> The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches.
What the GAO study[1] actually said:
> However, we found that the tests were limited because they did not include all possible candidate list sizes and did not specify how often incorrect matches were returned. ... The FBI’s detection rate requirement for face recognition searches at the time stated that when the person exists in the database, NGI-IPS shall return a match of this person at least 85 percent of the time. However, we found that the FBI only tested this requirement with a candidate list of 50 potential matches. In these tests, 86 percent of the time, a match to a person in the database was correctly returned. The FBI had not assessed accuracy when users requested a list of 2 to 49 matches.
According to FBI, a smaller list would likely lower the accuracy of the searches as the smaller list may not contain the likely match that would be present in the larger list.
In other words, their acceptance test procedure was gamed from the beginning.
Ugh, this is the worst part about this mess IMHO. U.S. law enforcement has time and time again shown that they are more than willing to argue in bad faith about statistics. This is going to turn out no different than fishing expeditions based on partial DNA matches where the prosecution predictably finds some 1/100,000 match after they search a database of 250,000 people and use that as some cornerstone of "obvious guilt" and convince the jury that there's only a 1/100,000 chance that he's innocent.
So much of forensic science is a sham, we claim as a country to uphold a system of justice whereby you're innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, yet so many prisoners on death row have been exonerated, some posthumously even when there's no real incentive to look for evidence of innocence at that point.
Who wants to bet that prosecutors are going to start using flawed facial recognition results as if they are equivalent to a victim picking out a suspect from a lineup of 10 people? "There was a 99% chance of a match"
I've worked in DNA forensics/DNA databasing/LEO IT for about 10 years. I have never heard of DNA evidence with a statistical likelihood of 1/100,000 being presented in court. It is true that all evidentiary DNA is presented in a statistical manner, but the statistical thresholds are far higher than 1/10x the amount of people on earth. A professional accredited DNA forensics laboratory would never publish or release a report with shoddy statistics like that. If attempted it would ruin careers and shut down a lab, today in 2019. We also work on OLD exoneration cases.
Maybe prior to the early 90's when the technology and chemistries were still kinda crude and not every lab could afford accreditation, but definitely not in the US in the past 10 years.
To be clear I am not arguing about the philosophy of if it's ethical to use DNA databases or facial recognition from driver's license databases. I'm saying comparing the use of DNA evidence to using facial recognition on a driver's license database doesn't make sense.
I totally never thought of stats for forensic science being presented in a misleading way before like in your example but it completely makes sense. The odds of finding _any_ 1/100,000 match are incredibly high. Wow.
I'm not sure I can follow your thinking when you say that a probability tree is easier to understand than a percentage. Has this been broadly scientifically understood? Is this something you have found within your field of work?
NICE, Cochrane, and the English NHS recommend talking about natural frequencies and not percentages. They also say that if you have to use percentages you should use absolute numbers, not relative numbers.
Take something really simple about percentages. What does 0.1% mean? Only 1 in 4 people know this means "1 in 1000".
> Gigerenzer et al show how only 25% of the general population could correctly identify 1 in 1000 as being the equivalent of 0.1%.
Take something a little bit more complex, such as the relative increase in risk vs the actual total risk. We know that most people do not understand what a 75% increase in risk means in real terms. But most people do understand a simpler explanation: of people who don't eat $THING we'd expect to see 1 person out of 1000 people over ten years developing a disease, but if 1000 people all eat $THING every day over ten years we'd expect to see about 2 people developing the disease.
“If you participate in breast screening, you will reduce your chances of dying from breast cancer in the next 10 years by 24%” versus
“If you participate in breast screening, you will reduce your chances of dying from breast cancer in the next 10 years from 37 in 10,000 to 28 in 10,000”
Here's a final example. For some time we knew members of the public couldn't do this, but we thought healthcare professionals could. Turns out that they couldn't do it either. Both groups find it much easier if you convert this into natural numbers and probability trees.
"A machine has been invented to scan a population for a disease. The machine is good but not perfect. If you have the disease there is a 90% chance it will return positive. If you do not have the disease there is a 1% chance it will return positive. About 1% of the population have the disease. Mr Smith is tested, and the test comes back positive. What's the chance Mr Smith actually has the disease?"
(This is from "Reckoning with Risk" by Gerd Gigerenzer).
Most people cannot get the right answer from this question.
If you reword the question they can.
"Think of a group of 100 people. 1 of them has a disease. The entire group is screened. The one person who has the disease tests positive. Of the 99 people who don't have the disease one person will also test positive. How many people of those who test positive have the disease?"
I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an article about the UK doing this https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognitio... I can't find the hacker news link, but its worth a read.
A single picture is surprisingly effective in recognizing that person in another photo. I've been playing around with a python wrapper on dlib's facial recognition [0] and it's astonishing how it can identify people from just one photo. It's not like other machine learning methods that include training a classifier or even fine tuning a classifier. It works by encoding the persons face to a 128 dimension vector and then using that for comparison.
The accuracy from most methods is between 99.2% - 99.8%, but the problem is that the training samples are too easy and controlled. It's sensitive to lighting. Google's most recent paper [1] on Facenet found 99.63% on the easy Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, and an impressive 95.12% on the Youtube faces dataset, presumably a much more difficult dataset.
Anecdotally, FindFace found my Russian friend's VK.com profile (amongst many millions of such profiles) as the number one hit after I took a picture of her in a bar and submitted it to their face recognition service.
These libs assume the angle is the same, i.e. square shot of the face. Cameras mounted up high are completely useless with these types of libs. Unless the tech. exists to magically rerender a front face shot so you can image how it would look from 12 - 20 feed raised up, this doesn't work.
That might be an interesting problem for a generative adversarial network. Train it based on some large corpus of faces and then refine it based on searching for the input vector that most closely matches the original image and then just change the pose in that input vector to generate a square shot of the face. In theory this would give you not only some generated face, but some reasonable space of facial features that the discriminator couldn't reject. I.e. beard / no beard if the chin was obscured.
I wonder what happens if we take a square shot of a face, then use something like the deep fakes to generate different predicted views and then feed those in to the original system.
> Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people.
You hit the nail on the head. Any system that hinders law enforcement’s assumptions and hunches will be touted as defective, anything that confirms those assumptions will be exalted.
This is why narcotics dogs are used. Studies show that dogs will signal upon trainer instruction, and that dogs aren’t accurate nor precise in practice. Such dogs exist to establish probable cause, not to determine whether or not a suspect possesses narcotics.
It probably happens unconsciously a lot too, with no specific ill intent ... officer just has a "bad feeling" about a person and the dog detects the tension. Dogs are very sensitive to shifts in human emotion.
Yup. Basically, it's Clever Hans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans) weaponized against the populace. Doesn't even have to be conscious on the part of the handler.
I would say that false positives are a feature. Like you mentioned it gives authorities cause to atop/investigate you. If they are wrong they have deniability. If they are right then mission accomplished!
Yah, one only needs to use drug dogs as an example here. It is a known fact the dog can be triggered to claim a hit etc... and somehow in most states a dog doing "something" is sufficient justification to have your vehicle searched..
Don't you have to renew your driving license photo every few years?
If the old photos are still on file, having multiple photos in the same style of a person a few years apart is actually probably quite a good training set.
My current driver's license photo is over a decade old and doesn't expire until 2023. At least when I renewed my license they didn't want to update the photo of me when I was 16 and just renewed it for 8 years. In theory I'll probably need to update my photo then, but as it is right now I look nothing like the photo on my driver's license.
> Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people.
I read the summary, and I don't agree. The tests being done are used under special circumstances. No way a camera mounted 12 or 14 feet up at an angle is going to provide the same type of results as youtube videos which are at a flat angle. There are simply too many "angle" like issues that will result in the accuracy being quite poor.
I didn’t read the story carefully because of the paywall, but it depends on what the searches are doing and what the sources are.
Several states have had success in identifying people with multiple drivers licenses using facial recognition systems on their photosets. Of course they are using DMV photos that are taken in a consistent way.
FBI or ICE could very well have a feed of identification photos from foreign countries that are close enough to get good success.
You train the neural net to encode landmarks which are unique to individual faces. Such a net, when trained, can extract the unique facial features from a single image and embed them in a vector to be compared to features extracted from other images.
This is similar to how single images of faces can be animated with GANs now.
Sensible regulations around what the government can do/not do in regards to things like facial recognition tech seems like it’s becoming more and more necessary. I am far more worried about privacy invasions/abuse by the government than I am by private companies that seem to get all the press (ie facebook). For the simple reason that 1) facebook can’t arrest me 2) facebook has no incentive other than targeting me with ads 3) facebook is actually incentivized to keep this data to themselves now that future competitors will not be able to Hoover up as much data as facebook did.
On the other hand, governments with the power to mass surveil their citizens has proven to be a horrible idea.
Given the choice, I’ll take the lesser of two evils which is a company that is interested in knowing the things I buy and where I go, for the express purpose of selling better ads. But all the press goes to “let’s break up big tech”. I’d be much more interested in stopping the mass surveillance of citizens by an entity that has the power to kill, imprison, subjugate and arrest, rather than an entity that has the power to target me with ads.
>Given the choice, I’ll take the lesser of two evils which is a company that is interested in knowing the things I buy and where I go, for the express purpose of selling better ads.
The choice is the crux of it. I'm not on Facebook, I choose not to have a "smartphone", I don't use free email or other web services that harvest my information and I avoid a variety of other activities that may offer every day conveniences at the sacrifice of my privacy to various corporations. I don't have this choice when it comes to the government.
We can debate exactly where the 4th amendment applies to prevent the government from hoovering up all our data so that they can track us all individually, in real time, and monitor all of our communications and interactions - but nobody can reasonably argue that the 4th amendment doesn't kick in at some point to prohibit this. Its always harder to claw back power the government has claimed than to stop them from claiming new ones. Its also the reason we need more transparency, so that we know exactly what information the government is harvesting and how closely we are being monitored and tracked.
Have you considered a couple of issues here? The first is that while companies may simply be in the business of harvesting massive amounts of information for advertising today, once they have that data they can use it to whatever end they like. From the legally gray such as manipulating elections to their benefit to the outright illegal such as using that information to gain leverage over politician, media, regulators, influential figures/celebrities, and so on. Kompromot is a term from the KGB era. Yet now private corporations such as Google and Facebook have many magnitudes more information on everybody than the KGB could have ever even imagined possible.
The second is as a peer comment mentioned: information these companies collect is subject to end up in government hands anyhow. People are so quick to forget about the Snowden leaks of things such as PRISM: [Program participation entailed NSA access to] "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information." Examples included email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats, and more. [1] Some of the companies confirmed to be working with PRISM are: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
I think things like this fall of people's radar because it doesn't get mentioned in the media. But it doesn't get mentioned in the media for the same reason it was never mentioned prior to Snowden either. These programs have not gone anywhere and, if anything, have grown only more expansive. The NSA didn't set up an exobyte scale data storage center [2] on a whim. Everything you submit to a major corporation in the US is something you should equate to submitting to the US government as well.
The issue here is it is not an either/or. We commonly run into joint partnerships where the government doesn't have/maintain the data at all. The goverment just 'buys' an answer from the private corporation and the courts ok this behavior.
For some dark comedy, look into NIST and their resistance to the release of their biometric software purpose built for the FBI. The solution they have since found is the purchase of COTS with contracts explicitly denying any kind of ownership as a result of purchase. We can't have the taxpayers getting too much bang for their buck!
I keep seeing the press complaining of police using face recognition that “is not accurate.” IMO yall might want to stop making that argument. Because you're gonna one day find cameras on every lamppost, and police tracking your every movement and saying “it's alright now because it's 100% accurate.”
Hmm, almost like those REAL IDs weren't such a good idea... not like civil liberties advocates mentioned this or anything... The ID security improvements (central issuance, anti-copying features) were fine and good, the federal database is not.
Oh I miss the good old days when we were fighting things like the clipper chip and weaponized algorithms. Now it is all about the data, which is much more difficult to rally people around. Anybody else remember the time the Office of Personnel Management leaked all the military biometric records (plus security clearance metadata) they fought to have stewardship over? No more vets working under cover :) You'd think they'd have learned that they can't trust themselves to warehouse so much high value data in one place, that single incident will serve as a daily reminder for about 20 years. Lots of externalities in that as well: given what would have been in my records, I don't think I'd fare well doing business in China.
Fairness of the U.S. immigration system aside, what is wrong in principle with law enforcement using driver’s license photos to uphold and enforce the law? When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S.
I would be much more concerned if law enforcement were, for example, using these photos to profile drivers by race or using them in an otherwise illegal manner. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.
>When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
False. Until the observer effect occurs, I - essentially - do not exist but as a record in a database. Someone who knows me, my car, or has the ability to ascertain who I am from identifiers on the vehicle, is able to collapse that sense of privacy but, until that happens, I am just one of the many of the nameless mass. In that, I have privacy and you would be hard-pressed to prove otherwise.
>Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S.
False. Tinted windows which obscure the driver's view is illegal. It's perfectly legal for you to have a high iridescent finish on the outside of your tint, which will obstruct the outside view of the driver (in sunlight).
>...or using them in an otherwise illegal manner.
When - in the history of ever - has law enforcement never abused the resources afforded to them? Your credulous, at best, belief in law enforcement's use of the system largely ignores the prevailing example given in the article - which was that they used the system on someone who was under "suspicious circumstance". The "suspicious circumstance" bar is so low that even a two-dimensional being couldn't limbo under it.
Some might argue that since the agreements were made that the three-lettered agencies would only use them for criminal investigations, that the example of the "suspicious circumstance" that was given just now is in fact illegal.
> Your credulous, at best, belief in law enforcement's use of the system largely ignores the prevailing example given in the article
Law enforcement will always be a compromise. There will always be some who abuse it, and there will always be a need for it (if you want a reasonable level of civilization anyway). It's not binary. It's not "Give up all freedom and rights for infinite security" vs "Give up absolutely nothing for absolute freedom" with nothing in between. The line has to be drawn, but it is arbitrary, and a lot of people have different opinions on where it should be drawn (rightly so! there's not an obvious place to draw it).
We certainly have to be careful not to draw it too far on one side, but that doesn't mean it has to be completely on the other side.
Eg: I personally think it's too far to put surveillance cameras everywhere, but I'd be ok with cameras and facial recognitions on some major roads (they already have pictures associated with driver's licenses and various other documents for acceptable reasons).
Yeah, it might get abused sometimes, but everything can be. Everyone for themselves and hope for the best hasn't historically worked out so hot either. Law enforcement being completely neutered with zero tools and powers isn't very effective.
The problem with the compromise argument is that it only ever goes one way. We had certain law enforcement capabilities in 1965 and civilization didn't collapse. Why would we expect it to collapse if they had exactly the same capabilities today?
Whenever this argument is used, it's always to add new invasions. Databases that were never needed before, facial recognition that was never needed before. Why are they suddenly needed now, just because we can? Moving in only one direction over time isn't balance, it's marching toward a cliff. Meanwhile anything that does improve privacy, like encryption, is used as an excuse for new police powers as well.
It isn't necessary for law enforcement to catch everybody. And they wont anyway. Which is fine, because 99% of their purpose is deterring people from committing serious crimes, which they can do well enough without any fancy new technology.
You don't actually have to catch fugitives as long as being a fugitive ruins your life sufficiently that hardly anybody is willing to do it.
Today's compromise is tomorrow's status quo. Then a new compromise is needed so the government can solve some new problem that gets headlines precisely because it's as rare as lightning. Rinse and repeat till all our rights are washed away.
> False. Tinted windows which obscure the driver's view is illegal. It's perfectly legal for you to have a high iridescent finish on the outside of your tint, which will obstruct the outside view of the driver (in sunlight).
That's not true. Most states have a limit on reflectiveness. I checked Alabama and Wyoming (first and last alphabetically), and both specifically limit you to no more than 20% reflectivity by statute.
Law enforcement doesn't get a blanket right to all government data.
If drivers licensing agencies are allowing my records to be used against my interests (being returned as a potential match is certainly against my interest), it makes me consider the value of being a licensed driver.
I consider anything that encourages unlicensed driving to be a big problem -- unlicensed drivers are likely to be less well trained and less safe on the road, and are less likely to have evidence of financial responsibility (eg insurance) and may not be able to pay a judgement, and likely will drive unlicensed vehicles as well, so may be very difficult to track down in case of a hit and run.
Fundamentally --- drivers have consented to their photos being collected for a specific purpose, and using it for other purposes against the interest of the driver is a big problem.
"When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy."
I think in the age of automated large scale image recognition we need to revise the concept of privacy. I don't think we should lose our privacy completely as soon as we leave our home. And with devices like the Echo we don't even have privacy at home. There need to be restrictions on mass processing of this kind of data. Otherwise we'll create a version of the world of "1984" where nobody can escape surveillance.
Sorry, I think I failed to clarify my point. I don't think ubiquitous vehicle position tracking is legal, or a good idea. I do think that if you're a driver on public roads, your face will be photographed at some point (such as for your license), and _that's_ legal and to be expected.
As far as I know, the problem here is police running photos that it has from some cameras against the DMV database. Which is a) apparently of dubious legality because it's a biometric search and should be done in a criminal case but is instead done promiscuously left and right; and b) is ethically dubious because it creeps into the territory of ubiquitous surveillance.
Vehicles and roads don't enter the equation apart from people having gotten driver licenses. The licenses just make the largest database of US citizens' faces.
> [...] of dubious legality because it's a biometric search and should be done in a criminal case [...]
That is not the law. You have been misled, perhaps as the article's author intended. The author's feelings on whether such searches should be legal are not the same as democratically-enacted laws on the matter.
Just because I am in public doesn't mean that I want to be tracked by government all the time. The idea that FBI constantly knows where I am sounds Orwellian and unconstitutional to me.
This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.
> This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.
I think that there were plenty of problems with the old approaches to policing, too. It was and remains the case that there's no need for detection if you can manage to pin the crime on a conveniently available candidate, whether or not that person did it; and pinning the crime on whoever you've got is greatly assisted by brute-force techniques that have nothing to do with technology.
Yeah this was a given when Arizona had to get new photos taken. We got called in 5+ years ago (we never have to renew) for new head shots. They zoomed in and were really particular about how our face showed up.
Imagine a USA where the citizens are no longer armed, and the 1st Amendment has been cannibalized by the passing of various "hate speech" laws that only serve the interests of the current elected... and then imagine trying to redress a Government gone full Orwellian. Just sayin.
A key element of the government going full Orwell is to make sure that most people believe their propaganda first. To establish an alternative news system that tells them who to hate. The entire narrative about refugees has been steered in this direction, enabling the government to treat them in an extremely authoritarian fashion. They're not citizens and they don't have guns, so the rest of the public is fine with mistreating them.
Well God forbid it ever comes to that, but there's probably 60 Million people with guns here, and most own more than one... so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. I mean it's not like we won in Viet Nam, to name one armed conflict that didn't go our way.
>>so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny.
No it isn't? I mean, I know it's a very common conservative fantasy, but if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters, and your puny guns won't change the outcome. Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those things.
This is aside from the fact that an armed populace only encourages the government's law enforcement agencies to arm themselves more, and increases tensions in every encounter because the LEO has to assume the target is armed.
> Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined
We've asked you so many times to stop posting this and other kinds of flamebait to HN, and you've so often ignored our requests to stop, that I momentarily banned your account when I saw this.
On looking at your recent comment history, though, I saw that you mostly haven't been doing this lately (that's good), so I unbanned you. Please don't do it again, though, because if this becomes a pattern again there won't be much slack left to cut.
> if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters
What is that supposed to do against the domestic population? Would they use their tanks and planes to blow up their own bridges and cities? Those are weapons used to claim territory from other governments. They're not very useful in a guerilla war where you don't even know who the enemy is.
> Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those things.
Where does that leave the American government if that's the population they draw their soldiers and law enforcement from and they're each only trained for a couple of months? What do you do when half your new recruits sign up with the intent to turn against you as soon as you've trained them and provided them with weapons and equipment?
Fighting a civil war is hard. The US government is well aware of that, hence the bread and circuses.
> This is aside from the fact that an armed populace only encourages the government's law enforcement agencies to arm themselves more, and increases tensions in every encounter because the LEO has to assume the target is armed.
The solution to which is to expressly prohibit them from doing so. Random sheriffs have zero need for military tanks and riot gear and they shouldn't even be allowed to touch it. You don't need a SWAT team to serve a warrant on a check forger. You don't need a SWAT team at all, because anything it could legitimately be used for is the rightful role of the national guard.
Just because the domestic population is armed doesn't mean even 1% of them would shoot a police officer. And the people who would, tend to be the people who acquire firearms unlawfully regardless.
If the problem is that violent drug dealers have illegally-obtained guns, you can't solve that by taking legally-obtained guns away from peaceful hill billies and women who just want to feel safe walking home at night.
> What is that supposed to do against the domestic population? Would they use their tanks and planes to blow up their own bridges and cities?
To fight an insurrection of its own populace? This is what is being described.
This has precedent. See Tianamen, Soviet Union sending the tanks to its satellite republics, the Turkey failed coup.
The only time the federal government can be stopped is to wait 4 years and electing a new president. Allowing individuals to own AR-15 has no bearing on 'freedom' from federal attacks.
Right, so the government has all the tanks and bombs they need to blow up their own bridges and structures.
Insurgencies don't have separate infrastructure. They use yours. Blowing it up hurts you more than it hurts them.
> This has precedent. See Tianamen, Soviet Union sending the tanks to its satellite republics, the Turkey failed coup.
Rolling in tanks is purely an intimidation tactic. They're designed to be hard targets that can destroy hard targets, but insurgents don't have hard targets. They use secrecy rather than fortification. To kill them with a tank you would have to know where they are, but if you knew where they were then you could go arrest them rather than doing anything whatsoever with a tank.
And even the intimidation value can be one hell of a footgun. Everybody has seen the photos from Tienanmen square of the man standing in the way of the tanks. That kind of iconic imagery is a massive fiasco for government and a major PR win for the opposition.
> The only time the federal government can be stopped is to wait 4 years and electing a new president.
It's not just about overthrowing the government. It's about making oppressive policies more difficult to implement.
It makes it more dangerous for corrupt police to sneak around like criminals without announcing themselves or outright lynch people in the streets, because it leaves people more ability to defend themselves against petty local tyranny as well.
Also notice that there is a large racial disparity in who gun control laws restrict from having firearms.
> Allowing individuals to own AR-15 has no bearing on 'freedom' from federal attacks.
In the case of an outright insurgency it's not about defense, it's about offense. It's about capturing soft targets for their resources. Twenty guys with rifles may not be able to take on an army base, but they can take on car dealerships and hardware stores and chemical plants and then drive off with their stuff.
And the obsession with the AR-15 is wholly misplaced. It's used by some bad people because it's used by a lot of people in general. It's popular. That doesn't make it different in any meaningful way from most other rifles, and the attempts to distinguish it immediately devolve into cosmetic differences like whether it has a pistol grip or certain types of mounts for ancillary equipment.
> Twenty guys with rifles may not be able to take on an army base, but they can take on car dealerships and hardware stores and chemical plants and then drive off with their stuff.
Isn't this coming back to your point? If you are fighting an insurrection, and start acquiring resources by force, you are losing the will of the people.
At some point, your insurrection is just thuggery, returning to the point that guns only benifit criminals.
> It makes it more dangerous for corrupt police to sneak around like criminals without announcing themselves or outright lynch people in the streets, because it leaves people more ability to defend themselves against petty local tyranny as well.
History shows the police murdering people in the street because they happen to have guns. But since they fire dozens of shots against sleeping targets, having guns for defence never helps, and gets you branded as cop killer.
> And the obsession with the AR-15 is wholly misplaced. It's used by some bad people because it's used by a lot of people in general. It's popular.
Completely agree, it's just an example. A gun is a gun.
> but if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters, and your puny guns won't change the outcome. Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those things.
Because our tanks and helicopters have done so well at suppressing a bunch of afghani sheepherders, right? I don't think you're really qualified to evaluate the ability of the US's rural population to adapt to guerrilla warfare.
In all seriousness, it's easy to use superior weaponry to subjugate a populace... if one of the win conditions is killing everyone in the population to be subjugated. As soon as you have to care about things like "mass killings" or "civilian casualties" or "are you sure this isn't genocide" that gets a lot harder. And I'm relatively sure that the people who make up the US military would care, particularly when it's people they identify with that they're exterminating.
There's a reason Kent State went down the way it did, and also why there's no US version of Tiananmen square. A radioactive crater isn't much of an economy, and the armed forces are made up of, well, you know, people who like most folk, don't enjoy shooting at people much like them.
The 2nd Amendment doesn't grant a right to bear arms - it prohibits the Government from restricting the right.
It was real unfortunate that most of the Native Americans had already been disarmed, otherwise it would have probably played out very differently. It's definitely a dark stain on the US.
> What would these 'hate speech' laws ban exactly?
Is it not authoritarianism if it's Our Guys?
You can classify anything as hate speech. Propose a restrictive immigration policy? That's hate speech against immigrant populations, an attack on their economic opportunity. Propose a permissive immigration policy? Hate speech against the native population, an attack on their cultural survival.
Anything that affects anyone can be construed as being intolerant of anyone it negatively affects. Since all significant policies affect people, anything your opponents say can be classified as hate speech by an authoritarian who doesn't like them.
Isn't this the argument that the concentration camps being run to detain refugees and separate their families aren't authoritarian because the government and their media allies say so?
The problem with the 2nd amendment approach is that a lot of the militia types are quite in favour of authoritarianism so long as it hits people they don't like.
> Isn't this the argument that the concentration camps being run to detain refugees and separate their families aren't authoritarian because the government and their media allies say so?
Only if you're the government and their media allies.
Anything that puts people in cages is authoritarian. You can argue that sometimes it's worth the cost, but then you're arguing that sometimes authoritarianism is worth the cost. And generally speaking it isn't and we should have a high bar for all imprisonment.
(Though the immigration case is somewhat confounded if being in the cage is only an optional alternative to being immediately delivered out of the country and released there pending an immigration status decision.)
> The problem with the 2nd amendment approach is that a lot of the militia types are quite in favour of authoritarianism so long as it hits people they don't like.
So what's stopping the people who don't like that form of authoritarianism from taking advantage of the 2nd amendment themselves?
was in Aruba recently - The US Custom clearance occurs there before your return trip to the U.S. The CBP officer didn't even open my passport. just had me look into a webcam and he had my info pulled up on his screen with few seconds.
I don't mean lacking in citations. I mean low-information, often snarky comments of the kind that grow like weeds on the internet. We're trying for better than those here.
If something is common knowledge, there is little curiosity in it, so it needn't be repeated on HN.
And this is why the morning of the Snowden leaks will always be a fond memory for me. Anybody with experience in the kinetic aspects of the USG, who also had a solid understanding of what is technologically feasible, knew about that mass surveillance was a certainty. The Department of State's process for designating terrorist organizations is instructive here: groups are evaluated on both disposition and capability. Well, the USG has repeatedly demonstrated a predisposition for spying on citizens and relatively recently it gained the technological ability to do so at scale. Lots of people feeling vindicated that morning.
It is actually a pretty long list of resulting changes. I'll describe a couple:
The German government became very interested in open source firmware, I've heard talk of RFPs requiring it from vendors - which compels vendors to put pressure on manufacturers, leading to fewer binary blobs.
Google became very interested in the power processor. Years ago their decommissioning process involved a hole being put through the Intel processor. For a long time I just assumed that there was a deal in place with Intel requiring a certified field destroy, but I'm now thinking that it was their distrust of Intel's backdooring. That may sound extreme, but nobody can say with certainty that whatever bs is occurring in ring -6 isn't caching private keys. Intel is now trying very hard to fool people into believing that they're going to be open sourcing their firmware - this will not happen.
As far as the social consequences, that is hard to say - I'm less plugged into popular culture than most. I'd be surprised if it didn't influence people's views of the government though, especially if they had voted for Hope and Change™. Greenwald timed and ordered the releases perfectly so that the government would predictably lie, only to be proven a liar the following news cycle. This pattern repeated a few times before they got the hint and STFU. And then there was the director of the NSA showing up at Defcon in a black t-shirt and jeans...
You have a good point but many people do not realize the implications of things. To be fair to them, things are purposefully framed so that they seem to be in the public's best interest. I understand the anger and resentment, but if people are now worried then we can use that momentum to fix the issue. You're right, it didn't have to be an issue in the first place, but let's do what we can to fix it instead of spreading the frustration.
You are 100% correct. I remember complaining about this way back in 2005 when RealID was passed. To my chagrin I just got my RealID driver's license as it became mandatory in my state.
What the parent is trying to say is that it was not public. This can mean that they just weren't aware of it too, or thought it was something else. I know when I heard about the RealID act there wasn't much discussion about it among my peers. It just seemed like an update into how licenses were done, and one that would make them more secure (and let's be honest, identification in the US is atrocious. We even use SSNs for identification!)
Yeah there was a little privacy debate when it was proposed, and a little states' rights debate. Now it's really just a formality, but back then there wasn't this level of integrated and aggregated data about individuals.
Some states listened and intentionally dragged their feet. Mine is one - we needed an extension in order to fly -- but we're rolling it out here now too.
Funny you should mention that in your call for caution against black pilling. When SS was proposed there was massive popular outcry against serializing citizens with a federally assigned number. The USG assured everybody that SSNs would only ever be used for the distribution of benefits...
Is there a non-GDPR-wall, non-pay-wall, non-reenable ads version of this? Even their JS reaches through the the sands of Web Archive time and blocks viewing the article...
There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.
Kinda weird for you to say that, when right in the article:
« Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at the use of driver’s license photos in federal facial-recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or individual license holders. »
These kinds of comments make me extremely upset. Such thinking is exactly why we're losing power in democracy. Such thinking is how authoritarians win. I will go as far as saying that spreading this idea is dangerous at best.
In my youth I spent thousands of hours I will never get back arguing about the merits of various social policies and I have never made a positive impact with my contributions.
Well then do more than just argue. And when you do argue, argue to change minds, not to win. I know I used to argue to win. I found that it just puts people off. It doesn't matter how right you are if you make the other person feel angry (obvious counter examples aside). Arguing to convince the other side is harder because you have to understand them. Not only that, but you have to demonstrate that understanding. It is always a continual battle.
But besides arguing there are things you can do. As coders and techies we can contribute code. We can encourage open source and make our own code open source. We can help others find secure forms of communication. We can also do what many others in the public can do: protest, write our congressmen, and raise hell. How much and how little of this you want to do or have time for is okay. But I wouldn't say that just because you haven't convinced others means you shouldn't try. It just means you should change strategies. You after all, no matter how smart or right you are, are not perfect and neither is the person you're trying to convince.
The geek/hacker contingent has been surprisingly inept at applying the hacker ethos on the political scene. This is despite the wealth and self-assessed brilliance - where are the subversive PACs exploiting loopholes? Or trade groups communicatinf what is "common sense" on HN to the rest of the world? Perhaps the industry attracts the lone-wolf/Randian types who do not see value in unity-of-purpose, because less-wealthy and allegedly "lower-performance" industries are much more politically effective.
> The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches.
What the GAO study[1] actually said:
> However, we found that the tests were limited because they did not include all possible candidate list sizes and did not specify how often incorrect matches were returned. ... The FBI’s detection rate requirement for face recognition searches at the time stated that when the person exists in the database, NGI-IPS shall return a match of this person at least 85 percent of the time. However, we found that the FBI only tested this requirement with a candidate list of 50 potential matches. In these tests, 86 percent of the time, a match to a person in the database was correctly returned. The FBI had not assessed accuracy when users requested a list of 2 to 49 matches.
According to FBI, a smaller list would likely lower the accuracy of the searches as the smaller list may not contain the likely match that would be present in the larger list.
In other words, their acceptance test procedure was gamed from the beginning.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/699489.pdf