Microsoft bans U.S. police from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition
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>The Domain Awareness System is the largest digital surveillance system in the world
I wonder how it compares to China and if facial recognition tech is as pervasive in America as it is in China.
You introduce the surveillance as a way of mitigating extreme, rare occurrences, like terrorism.
You gradually make it common to use when solving major crimes, like murders.
Only then do you start tracking down traffic infractions.
Doctorow calls this the 'Shitty Technology Adoption Curve' https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/
I was on a jury for a court case where: the incident was caught by a bus camera, but the police waited 6 months to ask for footage, footage is deleted after 1 month and they know this. The shop across the road captured the incident on CCTV but the cop had "tech problems" trying to transfer the video file to his laptop - even then they didn't even bother to sign a document stating what they saw in the video.
CCTV and cops (at least in and around London) are just totally useless. And the gov is useless too, "fighting" crime rather than addressing what causes crimes.
Otherwise, it's not too bad a place to live for a travelling Kiwi, great launchpad into Europe, oh wait they fucked that up with Brexit, too.
So pick another country or just fill-in the required paperwork. Wetwipe.
I've lived in several countries at this point, and no, it's not just an administrative task of completing paperwork. Immigration is hard. Do it wrong, and you might find yourself in Rwanda, for example.
And maybe don't call people 'wetwipes' on HN? If you want to hurl insults, well: All the web is yours, except HN. Attempt no landing there.
When I was in Xinjiang there were like 5-10 cameras at every intersection. Surely NYC isn't at that level?
As a result the US has a higher crime rate than many other countries including China. If you don’t trust China’s numbers look at Singapore, which has a population density similar to NYC with an order of magnitude less crime. Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught, without question.
There's more to it than that. A sheisty will defeat a camera.
I live in WA and for the past 5+ years I've only ever presented my driver's license to TSA agents at the airport.
...unless getting carded at the store for buying beer counts?
Unless you’re buying everything with cash, your purchasing history will be connected to it, too. Where you drive (license plate scanning and data-sharing is widespread). Facial recognition in stores means paying cash might not even help (seen the ones that highlight your face on a monitor when you walk in the store?)
But we have to pretend we don’t have a national ID system any time it might be convenient to a person to have that.
I am guessing to you are referring to how multiple private organizations can just poll for my social security number and I cant do anything about it? Yeah...
All the bad shit, none of the good. We may as well just have a national ID, it’d be less-bad than what we have now and might provide a jumping off point for making it a lot less-bad.
What private industry surveillance is mandatory? FFS.
Of course South Koreans know better than American soldiers not to commit crimes in South Korea, because prison there is so awful. Unsurprisingly they have a much lower crime rate than America.
Statistically, the Norwegian system with "holiday prisons" works well, with very low recidivism rates for most types of crime.
And also it’s a police state where you get sentenced to death for drug smuggling and can be punished for doing drugs in another country while on holiday if you are a citizen, for example.
To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you visit for long enough you realise it’s just a super nice prison and it’s not very fun being with the other lags
The third paragraph claimed it was a prison but it did not say the safety came from it being a prison.
the third paragraph and first paragraph are not in conflict.
In the other hand calling it “Disneyland” probably oversells how fun Singapore is. It is a fairly boring place in my experience.
Two countries can be bad. It’s not a competition.
It's not an American style of life, but I'm sure it's attractive to a lot of people who simply aren't into drugs, partying, or living the high life.
...are we still having to go over this?
There are no such people. Everybody does drugs, unless you adopt a definition of "drug" which is designed specifically to accommodate this assertion, rather than apply in some useful way to reality. It's difficult to even create a definition of 'drug' which convincingly excludes survival necessities like water and oxygen, but remains otherwise consistent.
There are some drugs which are, for reasons varying from racism to capriciousness to an intemperant desire for greater cartel income, prohibited to varying degrees in various jurisdictions.
You can go to Singapore and consume sugar, coffee, nicotine, alcohol, and many other drugs while enjoying the tacit endorsement of your behavior by the local state apparatus. You can also consume cocaine, opioids, and plenty of other drugs so long as you pay black market rates and do so shielded by privilege so as not to run afoul of an investigation. You can even consume cannabis, though of course it is very difficult to smuggle, so you pay a higher premium.
If so, isn't that begging the question? If a person wants to go to a place where drugs are prohibited, and "drug" is defined as a substance which is prohibited, then doesn't every jurisdiction qualify?
If a person "simply isn't into drugs", with "drugs" defined by the local state, isn't that person just in favor of the state-prescribed diet? And it really has nothing to do with drugs?
If such a person goes from a place where drug X is prohibited to one where it is not, does their preference suddenly change?
One better: if a person goes from a place where drug X is prohibited to one where it is compulsory, do they suddenly fall in love with the drug?
Of course not. Because nobody's preferences work that way. Ergo, there is no actual real human who meets the critera, "simply isn't into drugs" upon close examination.
Sure, there may be people who are pro-prohibition, but I imagine nearly all of them are in a position to financially gain from it. In terms of outcomes, it's horrible policy, especially if a target is reduction of death and disease from drug use.
So why are they not considered drugs? Is it because of literally the comment you responded to?
Drugs aren't linked to violence unless you make laws to link them.
Like I said, I would not care if druggies were decent people who just wanted to get high sometimes. However, unfortunately that is not how it works in the reality. They are the worst kind of people and I have zero sympathy for them after all the shit I've seen them do.
One night went up to the bar on the roof (god damn the drinks were pricey) clearly ultra wealthy peeps up there, group of very wealthy looking Africans with a magnum of champagne openly smoking weed.
But being a selfish prick is a privilege, not a right. Why do you feel entitled to do shitty things that make your city a worse place for everyone?
Oh come on, your yardstick is completely ill-calibrated. Among polities that
- didn't exist as independent polities until post-WWII
- were not modernized/westernized/democratized until post-WWII (thereby excluding NZ)
you'd be hard-pressed to name one that you'd be rather born as a random citizen in. Perhaps another of the Asian tigers, like TW. Presumably you have in mind, as Gibson probably did, a country that has had a longer history of independent or democratic rule and economic development.
How many children were murdered (by guns or drugs) in school in Singapore last year?
Oh yes, I'm sure all of the Indians crammed into the back of a caged ute on their way to building sites have income equality. Saw loads of stuff like that there.
Or the fact that being gay is still illegal, didn't stop me "breaking the law" the second day I was there.
I put Singapore into the same category as Dubai; it's all a facade and all can be conveniently ignored with a veil of money.
Crime rate is a statistic for which a majority of countries provide numbers that are completely dissociated from reality.
You can, of course, take the numbers seriously, as if the statistics are being published in good faith. Unless you have some sort of independent oversight, however, that isn't beholden to or biased by the country being assessed, then taking those numbers seriously is probably a silly thing to do.
The US gets lots of independent verification and validation of crime statistics. They're frequently analyzed at local, state, and federal level by journalists, students, activists, authors, and government officials. At every level an official number is published, it gets challenged, so there are incentives keeping the politicians and bureaucrats honest. They get slammed when they get caught lying, and they get caught lying because the public and the media keep track of things and demand accountability.
Some stuff, like total officer involved shootings, dog shootings by officials, abuses of power, and things of that nature, don't get publicly disclosed much of the time, so there are gaps in what we know and what officials are required to disclose.
The US isn't perfect, but you can get pretty good numbers that actually correlate with reality. Even other western countries don't always have trustworthy reporting and accounting for government actions. The best you'll ever get is a glowing narrative.
It does not account for the 1000s of illegal small assaults that happen daily. Anyone spending time in NYC will eventually run into this.
But then you get the one person who says "I've never been mugged" or "I've never been punched" or a journalist vists for a day and says it's all fine.
Meanwhile there is a lot of stockholm syndrome of what QoL people put up with on a day to day basis.
Potential criminal suspects. Who needs civil liberties, anyway?
Regardless, how do you think crimes are investigated? Is it your theory that suspects must volunteer themselves before being investigated?
> "[...]Others, such as the Washington D.C. Metro Police, the Singapore Police Force, and the Brazilian National Police have purchased the DAS software from Microsoft, our software developer, and have used it to secure high-profile governmental and cultural sites, the 2014 World Cup, and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Microsoft has agreed to give New York City 30 percent of the revenue it derives from selling the software to other jurisdictions (Parascandola and Moore 2012);"
But "Parascandola and Moore 2012" refers to another article that doesn't say anything about existing uses outside of NYC. (Using Archive because the site has a Geoblock).
https://web.archive.org/web/20210812131624/https://www.nydai...
EDIT: Just removed the paragraph from Wikipedia.
I wonder what kind of person volunteers their camera for the surveillance apparatus.
I wouldn't be shocked if we also saw a similar move to ban hospitals, schools, etc. from using the standard enterprise license under the guise of "we need to provide you with oversight for your vulnerable populations", and then charging them a hefty surcharge on top of the standard enterprise rate.
"Responsible" AI is more profitable than standard AI - regardless of the nebulous nature of what "responsible" means.
> "Responsible" AI is more profitable than standard AI - regardless of the nebulous nature of what "responsible" means.
/s/regardless of/in part owing to
Just take a look at the countries that credulously adopted "democracy". They are not in a good shape and will probably never find itself out of the moving goal post that Western countries like to place on "lesser" countries.
America is addicted to these 3 things: Oil, authoritarian labour, drugs. It's law enforcement is not meant to police those addictions at all but rather to ensure its continued uninterrupted supply even if it means violating its own principles that made the country great (about 40+ years ago).
It's no wonder many Americans are yearning for past glory.
Some Microsoft employees have been calling for such limits for years [1, 2]
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-github-workers-prote... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-workers-asking-drop-p...
> Beginning in 2009, the NYPD, in partnership with Microsoft, built a powerful counterterrorism and policing tool called the Domain Awareness System (DAS). The DAS is a central platform used to aggregate data from internal and external closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV), license plate readers (LPRs), and environmental sensors, as well as 911 calls and other NYPD databases. The DAS uses an interactive dashboard interface to display real-time alerts whenever a 911 call is received or a sensor is triggered. The DAS also in- cludes mapping features that make it possible to survey and track targets. The DAS was originally built to support the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI) – a public-private partnership – but has since expanded to cover the entire city, giving NYPD personnel direct access to thousands of cameras owned and operated by private orga- nizations. Until the development of the mobility platform and the mobile DAS system described below, the full capabilities of DAS have only been available to the Counterterrorism Bureau and a few other specially trained officers on desktop computers. As the NYPD upgrades its network, access to all DAS capabilities and resources will be expanded to all NYPD’s commands.
https://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/POA/pdf/Technology.p...
Hm... to my eye, this just seems to be a great spin on essentially pushing cops or their vendors to sign (more expensive, I imagine) independent service contracts under the guise of oversight. Their principles seem to be as genuine as they were in their plea to the US government to cede control of LLMs, generally, to the big corporate players "for safety."
> Insane to me that people ignore that.
Yeah for sure, but I don't think this is a super representative crowd, though. People uncritically frolicking through all of these developments with AI-enhanced rose-colored-glasses glued to their faces are over-represented in the SV universe. I know a lot of non-tech-focused folks that are casting a very wary eye towards our impending incredible AI-powered corporate utopia. The only similarly optimistic people I know outside of tech are the devastatingly credulous fellows still trying to figure out how to recoup money on all of the NFTs they bought, and they seem to be much better at generating headlines than societal changes. But maybe I'm the one wearing the rose-colored glasses, here.
Feels like they're just protecting their ass while keeping overselling their product.
Not that law enforcement should use AI irresponsibly and without boundaries, but I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a company to make that kind of call.
Personally, I think companies above a certain size should not be able to deny customers because they are effectively like public agencies or utility services due to their size. Banks, big tech, large social media platforms should be regulated like utilities in my opinion.
It’s part of an infrastructure as a service platform, which is why I view it as utility. But I also am saying we need to broaden what we call a utility for the modern world. Not having access to large platforms (like social media) or centralized services (banking) or large companies (which have lots of market share and are one of a few options) is very damaging. What are your thoughts on that?
> and they're not banning police on political or moral grounds.
How do you know this? This seems like it would almost certainly be the result of pressure from political groups.
They haven't securely broadened it to the internet or mobile phone service, and you want them to broaden it to individual privately-produced software packages. So the police can't be refused as a customer.
It's not like I can get electricity from another provider if there is literally only one in my area. And what they're providing (water, sewage, electricity) is deemed essential.
Even with banks, if one bank rejects me, I can (hypothetically) go to another one down the street.
Another angle is network effects - social media companies face reduced competition due to this and so they too should be regulated above a certain size since there isn’t enough competition or choice there, because the value of access to those particular platforms is very high due to their size.
> Even with banks, if one bank rejects me, I can (hypothetically) go to another one down the street.
What if they all reject you though? For example what if all banks decide they are better off debanking someone to stay in the good side of politicians who might punish them otherwise (like via regulation)? Some of these services are fundamental and should be forced to provide service no matter what.
But remember why common carrier status exists. Imagine I rob a stagecoach and lie low until the next day, when I catch a train to the next town over.
Is the train engineer my accomplice in the robbery? Or my accessory after the fact? Is the train company?
He and it might be, except that the train company “holds itself out” as a transporter of goods and services open to all. In exchange, the law grants the company that holds itself out as a carrier for all the freedom not to worry about whether carriage is a criminal act for the customer.
But without holding one’s self out as a carrier for all, there is no common carrier status. You cannot hold out a company as sufficiently large; they must hold themselves out as wanting this status.
When I see people clamor for social media platforms, I get doubly confused, because not only have these companies never held themselves out as common carriers, they would take nothing they do not already have (under 230) from doing so.
No, even without common carrier status. Being an accessory to a crime is much more narrow than "unknowingly conveyed a criminal during routine operation of a transportation company".
That broad of an interpretation makes everything being an accessory to the crime. The federal government created and backs the bills the thief stole, so they helped. The city built the roads they used, so they help. Old Mister McCollem down the lane stopped walking so the thief didn't run them over, which might have helped.
> But without holding one’s self out as a carrier for all, there is no common carrier status. You cannot hold out a company as sufficiently large; they must hold themselves out as wanting this status.
This is not true, you're misconstruing the difference between companies that had mens rea in transporting illegal goods and companies that don't.
Common carrier is an involuntary status. The government decides whether a company is or is not a common carrier and is obligated to provide services to anyone that asks (basically). Common carriers are almost categorically excluded from liability for the goods they transport because they are effectively incapable of mens rea. They did not choose to transport those goods, therefore they could not have had criminal intent in making a choice to provide service.
Companies that are not common carriers _do_ have a choice when deciding whether to provide service, and thus are capable of having criminal intent when making that decision.
Inversely, companies that choose to act like a common carrier _do not_ receive the same protections as an actual common carrier. Their decision to provide service to everyone without asking questions is still a decision, and can meet the mens rea bar.
The most well known cases I can think of here would be The Pirate Bay and Silk Roads. Both behave as if they were common carriers and will sell/convey almost whatever you want without questions. They do not receive immunity for not asking questions, because the intent of that policy is to allow (encourage, really) illegal usage.
On the flip side, the Post Office/UPS have indemnity for conveying drugs bought on Silk Roads because they actually are common carriers. They didn't decide to just not check packages, they are legally prohibited from invasive package checking and denying service to customers they find sketchy (would need a fact check on the prohibition of checking packages; I believe there are limits on what they can check, but I don't know offhand what they are).
As an odd sort of comparison, this is why you can't just take a magic 8 ball into the courtroom and shake it; 'for amusement only'
Though it does seem rare in the US for companies to prevent others from using their product based on ethical or moral reasons, but more should.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. You have been able to purchase porn for decades in various mediums - why would a website suddenly invoke the ire of the "morality police"? Even more-so when porn is freely available in almost every case when it comes to the internet.
Really though, it has nothing to do with morality - it is straight up the risk profile of those websites. There's even a movie about the start of the online paid-porn industry and all the stuff they had to do to figure out how not to bleed money on chargebacks etc.
Have you? Or has it been patchwork and limited and volatile, with people being fined and jailed fairly arbitrarily? There were periods in the 80s and 90s where people were going through pornographic tapes and removing the swearing.
> suddenly invoke
Suddenly, after decades. Is the adjective just to make it sound more unlikely?
I'm curious to know more about this. I'm not aware of any laws in any state (assuming the US) where it's illegal or forbidden from purchasing video games using a credit card, or even a debit card.
I know cases have been brought against Wikileaks and Assange, but in my opinion they broke no laws. They acted within the bounds of journalistic freedom. I don’t understand how people are OK with news outlets leaking things like Trump’s tax returns but think that freedom of the press works differently in other circumstances. Why would it be different case by case?
The current era of tech is all about disguising web services as "products" you can "buy" (most recently exemplified by the Humane AI pin and Rabbit R1), so I can see how there'd be confusion, though.
I could argue that my tool used wrong presents a legal risk to ME because I let law enforcement do some terrible things that I know don't work.
Semi-related, most cloud services do not allow crypto mining, the reason there being it's not cost effective. So whatever mining does happen is stolen credentials, or some inside company job where dude is using company resources for personal gain ... pretty much all illegal activity. So they ban it and I believe actively try to detect / aggressively disable it.
Companies can choose their clients in a non cyperbunk world too.
Yes. Freedom of association is literally part of the first amendment. The only limits are around protected classes.
How in the world is forcing a company to do business with someone a LESS dystopian solution than allowing them to decide who they do business with?
If the police departments are complicit, then does copyright stand to lose de facto as AI will only be increasingly implemented while the case slogs through the courts?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/how...
I don't really have skin in the game, I'm at the whim of these parties.
Even with LLMs, the existence of lawyers unknowingly using ChatGPT confabulations in court suggests that police officers will do the same with investigations or surveillance. A cop who takes Sam Altman's dumb tweets too seriously might think Azure's GPT-4 service can look at an evidence report and apply its AI Magic. Probably not something Microsoft wants to defend in court.
“Are you wearing a wire?” The answer doesn’t mean merely recording the conversation.
Now it could mean, a personalized “analyst” determining sentiment, correlating events/evidence/facts/(hallucinations)/building a prosecutors case…in real time!
I would like to see more companies restricting what contracts theyll take based on ethics.