seems to really help streamline the path to dystopia.

It concentrates power.

Just another step towards dystopia. After the reformations of german police laws in the last years, starting with Bavaria, I dropped hopes that the combination of state of law with civil liberties may be self-sustainable.

The drive to sustain themselves is inherent to any institution we forge, and the reward incentives within those institutions simply have _zero_ alignment with civil liberties. The drive to power, relevance, funding and self-sustain goes _directly_ against civil liberties and privacy. If you understand this dynamic, you understand that the rest is merely a matter of time and precedent cases used as justifications for further extensions of the reach.

Multiple problems:

- inherent dynamics of self-sustain and growth in any institution

- people drawn to enforce law-enforcement value stability and security over social ideals, civil liberty and privacy

- people drawn to power (i.e. the top of the food chain in those institutions) are mostly sociopaths who will instrumentalize every tool at their disposal to better their own position

- democracy has no protection against the populist appeal of what feels like security. politics will go one step further ad infinitum, and anyone who is against measurements which the majority of the population can be sold on as "this is good for you" is consequentially not one of the good guys. It doesn't matter wether all the smart people are extremely vary of this, because smarts don't win elections

so what I'm trying to say is, yeah, we're fucked. I guess this is just baked into Europe, as we're not running on the model of "liberty for all". The upside is, we get decent healthcare, I guess. Meh.

This is going to cause fashion to adopt appearances similar to what one sees with a Google Image Search of "makeup illusions". Such makeup causes a human face to be unrecognizable as a human face to FR software. All it will take is such a fashion to catch on, and our world becomes significantly surreal.

it won't because the counter culture will always lose against the technological system it tries to resist in the long run. resistance is allowed and encouraged because it helps to strengthen the system 8against dissent). any dissent is only a blip in the radar in the grand scheme of things.

La Technique (Jacques Ellul) https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-technique/

Good news everyone, another dragnet for us to enjoy! /s

1984, here we come. I'm glad the UK got out of the EU because of things like this.

You mean this UK?

MET police uses facial recognition.

> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/met-police-facial-recognitio...

The UK has more CCTV cameras per capita than any other country, bar China.

> https://www.yahoo.com/video/britain-more-surveillance-camera...

UK parliament sneaks in new live facial recognition rules.

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2021/08/23/uk-go...

They are on the next phase already. Take your hands of the keyboard right now, we sent agents to prevently arrest you:

"Crime prediction software 'adopted by 14 UK police forces'"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47118229

"The dangerous rise of policing by algorithm"

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/th...

You mean this UK?

"Two UK Broadband ISPs Trial New Internet Snooping System" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26430266

"UK’s secret, ongoing mass surveillance rigorously frisked by watchdog (arstechnica.co.uk) 2016" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12060832

"UK Home Secretary considering removing right to anonymity on social media (independent.co.uk)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898249

"UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable" (reuters.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13959953

"Bill that curtails ability to protest in England and Wales passes second reading" - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/16/bill-that-cu...

Let's not forget the Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT). They've been actively spying on protestors (of any creed) for well over a decade, with the goal of trying to identify as many of them as possible. Even during perfectly peaceful protests of seemingly little import.

UK police also collect "non-crime hate incidents" and give these records of heresy against the rainbows to people who ask for your criminal record. Mind you: Incidents. These are mere accusations that haven't even been verified, and as the very name implies, there has not even been an accusation of crime. It's just a record of non-criminal wrongthink.

I don’t think I understand. Police everywhere report on misdemeanour, and reporting itself is perhaps police forces’ main job.

They are explicitly gathering reports and accusations on things that are not in themselves punishable offenses. They just record accusations of non-crime and give it out when people's criminal record is asked for to damage them.

This sounds highly unlikely and I cannot find a reputable source for it. Could you provide one?

Point taken but policy reversal by a national government is a good deal more within the realms of possibility than a successful campaign to get the EU to do the same. Not likely at all in the UK at present but that could change if a faction within a national party decides to push anti-surveillance measures as a priority in some future general election. The difficulty is getting a consensus within the electorate to understand what's at stake.

Was that sarcasm? Or were you serious?

Either way, that was legit the funniest thing I've read on here today.

As in "you cannot be serious" funny, not haha funny.

Yeah. My perception's been that the UK is boldly spearheading Western Orwellianism.[0][1]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the...

1: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10668157/Teenager-j...

Face recognition is just the beginning. There are a whole array of biometric recognition techniques that are threatening to make anonymity completely obsolete.

How many accepted a pass for covid ? You guys complaining now, but if they say "it is for your health, for fighting covid", you will accept everything like good sheeps.

Milgram experience, if autority say something, most are sheep, and if you accepted covid passport and restrictions you are part of the problem.

COVID vaccination certificates are nothing interesting. My EU passport has my fingerprints and my face on the integrated chip and that's all going to be uploaded to some massive Schengen database. Half the websites I use in this country know my personal identity number and many interactions require ID. A certificate saying I got a jab is nothing to all this, and doesn't enable any interesting tracking that wasn't already happening.

It merely normalises another means of control, and sets a behavioural precedent for similar such restrictions and documents in the future. As always the problem usually isn't with the very first use of anything, but what governments think they can get away with after testing the waters.

So does a Drivers License.

It is without precedent to have to show a vaccine pass to enter cafes in human history. I'm confident that we actually have set an entirely new precedent with them, and it's not a good one.

> A certificate saying I got a jab is nothing to all this, and doesn't enable any interesting tracking that wasn't already happening.

Do you have to provide your passport to every shop, bus, train, etc that you use? There is a difference between monitoring your id when you travel between nations and being monitored everywhere.

If I want to rent a car, I have to provide my driver's license. Any time I do something that might be risky to the person providing the service, I have to provide evidence that reduces the risk they are assuming. When cars become self-driving, I will no longer have to provide a driver's license, and when the pandemic became endemic, people no longer had to provide proof of vaccination. The fear-mongering about slippery slopes is completely unfounded.

I tried to get a COVID finger prick antibody test while paying cash. The Kroger 'Little Clinic' insisted on ID and photocopying it. I refused and asked to see the written notice and privacy policy. They called store security on me. Apparently eveyone else complies.

You'll find that in life if you want to make a point, calling people sheep is rarely the most effective way to do it.

Although I agree with you on the form, that does not disprove the fact most will look into argumentum ad populum reasons, and social pressures to conform to where the sheep are going. Religious beliefs being the prime example, after all they even say: "The Lord is my Shepherd" ;-)

Comparing a QR-Code (which the EU covid pass is) with a facial recognition database, calling people sheep and thinking that's a gotcha argument makes you sound disingenuous at best and stupid at worst.

For the future: Try also reminding people of the microchips which Gates added to the vaccine and that it's all Clintons fault.

Their comment was fair. A touch indelicate, but fair.

Just because "the authorities" say something is a good idea, doesn't automatically make it a bad idea.

If you accept that breathing asbestos dust can cause lung cancer, are you a good little sheep who is part of the problem?

Of course not, but blindly following authorities is a bad move in general.

and who was acting blindly?

From what I've seen, there was very little public support for the covid certificate. People sort of put up with it because they were banned from public places without it. It was difficult to mount any meaningful protest, because protesting was difficult and dangerous at the time.

Of course you've failed to mention that the use of a covid certificate was largely elective. You could simply not go out for dinner or on vacation and you would have been fine. Things are bit different when it comes to mass surveillance, databases, and facial recognition.

>Of course you've failed to mention that the use of a covid certificate was largely elective. You could simply not go out for dinner or on vacation and you would have been fine.

Huh? In most of Australia, varying on a state by state basis, signing in via QR code was not elective and was mandatory for all public venues _including shops_. Most people do not have >1 month of food, and restrictions remained in place for a lot longer than that. These sign-ins were tied to vaccination status and the state governments made a two-tier system where they classified what types of business would only allow vaccinated people in.

GP has it right in their assertion that people will just follow what the government says is best. We had a mass-scale demonstration of this in action!

> Huh? In most of Australia, varying on a state by state basis, signing in via QR code was not elective and was mandatory for all public venues _including shops_.

This is highly location dependent. In (most of? all of?) Europe signing in was only required for pubs/restaurants/hotels/concerts and never for essential services like shops or pharmacies.

Is following all law and regulation preparation for authoritarianism? What about driving on the proper side of the road and stopping at red lights? Not defecating in the streets? Waiting in line? Requiring a license to practice medicine? Etc.

Worry not, we are the good guys (TM), so only bad guys have to worry!

Nevermind that in a few years Nazis could use that system for something else entirely...

As an European by heart, I wish Europe would stop with such nonsense and grow some balls to go with its (theoretical) values

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

>As an European by heart, I wish Europe would stop with such nonsense and grow some balls to go with its (theoretical) values

But, think of the children (TM) /s

Well, people are preoccupied with children with the recent abuse video of (reportedly arrested) Russian soldiers and small children in the war zone.

I think you missed the the context here. The "think of the children" line is a cliché used in the West as a backdoor to justify the introduction of oppressive and invasive surveillance measures by governments, and if you try to oppose these measures, you can then be accused of being ok with children being harmed, so in the end there's no way you can win the argument and the surveillance measures are successfully pushed through.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

Maybe that phrase can still be used sarcastically where the non-specificity of the victims makes debate inconclusive. But, Europe has unfortunately entered an era where we know precisely which nationality’s children are at risk.

I do... Can I have mine with a caesar dressing this time, please?

Why? Why are they doing that?

To get the criminals is it? Ha what a joke, there's criminals getting away with murder right now look at Putin, what has Europe done about him for the last 30 years?

Because we let institutions run wild and don't have auto-expiration dates for laws/measurements that restrict civil liberties. I elaborated further on this elsewhere in the thread, maybe that helps clearing things up.

Auto-expiration dates won't help, the duration will be extended ad infinitum, because think of children. Unless you require quantifiable evidence of law's efficacy and causality to make an extension, which is quite a proposition given how every other law is unconditional. Even then, the data can be cooked.

In Ireland the legislation enabling government restrictions for covid expired, and the government who enacted that legislation have to desire to renew it. So it's not always extended ad infinitum.

What has Europe done about yemen, donbass, Syria, Lybia, Irak, etc. What has Europe done for itself regarding the scamdemic ?

"The bad guy is dumb, he think I am the bad guy when he is the bad guy".

You are part of the peoples that have decided in advance they are on the "good" side, that they have "truth from media and gouv, that never ever would lie to me". Ever thougth about putting the "I am definetly on the good side because I am european, and european is the definition of good" into question ?

Given the open borders & ease with which people can move outside of the jurisdiction where a crime was committed that does make some sense.

Still..huge amount of potential for problems & abuse

Not sure I understand the concerns. If it is used the same way fingerprints are used, it's not a massive privacy invasion. You are only registered to the database if you committed some crime, and searches in the database are only in relation to a specific crime. I am not seeing here a proposal for a chinese style face recognition on all CCTV in public transportation or something like that.

And I think anyone who has played with a face recognition algorithm will agree that it cannot be used as evidence in court. But if it can help narrow down to a few suspects, why not?

Surveillance laws tend to gradually expand and very, very rarely get rolled back.

Once the database is there, someone will bring up the proposal to apply it to some CCTV cameras. That will be shot down. Then someone will bring it up a few years later. Then a few years later it will actually happen. Then it will be slowly expanded.

> And I think anyone who has played with a face recognition algorithm will agree that it cannot be used as evidence in court.

Hope the court sees it the same.

If it's all as inevitable as the tides, what is there to argue about?

The more pushback against each step, the less quickly this happens.

Because we know fully well that the people who use these systems are going ignore the probability of a false positive and just worship the oracle as if it infallible, as we are much too comfortable to offload our cognition on algorithms.

I remember one master's graduate presenting his research and program using facial recognition to find offenders (I believe using phone while driving). When asked about false positives and their consequences, it was basically waved off and not many in the room were interested in the answer.

This is the same country which is still handling a case where it had families fined because the system incorrectly flagged them for years (Netherlands, childcare benefit scandal). On top of these families still not being repaid, a lot of tax money is wasted on politicians talking about it without resolving the issue.

I've noticed that people are increasingly comfortable with the idea of screwing over innocent people so long as the guilty are punished, and don't really value innocent until proven guilty anymore.

You are only registered to the database if you committed some crime

Generally false; biometric data is enrolled on arrest, not conviction. European countries probably differ on specifics like how easy it is to have your data removed at a later date, if at all.

Not sure for every country. My understanding is that the practice is to take biometrics to check against the database on arrest, but adding to the database requires a conviction (at least I believe that's the way it works in France).

What do you mean by "Chinese style"? China has some of the strongest consumer facial recognition protections. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/facial-recognition-chin...

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