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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Their conclusion reminds me of this lady in China, Lao Rongzhi, who was a serial killer along with her lover, Fa Ziying [0]. They both went around the country extorting and killing people, and, while Fa was arrested in 1999 via a police standoff, Lao was on the run for two decades, having had plastic surgery to change her face enough that most humans wouldn't have recognized her.

But in those two decades, the state of facial recognition software had rapidly increased and she was recognized by a camera at a mall and matched to a national database of known criminals. At first police thought it were an error but after taking DNA evidence, it was confirmed to be the same person, and she was summarily executed.

In this day and age, I don't think anyone can truly hide from facial recognition.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7D3mOHsVhg

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> and she was summarily executed.

Nitpick: Summary execution means execution without due process. As per Wikipedia there was a quite thorough legal process all the way to the supreme court.

"On September 9, 2021, Lao was sentenced to death by the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court for intentional homicide, kidnapping, and robbery. She was also stripped of her political rights for life and had all of her personal property confiscated. Lao appealed her conviction in court, and the second trial was held on August 18, 2022 at Jiangxi Provincial Higher People's Court. Although Lao admitted to being an accomplice to Fa, she claimed to have only done so in fear of losing her own life, as Fa had physically and sexually abused her throughout their relationship. On November 30 of the same year, the court upheld the death sentence. On December 18, 2023, the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court carried out the execution of Lao Rongzhi, with the approval of the Supreme People's Court."

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

Your overall point holds that there was China's version of due process and plenty of elapsed time between her capture and subsequent execution. Therefore it was not a summary execution. Nowhere close. Moreover, to call this out is not a nitpick, it's an important factual correction of the OP.

However I would nitpick that while summary executions do include those without due process, the defining characteristic is simply speed. If the execution happened uncharacteristically fast compared to typical executions, even if all due process afford to her was followed, then she was still summarily executed.

Nitpicking continued: As per e.g. Wikipedia definition it refers explicitly to the process (and not the speed): "In civil and military jurisprudence, summary execution is the putting to death of a person accused of a crime without the benefit of a free and fair trial. The term results from the legal concept of summary justice to punish a summary offense, as in the case of a drumhead court-martial, but the term usually denotes the summary execution of a sentence of death."

In practice a free and fair trial can't be very fast though.

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

Thanks, I used the wrong word, I should have meant that she was executed soon after conviction, which is not usually the case in many other countries.

Hmm, "cameras reported a 97.3% match". I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37. IE, 1 in 37 people would be tagged by the cameras. If you're talk China, that means matching millions of people in millions of malls.

Possibly the actual match level was higher. But still, the way facial recognition seems to work even now is that it provides a consistent "hash value" for a face but with a limited number of digits/information (). This be useful if you know other things about the person (IE, if you know someone is a passenger on plane X, you can very likely guess which one) but still wouldn't scale unless you want a lot of false positives and are after specific people.

Authorities seem to like to say DNA and facial recognition caught people since it implies an omniscience to these authorities (I note above someone throwing out the either wrong or meaningless "97.3% value). Certainly, these technologies do catch people but they still limited and expensive.

> I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37.

Why would you assume that?

The "97.3%" match is probably just the confidence value - I don't think a frequentist interpretation makes sense for this. I'm not an expert in face recognition, but these systems are very accurate, typically like >99.5% accuracy with most of the errors coming from recall rather than precision. They're also not _that_ expensive. Real-time detection on embedded devices has been possible for around a decade and costs for high quality detection have come down a lot in recent years.

Still, you're right that at those scales these systems will invariably slip once in a while and it's scary to think that this might enough to be considered a criminal, especially because people often treat these systems as infallible.

Another related thing to consider, if she had plastic surgery what are the odds that among a billion people there isn’t someone whose face looks more like her original face than her face looks like her original face.

The only way a percentage match means anything here, is that the facial recognition software returns a probability distribution of representing the likelihood that the person identified is each member of the set. I'm sure that 97.3% is actually low for most matches, since she had extensive plastic surgery.

This could help with the discussion: "Human face identification after plastic surgery using SURF, Multi-KNN and BPNN techniques" <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40747-024-01358-7>

How do you know that story is true? Would the police say if they made a mistake? Would anyone be able to find out the truth or accuse them?

By that logic, how do you know any crime story from anywhere in the world is true and not just a cover up by cops?

Good question: When you encounter information, how do you determine the likelihood of its accuracy?

that's a problem reported by many many minorities around the world

The person they executed admitted to being Lao Rongzhi, admitted to participating in the crimes, but claimed she was not responsible because of abuse she suffered at the hands of Fa Ziying. While false and forced confessions are absolutely a thing, hers doesn’t really fit that pattern. She acknowledged being involved, showed remorse for the killings, but distanced herself from them and minimized her involvement in violence, focusing on the robberies. After being presented with DNA evidence, it doesn’t appear that she ever claimed not to be Lao again nor did her defense seem to ever attempt to put that forward, but both of them put forward a rigorous defense to attempt to save her.

Anything is possible, but it seems from her own actions for years up until her execution that it was in fact her and she only denied it to the local police initially, hoping to be let go.

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