House Democrats debut new bill to limit US police use of facial recognition | Hacker News Reader

House Democrats debut new bill to limit US police use of facial recognition

techcrunch.com

322 pointsarkadiyt151 comments

This seems like a good rule. Warrants are good. Outlawing using it to ID peaceful protestors is good.

While the points about facial recognition misidentifying black people are true, I'd rather it rely only on the civil rights issues associated with it working and not tie it to misidentifying minorities. That's a situation where in 5 years "it works on black people now, kay" is the argument to overturn the law.

At this point I’m thinking “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” would be a good constitutional amendment.

That is, if a reasonable number of humans couldn’t do it, the government can’t do it with computers against its population.

how is a machine that does something "a reasonable number of humans couldn't do" "in the likeness of a human mind"?

Many AI systems these days are adequate counterfeit humans in ways that adding machines and spreadsheets (and advanced systems that reduce to these things) are not.

In other words, computers interpreting things in ways that counterfeit humans or computers generating things that counterfeit humans needs to be banned for government use.

I’m not talking about banning the steam shovel but systems where it becomes difficult to determine whether or not a human did it.

I think that's probably far too broad. E.g. I don't have a problem with the IRS using computers to calculate how much people owe in taxes based on the info they collect. The number of people it would take to do that manually might be unreasonable. W-2 info has to be to the IRS by Jan 31st, taxes are due April 15th, that's 51 days to generate a couple hundred million tax return numbers.

Federal payroll is something else that would probably take an unreasonable number of people to manage manually.

In the sci-fi universe being quoted, they used drug-enhanced humans for all calculation after narrowly averting an AI based catastrophe. Honestly, I'm finding it pretty prescient stuff for 1965 myself.

If taxes can't be done in paper with basic math, then it's too complicated.

Automating it just makes everyone unknowing victims to the tax corruption congress persists in.

what part of taxes can't be done in paper and basic math? Sure there's possibly 100s or 1000s or tens of 10000s papers to read and basic math to do but haven't personally run into anything other than addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division doing taxes

I agree USA taxes are ridiculously over complicated and there's tons of tax corruption

You answered it yourself. 100s of pages isn't sensible. 1 page, 5-10 variables, done.

Anything more is just congress trying to create retirement plans for themselves via lobbyist and special interests.

> E.g. I don't have a problem with the IRS using computers to calculate how much people owe in taxes

Or the census, which was an early adopter of computers (give or take your definition of a computer), because not doing so was taking almost the full 10 years between censuses.

https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/ta...

Its a quote from Dune. IDK if OP is being serious or not. Basically AI similar to human intelligence has been banned, and hyper-intelligent humans called "Mentats" have largely replaced computers, and help navigate ships through space, as well as complete complex math and probability problems. They are also often used as advisors.

>and help navigate ships through space

the spacing guild handles ships, they do train their minds, but not in the same way as mentats. They use spice melange's prescient powers to navigate more than maths.

Define reasonable. In practice, the government defines it based on salary and budget feasiblity, rather than difficulty.

I'm not concerned about facial ID getting my face wrong, as in a human couldn't be hired to do the same, I'm concerned about it costing fractions of a penny and the government doing it everywhere all the time.

There should be quantitative restrictions on minor rights violations that become major rights violations, even if they're sufficiently minor to be reasonable when done once by a human being in a way that costs the government 10,000 times more than having it done by a computer.

In 20xx, aggreagating billion points of data is illegal due to reasonable number of humans couldn’t do it.

We’ll need Mentats

Lets figure out how to make mentats and ban robots. That way we can expand the human mind like crazy and see how far we can take our own mental abilities

Get out of my mind, Kwisatz Haderach

> I'd rather it rely only on the civil rights issues associated with it working and not tie it to misidentifying minorities.

I’m trying to to understand your point but I’m struggling to understand whether you understand your point.

Their point is a good one. If the basis for the legislation is merely the shortcomings of the existing technology, then the legislation will be deemed obsolete once the technology improves.

That would be a reasonable point if there was compelling evidence that technology at this scale ever overcame these biases. It never does. It’s just an empty promise of fealty to technology and advancement. The reality is that more technology continues to reinforce the same power structures.

This is type of bias is relatively easy to overcome, by probably adding extra layers to the net and improving training data.

All the more reason to use reasoning that can't be defeated so easily.

You're arguing that the tech will always be discriminatory and the original comment is suggesting a method that would also work positively for what you are arguing.

Further, if you want people to get on board, you need to include everyone. When you make it about a specific characteristic of person, you lose support.

> It would also require police departments and agencies to purge databases of photos of children who were subsequently released without charge, whose charges were dismissed or were acquitted.

Feeling weird about the notion that law enforcement keeps photos of children who have had run-ins with the law but ultimately weren't convicted of any crime. Why would they even need to keep such photographs? Data retention == legal liability.

You assume police experience anything that can be called legal liability. There is rarely any consequence for abuse of power by police, because for the most part the people tasked with investigating any such abuses are either police or people who have a vested interest in keeping police happy.

So they keep any data they can and hide any data that makes them look bad. It's always useful to them to point out the kid they just shot might have stolen a pack of gum in the past.

This is the correct take here. Law enforcement, at least in the United States, often operates above the law, particular at the federal level.

Pass all the laws you want, but they'll continue getting away with abuses of power.

In my experience I'd say particularly at the local level since there's usually much less oversight or training and more gun-ho attitude.

More true at the local level than the Federal.

It very much can be. The sheriff in the county I grew up in used to search people's property without a warrant and they weren't home. I remember my buddy's dad when I was a teen was growing a little marijuana deep in his cornfield. Buddy and I were home, his parents gone. Sheriff knocks on the door with the plants at his feet to tell us to tell his dad that he better not catch him growing anymore. I also remember others having similar experiences with them coming home to the sheriff looking through their sheds for a stolen ATV. No warrant, no nothing. And nobody ever did anything about him because he was too well connected with town leadership and county leadership. Small and rural areas can be heavily screwed up because the sheriff and many of the county commissioners or city councilmen or other people in local governance all went to highschool together. Nothing like an old good ol' boys network.

The thing about that is at least you have the feds to report to. If you have enough people file complaints with the FBI and DOJ, they should end up looking into it. Usually the local guys don't have connections that deep.

On the other side, if it's just one or two complaints, then they won't do anything.

The sheriff definitely had the right to search the farm field, and possibly had the right to search in sheds without a warrant. I’m not a lawyer, but there is a Supreme Court case that defines what is and isn’t protected on someone’s property, the result of the case is the open fields doctrine. [0] Open fields are not protected by the 4th amendment, the shed may or may not have been protected.

This is related to the common law concept of ‘curtilage’. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hester_v._United_States

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtilage

It also sounds like the sherrif chose NOT to prosecute, and tried to handle the matter informally - I think this is just good policing unless it's only certain social or ethnic groups that get the benefit of the doubt in these kind of circumstances

Absolutely, most likely nobody can make a call on corruption % but the FBI seems to make arrests in the low 10s of thousands / year max at the highest[0] while the total number of arrests tends to be ~10M minimum in a normal year

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/745456/number-of-fbi-arr... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191261/number-of-arrests...

Here’s a story about the FBI stealing $80 million after lying to a judge:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve...

Here is one anecdote in contradiction? ok

(fair enough, since it's not like I provided any support either lol)

The town I grew up (about 10k people, in the midwest) had exactly one bike cop. I don't recall his real name, but everybody called him Lurch. The story was that when he was new, he spent a day speed trapping outside the police station, and giving other cops speeding tickets. They took away his squad car, and he was a bike cop forever after. I'm not sure what he did when there were three feet of snow on the ground.

Anyway, when I heard that story, it was a joke about how dumb Lurch was. As a grown up, this is a story about how local law enforcement is above the law, and how they punished an officer who challenged that.

People around the NYC area openly drive around with fake badges mounted on their windshield to indicate they know a cop and should get preferable treatment. And cop unions openly advertise handing out cop union support stickers in exchange for donation.

Very in your face corruption.

I know a career opiate addict who has about a dozen of those stickers on their car, many on top of each other. Like they truly believe each sticker reduces their chance of not looking like a total suck up

I mean nobody is expected to investigate their own group. That is why things like judges/courts, prosecutors, civil/town/city observation groups and federal agencies are there.

The problem arises when you have cases like: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/lawsuit-claims-loveland... (series of false DUI arrest to bring in cash) and the whole police department is not raided on the spot.

Courts just drop cases because: a) qualified immunity and b) an "allergy" to having the D.A. and other agencies step in and do the investigation.

P.S. Hold your D.A. accountable in your area when you hear things like that. It is more important in the long run to have a few less street criminals behind bars and more corrupt "apples" in.

Edit: typo

> I mean nobody is expected to investigate their own group. That is why things like judges/courts, prosecutors, civil/town/city observation groups and federal agencies are there.

Maybe we need a setup where local cops are investigated by the FBI, the FBI and CIA are investigated by DoD's Navy NCIS or Army CID, DoD is investigated by Homeland Security or Treasury, and Homeland Security is investigated by local cops. It's hard to collude around that big a loop.

Right. State cops can investigates local cops, etc.

> It's hard to collude around that big a loop.

Yeah, but I don't know that collusion is the min mechanism. I think it's more that cops just feel a lot of solidarity with other cops.

If incentives are strong enough that a cop can make a career by putting away a lot of "dirty cops", that usually is what works. I think we're far from there though.

It’s far from perfect, but this is probably the best proposal I’ve ever heard except the federal agencies would need to be more broken up.

> particular at the federal level.

I'm not sure that's accurate. State and local have shining examples.

Why does any organization keep 90% of the data that they have. It's all a liability. Either they are required to keep it by law, or they are making money selling it or mining it for others.

"Hey boss! I just had a great idea to glean new metrics from all of that data we've been hoarding. We can't get it unless we go back to the raw data. Is it still available?"

"Of course it is. This is exactly why we keep it around."

My local PD growing up would have kids in for field trips and one of the 'activities' was getting fingerprinted.

There's a pretty big difference between doing an FBI fingerprint card to show kids the process and send home vs. submitting that card to a database.

With the advent of live scan, that distinction may have disappeared, though.

See also: The boy scout fingerprinting merit badge, which local police departments are naturally happy to assist with.

The original requirements from 1938 included "Obtain the fingerprints of 5 persons and present evidence that these fingerprints, together with complete descriptive data, have been accepted for the civil identification file."

https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2021/08/09/merit-badge-his...

For my age demographic, the US went through a kidnapping moral panic when I was young and that's why people let their kids get mass-fingerprinted. It was very "We must do something. This is something, therefore let's do it" thinking.

As boy scouts, we set up a booth at the local Dairy Queen to get fingerprints for kids if their parents wanted it. A lot of parents did indeed want it. Can't remember exactly what year it was, but early/mid 80s sounds about right.

If those parents were the same age but in today's world, I wonder how many of them would still be so willing to do it. Back then, the concept of mass surveilence and all of the crap we deal with daily today was just not even an idea people would have had. Then again, most people today still are ignorant, so maybe the numbers wouldn't change at all?

It would be interesting to know the statistics on how many missing children have been identified by the fingerprints they filed with the local PD over the decades.

And how many times this data was used for other purposes by the PD

I've been finger printed a few times. More and more jobs require it - SEC, security work, schools, etc. Some states require it for the exercise of specific rights. It seems likely that at least 50% of people have been fingerprinted by the age of 30, likely higher.

This was my first thought when I heard (after the fact) that the police visited my kids daycare. I was livid with the director, but it looks like the cops in my Bay Area town are a little more restrained

Wait til you find out the widespread practice of getting a baby's footprint on the birth certificate! Maybe those fade or change more with time, I don't actually know.

Palo Alto local police definitely do this; also require fingerprinting/recording (at least) of any new massage parlor employees, among other things

WHAT. For what purpose? I mean, I know the real reason is prostitution but what’s the justification they use? This is so insane I don’t even want to believe it’s true.

It's probably not the fingerprinting you're thinking of.

More likely it's the Live Scan system, which is a thorough background check that touches with DOJ and others, etc. It does include finger/palm scanning but also much more.

Think of it like a very thorough background check.

If you have a criminal background, ever been in trouble, or have known criminal associates, it'll turn up on the Live Scan.

So yes, the real reason is probably anti-prostitution and anti-sex trafficking - and they probably don't hide that fact I would imagine.

I wouldn't be surprised if they save the Live Scan.

Of course they do. That's part of the Live Scan system. It's a background profile of sorts. Teachers, field trip chaperones, certain licensees and many more folks have to get one done.

My first guess would be an attempt against human trafficking.

"Data retention == legal liability"

The government has ensured to give itself very little liability.

> The use of facial recognition has grown in recent years, despite fears that the technology is flawed, disproportionately misidentifies people of color (which has led to wrongful arrests) and harms civil liberties, but is still deployed against protesters, for investigating minor crimes and used to justify arrests of individuals from a single face match.

I feel like I'm the only peron where who doesn't see a problem with Police having access to facial recognition. Its not like anything used right now is accurate, eg eyewitnesses. If it really is unreliable it shouldn't be used as a sole basis to arrest people, I'd expect a civil suit if that really happened. However just because some police mis-used it doesn't mean it should be banned.

You’re not the only person who thinks this. It’s just a tool, people who think police shouldn’t properly use a useful tool are morons.

I agree.. I think the length of the time the data is stored and who has access to it and whether that access is audited or not are the important factors to legislate on.

If it can still be useful while protecting the rights of the citizens, then why should the police not use it? If it can't be useful with these protections in place, then why would the police spend money on it?

The problem here is the definition of "proper", and many people use a very broad definition of it where if a police officer is doing a thing it can't possibly be improper. This is often referred to as "qualified immunity"

> people who think police shouldn’t properly use a useful tool are morons

I agree, I think police should *properly* use their useful tools, but I don't trust them to use nearly any tool properly, so I would prefer they have a limited set of tools that still get the job done if they apply themselves but don't allow massive scales of mis-use. Unfortunately, cops are lazy and want to pick the lowest hanging fruit, like pulling over shitty looking cars and such.

The unstated premise in this comment seems to be that the police will use tools properly. That's going to need a lot of justification.

The problem with technology is it allows abuse on scale. Yes, there can be racist cops. But if you buy in technology that's racist, suddenly every cop is using a racist profiling system. In a similar way, yes, eye witnesses can be mistaken, but we know that, it's far more difficult to argue "oh this billion dollar AI machine is mistaken, oh actually they've threatened to sue me no they aren't".

>If it really is unreliable it shouldn't be used as a sole basis to arrest people,

It seems like you do get it.

> I'd expect a civil suit if that really happened.

That's not how the law works in the US. Just spend some time reading up on sovereign immunity. The likelihood of any police officer being punished for wrong-dooring is 0.

Between devices like stringrays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker), police drones, license plate scanners in police cars, RFID tags associated with cars, toll stations, and the pervasive "divine eye," (ubiquitous cameras) that can be seen in a large number of intersections, I feel like this bill is as disingenuous as the bills designed to regulate congress person's stock trades.

Why do you need facial recognition when you have access to stingrays or IMEI and telco side geolocation info?

Why is the law explicitly banning facial recognition and not addressing the philosophical underpinnings of why facial recognition in the hands of law enforcement is bad?

All this will do is open an industry for private camera and facial recognition private enterprise to sell data to police forces.

Building owners can work with the company to mount hardware that feeds into the database and compares faces to public records and other observations. This data is sold to police forces and governments and really anyone that would like the information. 1a protects this.

So at least democrats are all about letting the free market do it.

Open? That's the state of the world. It has been for a couple years, now. Police don't have their own tech, they just have subscriptions to clearview.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/faci...

Worded correctly you can legally prevent police from accessing certain data even though 3rd parties. 1a doesn’t mean shit when it comes so what’s admissible in court. The law is about what police are allowed to hear not what people are allowed to say.

Why do you not want justice served for those that commit crimes?

We both know the police will be capable of solving crimes without the use of facial recognition, if they put in the effort.

I am not at all in favor of this. If the police can legally obtain information, they should be allowed to use it.

IMO the right fix is at the other end: severely restrict the use of facial recognition for everyone. I don’t want corporations to have powers exceeding that of the police, thank you very much.

I think it's a bit silly to target face recognition. The data's already there, so to say "yeah you can have all this video footage, and you can review the footage all you want, you just aren't allowed to use a computer to analyze it" is dumb. To the extent that further privacy protections are needed they should be enforced at the point of data collection/retention, not at the point of analysis.

It costs a lot of hours to watch cctv footage. Tracking everyone who ever is on cctv footage without face/gait/whatever recognition is impossible.

We do want the police to do their jobs. We don't want them to be an intelligence apparatus.

If you outlaw facial recognition, only outlaws will recognize faces. Consider how gun control laws have some efficacy because not everyone is a skilled gunsmith with machining equipment. Someone with a mill/lathe in their garage can still make them. Software allows even unskilled people to do the thing. This can be performed today with off-the-shelf, existing hatdware and open-source software. Attempting to outlaw its use is about like trying to close Pandora's box. The horses are already out of the barn on this one...

On the other hand, if you outlaw the collection, retention, and sale, transfer, or other trafficking in information derived from large scale face recognition, then the availability of the information will decrease radically. People deploy or obtain access to large scale privacy-invading data sets because they can legally monetize it. If it becomes illegal to collect the data and illegal to be on either side of a transaction, then the information becomes a liability instead of an asset. And outlaws don’t have enormous fleets of cameras.

Except you don't have access to the datases of identities as an individual (without paying a lot). That's the value. Who cares if someone runs facial recognition if they don't have a database to tie it to your PII. It's also a big difference based on what powers the user legally has (police vs individual).

Police just buy this technology from corporations right now. Presumably in practice this bill would be interpreted as "you can't search clearview.ai's website unless you have a warrant"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/faci...

This doesn't make sense to me. What's a corporation going to do? Try to sell you something? So what? Oh no! Facebook is showing me overly-targeted advertisements!

The government can put you in jail or shoot you. That's who we need to be worried about.

The gov't loves it that all of the (mainstream) privacy concern is about corporations, while honestly that's such a small issue in the grand scheme.

I would love to see more bills where Democrats provide more police funding but tie it to accountability reforms like this one. Seems like a winning move.

Except police have more than enough funding.

Police are not funded by Congress...

Not directly, but there's lots of federal funding that ends up in police budgets.

That is for the state, and local municipalities to decide - not congress.

Policing is best done at the local level. The police force needs to be local, and beholden to locals. It would be a very perverse system to have a "federalized" police force in every town and city...

>That is for the state, and local municipalities to decide - not congress.

Congress can attach strings, just like they do to tons of other things.

>Policing is best done at the local level. The police force needs to be local, and beholden to locals. It would be a very perverse system to have a "federalized" police force in every town and city...

I don't think you can just take that as a given. Most countries in the world have a federalized/unified police force, the Anglosphere are the weird ones here. But of course there is the RCMP as a counterexample.

Most countries in the world are not the size of the US (both in population, territory and diversity of culture/norms/expectations). And most countries in the world are very clearly examples of how not to do policing...

they could be though...

Why would you want your local police force beholden to the federal government instead of the local populace that they serve?

Many reasons. Maybe I'm a black person in the south who believes my local government is controlled by racists. Maybe I believe the incentives for the prosecutors who are supposed to police the police are completely out of whack because prosecutors rely on police work to do their job. Maybe I just think the police are completely unaccountable and am ready to see a new political strategy regarding policing to be tried.

Either way, federal funding doesn't eliminate local funding, it would just be in addition to if the police agree to some rules.

The problems you describe would only be made worse by moving funding to a centralized, far away and detached federal entity. Accountability - gone. Locality - gone. Trust - gone.

We already have a centralized federalized police force - the FBI. Look what political shenanigan's they have become embroiled in lately. Who's interest are they serving currently? Who are they accountable to? What can be done about systemic issues in this system? Nothing and no-one...

> Maybe I'm a black person in the south who believes my local government is controlled by racists

This is vastly overplayed in modern times, despite what sensationalists would have you believe, but in this alternate reality nothing forbids the federal government from being filled with and controlled by racists either...

Regardless, the solution is very clearly to change the local government, not side-step it for a government that's hundreds or thousands of miles away and unaware of local issues that might be important to residents. Oh how history repeats itself... the US wouldn't be a country today if we hadn't already learned this painful lesson.

More federal government is rarely if ever the solution folks. Your local government already has the power and ability to do all the things it's citizens desire.

I guess I just disagree with your characterization of pretty much everything you said.

The FBI - obviously not perfect, but the political shenanigans seem overblown to me. The mar-a-lago thing was 1. probably justified although I'll reserve judgment until the confiscated files are revealed, and 2. ordered by the attorney general, not the FBI. Based on the news I have read the FBI is far, far, far more accountable than my local police department which is utterly unaccountable because any politician who crosses their union is instantly replaced.

> the solution is very clearly to change the local government

Much easier said than done. Pretty much everyone in my city has nothing but negative experience with the police, but nothing can be done because every politician is scared shitless of them. We elect "police reformer" after "police reformer" and they quickly change their tune once they realize doing anything cops dislike effectively instantly means laws are no longer enforced. We're being held hostage, and there is no local solution.

It seems much more likely the perspective being portrayed here is not the reality to the elected officials. Perhaps there is more to the story than what joe-random citizen sees or understands. I highly doubt elected officials are actually "scared" of the police, despite whatever campaign contributions the local union chapter can muster. There are a lot of political forces at play, including the desire for re-election.

Mar-a-lago is just the latest of a string of political shenanigans the FBI has been involved in. But we can also look at other federal law enforcement agencies for clear examples of why we do not want this. ATF, Secret Service, CBP, ICE and more have all become embroiled in political turmoil in the last decade.

Regardless, the problems you voice here are not solved by a federal police force nor federal funding. The federal government is not immune to corruption and bad actors - and are far far more difficult to hold accountable for bad decisions and actions. The federal government doesn't understand nor care about the problems of some po-dunk random town.

You need local folks that live in your town to be the local law enforcement. It's that simple. It should be noted currently a lot of your town or city police don't actually live where they work, and therefore might be inclined to care less about the local community. Moving the agency and incentives further away only will exacerbate this situation.

You want more accountability? Then have your neighbor be the enforcer, not some hired gun from out of town.

My police department literally operated torture facilities for over a decade. People were being tortured by their own police department. They paid $67 million settlement money last year alone, and that's been about the average over the last decade. Yes, to an extent all government is bad, but saying that police departments that for all intents and purposes are self-regulating are more accountable than federal agencies just seems bonkers to me. Local regulation may be able to hold individuals accountable, but can never create systematic change because the inertia is just far too strong to overcome.

The only thing that has ever created some amount of change is a federal consent decree that the department is now forced to follow (although they have been to court fighting it many times)

How would any of this change at the federal level?

The federal government doesn't solve local problems. They can barely solve national problems these days...

People want to look towards some higher power for solutions. No such thing exists here. The solution is already in front of you.

If your local politicians don't change anything, then it really means the constituency doesn't actually want it to change. Just because you and your circle disagree doesn't mean everyone does. Politicians like to remain in office... and it's not police unions that submit ballots...

Lastly, your perspective might be very different if you happen to live in a major city. However, this policy would not be isolated to major cities... it would also impact small towns all across America - we need to remember NY, SF, LA, SEA are not the only places folks live. For majority of this nation that does not live in this mega-cities, losing locality would be a huge step backwards.

I don’t think we disagree on much. You’re probably right that my perspective is completely skewed by living in a major city. I will say though that reason local politicians don’t change anything, beyond losing pro police votes, is that the police literally engage in work stoppage as soon as anyone starts talking about reform, and then hands are tied.

I think most folks actually agree on more than they would assume - today's media thrives by making it appear we're much more divided than reality.

> is that the police literally engage in work stoppage as soon as anyone starts talking about reform

I think this might be related to the recent "defund the police" movements and other similarly misguided attempts at reform. Making it more difficult or dangerous to do the work will absolutely result in stoppages, or at least the appearance of stoppages.

What gets left out of these conversations is the police's opinion. Why not engage with police and find solutions for making our communities better and safer? I think many would be surprised to find out the police actually do care majority of the time. Some folks spend an entire career in law enforcement, and some even obtain advanced degrees (masters and higher) on enforcement policies and actions - yet we do not involve them in these conversations at all, almost as-if us simpletons know best how to do their job (hint, we don't). Our ideas and their ideas should be discussed and consensus reached.

> What gets left out of these conversations is the police's opinion.

The problem with this is the union has elected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Catanzara to be their president. His history includes countless complaints, domestic abuse, and a relationship he started with a student at the school he was supposed to be protecting. Timeline of wrongdoing https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/hio06z/chicago_fra.... It's just hard for people to take police demands seriously when they choose to elect someone that basically everyone in the city believes is evil. I find it hard to believe politicians aren't attempting to find common ground on changes that can be made, but every time the mayor releases a list of reforms they'd like to see the only response is "fuck off or we stop arresting people" and then they follow through if push comes to shove.

I think that is my point though. The mayor just putting out a list of reforms they want doesn't actually mean they are good reforms. Particularly when the proposition follows a public incident.

The mayor is a politician that often seeks cheap PR (like many or most politicians) and will say things that are absurd but sound good. A lot of things sound good until you iron out the details, as the "defund the police" movement found out.

I do not know the specifics of what you talk about regarding proposed reforms, but I would be shocked if the mayor of Chicago sat down with police captains and chiefs and worked together to propose and implement solid reforms. If they had, they would by definition have police backing for the reforms. The opposite is what almost certainly happened...

Think about it - what if your local mayor starting yammering on about how your industry does their job wrong and here's how it's going to get fixed - all without including anyone from your industry for input. I think the reaction would be quite similar...

I promise you the folks working at your police department do not wake up in the morning eager to harm their community.

Afaik, police opinion being treated as most important thing is how things got where they are. They are unaccountable, effectively speaking.

Who polices the police?

Ask the parents of Uvalde who actually helped them when they most needed it. Was it the local police force, or the federal CBP?

Neither - it was a random dude acting in an un-official capacity.

Regardless, one isolated example is not evidence of anything. Everyone agrees something very wrong happened in Uvalde.

> one isolated example

Is it though?

Who defeated the first iteration of the KKK? It wasn't local sheriffs, it was the feds.

Who brought charges against Ahmaud Arbery's killers? The local PD cleared those lynchers. It needed the Georgia state authorities' involvement.

Local police authorities can be of highly variable quality, and they don't have as much oversight as the higher levels of law enforcement. I'm not inclined to trust in them more just because they're "local". Their closeness often leads to massive conflicts of interest. Trust has to be earned.

> Police are not funded by Congress...

Yes, they are; out of very roughly $125 billion annually in funding for state and local police, about $20 billion comes from the feds through DOJ programs that support them, and some comes through other federal funding streams.

This is stretching the truth I think. The feds don't just hand out money to your local town's police and buy them things. The local government applies for grants, funds and special programs and then gives it to the police. Which is very different.

It might get muddy when an elected official runs the law enforcement office (such as with elected county sheriffs, etc.), but that is still the local government that is doing the requesting.

American police are funded locally, often with large budgets, and would happily turn away that extra federal funding and associated accountability. Even more, lots and lots of conservative politicians and talking heads would make a point about how they fought off "big government" and "democrat" control of their local police departments, and you'd be hard pressed to convince people not already pissed at their local PD that such a situation is a bad one.

but, since covid times, many small towns are legitimately in financial distress.. especially around pension commitments.. its a slow-moving train wreck

If they had to turn away things like surplus military gear and federal dollars for training in military tactics because they weren't willing to take the accountability measures -- that'd be progress.

Police really rarely needs military surplus gear anyway. Neither do they need training in the military tactics, unless they want to treat policing streets as a battlefield, which is very concerning if they do.

Oh, they do, pretty widely, and it is concerning.

https://theintercept.com/2014/08/14/militarization-u-s-polic...

To add on. Even outside the scope of funding. There is an interesting trend in local politicians elected to city council, mayor, etc and having backing of the police union. Any serious action that would cause a culture change that is unwanted by the police could result in loosing the backing of the police union, hence, a good chance of loosing an election. So change on the local level is unlikely to happen.

It is not a recent trend, it is simply a consequence of sufficient voters not able or willing to do sufficient due diligence and voting in the election.

100% of the cops and their family and friends will be voting for the politician that favors them. Will sufficient local voters not associated with cops also vote? Probably not.

Few people want to go to work their jobs, raise their kid, and then also dig into the city budget to find out which politician is proposing increasing retirement benefits for cops that will cause massive increases in spending 30 years down the road.

In many ways, our “democracy” relies on a certain amount of people doing the “right thing”, even though they could get away with worse. Too many people try to get away with stuff, and it will start to unravel.

I would not cede funding of local police agencies to the federal government (ie, the next Trump or J. Edgar).

A winning move if you want to create a police state papered with guidance that can be either ignored without consequence or repealed in days.

Another win would be promoting/funding resources for mental health crises. There are too many reports of unstable people being killed by the police when their families call in for help.

Cops should be dealing with bad guys, not sick people.

Are we "funding police" or are we "funding enforcement?" And should all enforcement funding be viewed through the lens of political reform? Why is that necessarily a winning move?

The one-pager [1] ends with some points about auditing, but when I search for "audit" int the full-text [2], I'm wanting more details. It refers to GAO audits, and ensuring that arrest photographs are not stored, but I would think the purpose of auditing is a more general and quantitative assessment of whether the system is working as intended, such as:

- measurements of accuracy rates, using new photos of people known to be in database, and people known to not be in database, and measurements of how accuracy is related to race.

- records of who is accessing the database, in the context of which investigation. The one pager outlines things you can't do, but within whatever the allowed uses are, there may be fishy harvesting things going on, and how will you notice that?

- facial-recognition technology is only as good as its software interface, and how will the development and versioning of that software be audited? what will prohibit vendors from including secret APIs what law-enforcement can use in a way that side-steps auditing?

[1] https://lieu.house.gov/sites/lieu.house.gov/files/FRT%20One%...

[2] https://lieu.house.gov/sites/lieu.house.gov/files/Lieu%20FRT...

The sad thing is that our constitutional right to privacy is nowhere near as broad as our modern understanding, and that's exactly why the Supreme Court was able to get away with the crap it did when they ruled against the precedent Roe v Wade.

Not only should we have an amendment that ensures that we have a reasonable right to privacy, but it should include a right to privacy from the government even if the data collected is by a third party.

Good. We need to dismantle the tools that can be used to oppress the masses.

Do you have evidence that this tool is used to oppress masses in the US?

The qualification was "can be", not "is". I think it's pretty self-evident that it can be.

It is not. We have a great judicial system and technology has always favored innocent to prove their innocence rather than it's absence.

More Technology => More Evidence => More chance of acquittal of the innocent.

Technology also helps deter and catch crime

It's really sad that these psuedo-privacy and soft-on-crime policies are destroying America far greater than imaginary oppression dreamed up by privileged white sitting comfortably in their homes with cushy jobs.

> We have a great judicial system and technology has always favored innocent to prove their innocence rather than it's absence.

None of this has been true for a very long time. Wrongly accused almost always take a plea deal these days. If you don't have money for a fancy lawyer, you're almost certainly taking a plea deal whether you did it or not.

This is spoken like someone who has never had any dealings with police or the legal system.

All that said, I don't know what any of that has to do with my original comment. OP said

> We need to dismantle the tools that can be used to oppress the masses

and you replied

> Do you have evidence that this tool is used to oppress masses in the US?

can be was the original qualifier. Is doesn't matter. Can be matters. You don't give a baby a loaded gun and then say "but is it currently shooting you?".

There's no logical argument that a government could not possibly under any circumstance be physically capable of misusing this, so "It is not" is false.

Do you accept that facial recognition can be used to oppress the masses in the US?

Again where is the evidence? Except manufactured imaginary persecution by HNers?

Empirical evidence isn't necessary for politicians to make decisions. This has been true since the time of the Greeks and applies to every politician in every party, without exception.

Donatj is on point. I'm wary of government power and want to destroy tools that can be used to oppress people.

A lot of the things that came with the Patriot act have been used predominantly to arrest drug dealers.

You mean people breaking the law were arrested and the crime rate of US was rapidly declining?

Sure, we can't have that, right? What we want is smash-and-grab, locked-down-shops, rampant crime.

But hey most of the HNers are sitting at their comfortable suburban home with cushy jobs. None of this affects them, only imaginary persecution of them

But police (well, anyone, really) can still take a photo of protestors and examine it manually, right?

The technology is just a tool that makes it easier, but in principle changes nothing.

I guess my point is that there isn't any fundamental change here, we have just made things easier. Maybe before, compiling facial databases if everyine was just impractical, and now it's easy.

On a scarier note: anyone can do this. You can tell the police to pinky-promise they wont use it, but nothing stops me or you or a corporation from taking photos and identifying the people on them.

The difference is scale is a difference in kind though.

The thing I'm worried about is parallel construction.

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

It would surprise me if this wasn’t written in such a way it was 100% certain never to pass. There isn’t a lot of politicians that don’t fall for the ‘but what about the turrrists! Think about the children! But drugs!’ arguments made by law enforcement stooges when their power is in danger of being curtailed.

Is it just me. Or did I just read some HN post of the oposite. Like use it to deanonymize people?

Target different people

- "Peaceful" protestors

- "Violent" "anonymous" cyberstalker

Federal legislation on pretty much any "hot button" political topic is practically guaranteed to not pass on the federal level these days. And anything having to do with regulating police is one of such topics. This isn't going anywhere.

The FBI will have this power in spades though. They also have a 98% conviction rate.

I think the federal government might be worried that local police could get too good at their jobs thanks to technology and that would create a state/federal power imbalance.

Who needs face recognition when we're all carrying around fingerprintable electronic devices anyway. Well, I suppose Congress has no shortage of red herrings to energize their base and cause public debate.

And the story above this one on HN

“US government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers”

This isn’t about individual liberties, it’s about centralizing enforcement at the federal level, where federal politicians can control it.

Haven't read but I'm gonna guess they don't consider federal law enforcement "police".

How about license plate scanners too? And Civil forfeiture?

What limitation would you want for license plate scanners? I know in my area they've been the key to solving half a dozen murders in the last year or two since they've been introduced.

The ends do not justify the means, ever. Repeat this ad infinum.

Okay, but that doesn't answer the question. Would you want a complete ban? Privacy is a pretty nebulous concept. You obviously have to draw the line between privacy and security somewhere.

You can say the ends don't ever matter, but generally things are a balancing act. Bodycams obviously reduce people's privacy, but the accountability provided was considered to justify it. Metal detectors obviously reduce people's privacy, but people justify that by the ends too.

Typically in the US, we give up privacy rights to things done in public and not to things done in private unless if a judge agrees to a warrant.

It's already legal for police to send out an amber alert and have everyone look for a license plate. How is that practically any different than flagging it in a computer and having it alert you automatically when it's viewable in a public place?

One only has to read the constitution: Illegal search.

Finding a computer reading your license plate in public to be an "unreasonable search" is definitely not apparent from the Constitution or any mainstream interpretation of it.

License plates are publicly available IDs that are annoymous to most of the public usage.

Every single car should be tracked at all times. Car are killing machines. Killing or sending to hospital over a million people a year in the USA alone.

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