Speaking of racial and class injustice, the war in drugs has incentivized a lot of crime over the years while also brutally punishing poor people who turn to it out of desperation. To propose adding another layer of facial recognition that both attempts to strip privacy from people, but also falsely identifies many black people, is in extremely bad taste by Microsoft
The thing that always gets left out here is that you can just show up to court and ask for your property back, and 99 times out of 100, the judge will give it to you - because it's still up to the state to demonstrate that the property was the proceeds of a crime.
...but 99 times out of 100, the property owner doesn't show up to court.
> Costello hired a local attorney to get the money back. After making a few calls, the lawyer told him to accept a deal from the government for half of the money. Costello agreed. But his legal fees were $9,000 — leaving him with only about $7,000.
> In one respect, Guerrero was lucky. His construction firm paid a small amount to make his legal struggle possible, and Stone had agreed to do much of the work without pay. Given the time involved, the legal bills would have been $50,000, Stone said. But he agreed not to press for his fee from the government as part of the settlement.
> He wanted to get his money back, but he had no idea how to sort through the intricacies of the federal civil forfeiture system, an arcane corner of the American legal world. Though he was never charged with a crime, he would have to prove, in effect, that he made the money legally.
> In New York, the multi-step process required to get the NYPD to release possessions can be opaque and circuitous. When the Bronx Defenders circulated a questionnaire in 2014 among its clients who had possessions taken from them at the time of arrest, nearly half said they were never even given the itemized voucher that Clavasquin received.
> Even with that voucher in hand, petitioning the district attorney’s office for the necessary forms to release items categorized as evidence can be fruitless: More often than not, requests to the district attorney’s office—whether phoned in, written, or emailed—go unanswered, said Adam Shoop, a Bronx Defenders attorney who helped bring the class-action lawsuit against the city. The only reliable way to force a response is to file an administrative appeal, a legal tool that the average non-lawyer almost certainly wouldn’t be able to use on his or her own, Shoop said.
When you make a statement like "99 times out of 100" it's up to you to prove that with statistics. My initial belief is that you made up that 99/100 number and evidence of people not getting their money back only reinforces that belief.
85% of people not showing up for court does not mean that 85% of people would win immediately upon showing up. As my examples demonstrate, merely showing up can be the first step in a very lengthy and expensive process.
If I go see a lawyer and they tell me "it'll take years, you'll get back only some of the money, and most of it will go to paying me", I'd skip court too.
This has always been the wrong word, yet a favorite going back at least as far as Lyndon Johnson's "War On Poverty". It suggests an "enemy" to be "defeated" -- but the enemy is a monster of our own making.
Reform, Reconstruction, or New Deal are more truthful as descriptions, but tend to sound like hard work rather than the quick fix voters crave.
America is a (remote) 'warrior' nation. We don't suffer from a disease, we 'fight' the disease, we 'lose the fight' with cancer, we fight 'wars on poverty' and 'wars on crime'.
There's no need to normalize the word in America. Aside from some short periods, we've been fighting an armed conflict somewhere in the world (except the homeland) since forever. This is important. Because Europeans still have some well deserved collective memories about what war means, considering it happened in their backyard. It's harder to swindle the word 'war' around Europe as people know what it means way better than the American collective mind.
> In most languages and societies in Europe and Asia people don't use words like "fight", "war", "kill" so easily or as euphemisms.
Not sure about Asia, but over here in Europe some politicians leaning far right often use the above military words. But that comes to no surprise given the mindset.
Germany's president said in his speech on April 11:
> No, this pandemic is not a war. It does not pit nations against nations, or soldiers against soldiers. Rather, it is a test of our humanity. It brings out the worst and the best in people. Let us show each other our best side!
As an English speaker commenting on a German speaker's use of language -- I think it's laudably accurate, not pedantic.
'Everyone knows' may apply to how people in your vicinity use that word, but it's not necessarily the case everyone uses, or approves of, this usage.
As others have noted, normalising words with specific and powerful meanings is a way to weaken those words and surreptitiously make the actions they represent more common and palatable.
I see where you’re coming from, but I disagree that the normalization argument is the only interpretation of whats going on here. Language is extremely fluid and its development often exceeds our own conscious understanding.
« A sustained campaign against something undesirable » is already a commonly accepted definition of the word war. It can grow to mean different things in different contexts just as much as any other word can. I think we need a lot more argument to prove the normalization of the word causes peoples perspective of conflict to change
OK, let's compare your definition of "war" with the one Wikipedia has to offer:
«War is intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces.»
Brainwashing seems to work fine, making a "campaign against something undesirable" out of the most horrible bloodshed.
Alright, as an English speaker who has lived across North America, it's pedantic.
And we're talking about an American company working with an American gov't agency. Why wouldn't how "war" is used in the US be the only thing that matters?
Not an English speaker, but the very fact you find it pedantic is making his point, IMO. It means their normalizing the word "war" worked on you - or it may be seen as such. Not judging you though, just my perceptions.
We always need an "enemy" to motivate us to become "heros".
It is part of the culture. Certainly it is not restricted to government. In American business the "war" themes are extremely popular.
However, this sort of thing is everywhere if you are looking for it, embraced by people of all ages from all walks of life, and certainly in places other than the US. I remember when I first starting reading about cryptography and wondering why they kept using the word "attack". Or even something like software not being released/distributed/installed, but "deployed".
It is interesting how this seems to escape the focus of the political correctness language revisionsists.
I’m not sure but isn’t the etymology of “attack” and “deployed” in those cases based in US culture which was GP’s point?
When people use certain terminology, it doesn’t mean they “embrace” the cultural phenomena that led to its development. They could use it simply because it’s the conventional terminology.
On the other hand it may help the society to understand that the law is wrong and fix it. The fact that police is enforcing poor laws poorly does not help anyone, and instead of trying to ban police from using modern tools, in hope that police will not be able to fully enforce the stupid laws, we need to focus on fixing the laws.
Back in 2012 I was chatting with a co-worker whose side hustle was owning/running convenience store gas stations (he had two and was looking to expand). He was talking about the issues he was facing with shoplifters and I mentioned that Facebook had, in the previous 12 months, acquired the #2 company in facial recognition -- then did it again when the #3 company moved up to #2. I asked him if paying $200/month per store for a digital surveillance system that not only captured video but ran biometric matches against Facebook's database of images would be of interest to him. "Hell yes!" was the answer without any hesitation (I think he would have gladly paid more because insurance rates would possibly go down -- I forget the rest of the conversation).
The point being: whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo, these services aren't developed just because it's cool but in order to generate revenue at some point. Why is there so much shock and surprise that Microsoft tried to sell a digital security/surveillance/law enforcement tool to the DEA? To me the major story would be if someone internally suggested it and it was nixed on principle.
I think people underestimate the degree to which most companies cooperate with the law enforcement.
When I was a teenager working for my Dad's small insurance agency, investigators would come in about once per year and ask for files on customer xyz. When I was old enough, I asked my dad if they needed a warrant. His answer was "Yes, but why the hell would I want to fight that battle?".
In my 30s, I worked for a major financial bank running tech for their US compliance/legal/regulatory departments. The mountains of data that we give local, state, and federal authorities on a daily basis is enormous. I mean you wouldn't believe how much data we handed over - or made available during an inspection. There was a documented official process for both the ad-hoc requests or the regular dumps, but we absolutely never fought with them about what we provided.
Not to mention, there are literally billions of dollars of grants and other funds available just waiting to be full-filled in search of problems. The surveillance industrial complex that was kicked off after 9/11 has more money available then can possibly be spent.
Any major software and infrastructure provider would be foolish not to develop armies of teams to go after that funding. Don't think for a second that IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and ANY other enterprise hardware and software organization hasn't put huge resources in place to address these "needs."
These feel good press releases do just that - but I guarantee you the Fed divisions of these companies are still plugging away selling billions to the government for software, hardware, and services around all kinds of surveillance technology.
People are yelling about Microsoft hypocrisy after they made noise on their feel-good achieve-nothing move at Github.
In my opinion, people have been complaining about the change too much, and the hypocrisy too little. The PR was probably positive, when it shouldn't be.
They have come out to say some very good things, as you say. But is it still principled if it only comes right after failing to win a big contract to do the opposite? Not as clear
This is about as evil as it gets for a software company. Using your technology to put people behind bars for victimless crimes
Microsoft products are generally such low quality that I avoid them anyway, but I'm going to try to disable all my Microsoft cloud accounts after this revelation.
It's easy to lay the blame on corporations, but where do the voters come into this? They are the ones that get politicians into office. Politicians are the ones with the power to stop the war on drugs, yet they haven't. Should we say that people who vote for politicians that don't get rid of the war on drugs are using their vote to put innocent people in prison?
It just seems odd to me that the two groups of people that could put an end to the whole thing (voters and politicians) seem to be blame-free.
I largely feel that politicians answer to corporate interests, not citizens. As well, if both corporate parties do not want to end the war on drugs, you just vote for the one closer to your interests because voting for a third party is also a waste of a vote.
Corporations are our modern lords. I'm not happy about this but they are very much who is running the show.
People are too busy arguing about spanish speaking people and how vaginas should be allowed to be used to give a shit about the corporate surveillance state taking over the entire world. This is why identity politics is a wedge issue, call me privileged.
What we should study is how these companies successfully laundered their reputations, such that we can hold modern corporations accountable for conspiring with genocidal or dictatorial state actors. This does not solve every ethical problem that underlies the contemporary corporation, but I believe that companies that are complicit in the mass extermination of human life should face the consequences. Hopefully, we're on the same bandwidth here.
And what's the solution? Do you propose killing everyone that worked for the companies in question during WWII? What about those not in Germany or occupied terretories? Since most of those people are long since dead, do you propose killing their children and grandchildren?
Anything done today for crimes 80 years ago will only serve to hurt those that weren't even around, and not really help those that were harmed.
Companies are not people and are not run by people, they have specific legal requirements and power structures that mean that the operate very differently from how most people that compose them want them to.
In any case, how people act is largely a consequence of their environment, i-e, the system. These can be environmental, political (as in, power relations), cultural, etc...
Corporate humanism isn't always a crime. Sometimes it is.
But even when it isn't, it is a sub-optimal strategy compared to maximizing as long as those that make the decisions have differing interests than those that bear them. And if they do not have differing interests, then why separate them?
You've just described a superset of what I'm talking about. These goals go hand-in-hand, and I'd say understanding the systemic reality is a necessity for dismantlement and/or reform.
I agree. I'm just suggesting that there is not really a fundamental distinction between genocidal corporations and non-genocidal corporations, rather that the issue probably comes from deeper.
I kind of just left it alone... it was intended to be sarcasm, but figured there's three ways it could be taken. Sarcasm/humor, genuine or false-flag.
The reality is that companies aren't people, and despite the concept of corporate personhood shouldn't be treated like it. Nobody working in or managing a corporation today was likely a part of said company during WWII.
Beyond the above, Sometimes "companies" have no choice. If your company, and its' resources, employees, etc. exist in a totalitarian regime, you're kind of stuck. If the country's leaders are willing to kill and replace you, then most people would simply comply. Many that worked in these companies during WWII passively resisted by slowing things down and hindering projects. Not enough to get them killed, but enough to keep things from going as bad as quickly as they otherwise would have.
A company is made up of its' people, from the leadership down... and that changes over time. Trying to hold a company to something done 80 years before is kind of meaningless. If it was called for and/or done at the time, or nearer the time that's different. Like many things, at some point you need to get over things that happened before you were born and concentrate on the now.
Example US drug consumer money pays for violence and corruption in Mexico. Speaking first hand of a hostile takeover > theft of family home in Acapulco.
“Drugs” aren’t exclusively from Mexico. The DEA’s remit includes domestic production.
You’re correct in that strong demand for illegal drugs imported from Mexico fuels gang violence - but the DEA would prosecute me regardless of whether or not my hypothetical cannabis was ethically sourced, home-grown, or was the product of cartel wars, exploited workers, and gang violence.
I don’t believe there is any argument to be had in good-faith to advocate for the punishment for the possession, personal-use, and personal-production of drugs to be worse than the effect of the drug itself. This is what we mean when we talk about the DEA pursuing victimless crimes.
Note that I’m not at all saying that dealers who push addictive substances should be allowed to operate: by all means go after opiates’ supply-chain (and we can start with Perdue’s executives!) but it’s senseless to have the laws against cannabis, LSD, et cetera that we have today, especially when alcohol and tobacco are legal. I’d rather we banned alcohol and had state-licensed LSD counters in supermarkets...
Remember, “drugs” are not a monolithic social-ill and it’s dangerously ignorant to lump entirely different substances together, label them broadly as “drugs” and suggest they’re all equally bad while giving alcohol and tobacco a free-pass - because this leads to horribly misguided social policymaking and damages the credibility of those in-charge. I wouldn’t have a problem with the DEA if they left individuals alone, and employed more social-workers than Hank Schrader-types.
It’s maddening how few departments in the US gov (or any country’s gov, really) have evidence-based policymaking as an organisational pillar.
> by all means go after opiates’ supply-chain (and we can start with Perdue’s executives!)
I agree with the rest of what you wrote, but I'd like to suggest that the vast majority of the negative effects of opiates are entirely due to how society treats them.
(Also note their incredibly low wholesale prices, and that (as with alcohol) most people who become addicted to them seem to have other problems in their lives that don't magically go away when the drug is banned.)
Purdue was engaged in aggressive marketing of their opiate drugs to doctors who then prescribe them. Their marketing objective was to rehabilitate doctors’ then dim-view on opiates - and their marketing material went with unchallenged claims such as that they had developed new opiate formulations that weren’t addictive or otherwise had less addictive potential compared to older opiates - these claims have all since been debunked. I understand that the marketing executives at Purdue and others were aware that they were both being dishonest and that what they were doing would result in more OD deaths and ruined lives.
Charitably, it can be argued that making opiates more accessible to those who benefit from them who were previously denied them due to doctors’ reservations about opiates - despite increased OD deaths - would still result in a net improvement in overall disability-adjusted-life-years, but because Purdue’s leadership stood to personally gain from increased sales (and cynically: assured long-term sales due to iatrogenic addiction) we cannot assume they were simply acting in the public’s best interest and the increased revenue was just a pleasant side-effect. That is the problem.
I recommend checking-out the work of Ben Goldacre if you’re interested to find out more.
Pharma companies, of all sizes, manufacture drugs with very high addictive potential - no-one is angry at other companies for making generic fentanyl: those companies weren’t telling doctors it was somehow “safe”. (So I’m not saying it was only Purdue).
Basically if you try to open a farm and a store to grow and distribute these substances, then a group of armed thugs show up and burn your products and (at best) kidnap you and lock you up. Amazingly, this group of drug lord enforcers is actually the US Government.
The problems you are describing are not a result of paying money to someone for drugs. The problems you are describing are a result of that person then having to pass that down the line to actively violent criminals, because another group of violent aggressors works to enforce their monopoly (the DEA etc). And why does "Law Enforcement" do this? Because it means they can murder black people with impunity. It means the people behind the DEA can scare white people into voting a certain way.
It's is really high time that we see that government is not full of people trying to do the right thing. Blatant racism is systemic. The war on drugs is part of that system. And is only part of that system. It is not that the government is full of otherwise good people who happen to be racist. The government is full of sociopaths and bullies.
If "these truths" were self-evident, why does the constitution not apply to non citizens? Why do government paid lawyers argue that waterboarding is not torture and is legal, as long as the victim is not a US Citizen?
Despite its great declaration of independence, the people that the people put in charge, are great at ruling us by dividing us up and creating differences.
> And why does "Law Enforcement" do this? Because it means they can murder black people with impunity. It means the people behind the DEA can scare white people into voting a certain way.
I appreciate and sympathise with the sentiment - but this just isn’t true. I agree that ACAB - but drugs aren’t illegal “so the police can murder black people with impunity”. Arguments like yours damage the credibility of the civil-rights movement.
(Yes, cops routinely plant drugs on black suspects; yes, black people are unfairly targeted and prosecuted for drugs offenses; yes, penalties for crack-contained are far worse than normal concaine due to racial bias and prejudice in the system; yes, cops murder black people on the job and get away with it; yes, to a thousand and one other things - but “murdering black people” is not a significant motivator behind federal-level policymaking at-present).
Maybe not murder with impunity, but imprison with impunity. Which is pretty bad when you consider how privately run prisons factor in.
> “You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
A country that is supposedly about freedom finds reasons to keep people in prisons. Imprisoning people for things like possession of marijuana (while we over-prescribe opiates) is unbelievably cruel.
>I agree that ACAB - but drugs aren’t illegal “so the police can murder black people with impunity”. Arguments like yours damage the credibility of the civil-rights movement.
It does sound absurd doesn't it? How about this one:
A law was created so that one group of citizens could keep another group of citizens as slaves; buy them and sell them; whip them and beat them; murder them with impunity. They authorized the creation of a police force to hunt and kill any that escaped. The system was so entrenched that the leaders at the state level chose to take up arms and fight a civil war.
Does that sound crazy?
Now, do you believe that that entire system of racism and economic servitude just vanished at the end of the war? Do you know that the Thirteenth Amendment, contrary to its propaganda claim that it banned slavery, just changed the requirement from "being black" to "being a criminal". You get that right? You can be a slave if you are a criminal, under the US Constitution. Do you think there might be a correlation there? Something a racist state could game? The US used to have the most slaves. Now it has the most prisoners. The prisons are for profit and their labor is for profit.
Wake the fuck up.
This is not a few bad cops. This is systemic. From presidents on down. If you think any of these statements damages the credibility of the civil-rights movements, then you aren't going to be able to vote for the changes that are needed, are you? You'll vote for the little ones, that fit your definition of what the problem is, but you aren't going to help with the root cause. You aren't going to help end what has been going on for centuries, and is still causing black people to be murdered indiscriminately.
And yes, murdering black people helps keep the white folk in line. It helps at the ballot box. It means you can talk about thugs. "Look, the fact that we kill a disproportionate number of black people is proof that black people are criminals. Better vote for someone who will fund the police!"
Everything you’ve said there is true and excepting only the last paragraph I agree with it entirely.
But the murders and manslaughters we’re seeing are a consequence of the oppression - you’re making it out so that murder is the objective of the oppression (I.e. “we oppress so that we can murder”) - not the other way around: “murders are enabled because we oppress”).
What you’re describing is genocide - and yes, throughout US history right through to the present hallmarks and traits of genocide are plain to see[1] - but still I just don’t feel comfortable equating historical slavery in the US to genocide - let alone describing modern-day oppression, repression, and systemic racial bias in the US - as genocide. It’s intellectually dishonest.
Except for the last paragraph? You really don't know what "Law and Order President", the "Silent Majority", what these dog-whistles are about?
And for the rest, I think you underestimate the number of people in this country who would rather have no black people than free black people. Sure, they'd rather have slaves, but if not, they're ok with genocide.
And if you think that there couldn't be enough people to hold such beliefs, let alone successfully carry them out, then you've forgotten about the last century entirely and the very recent white supremacy marches.
And on that note: look at these guys! This is what white supremacy looks like. Certainly doesn't look like your Senator, your chief of police, your sheriff. No, white supremacy dresses up like a comic book villain for you all to see. There couldn't possibly be die hard racists in power! And sure, well if there are, its really that they are economic opportunists. Sure they're evil, but they don't actually want black people to die, right? I mean, they need them to work in the prisons!
Again. Wake the fuck up. And stop denying their existence.
The same thing happens with demonizing immigrant farm labor. Think about what it's like to negotiate for a better living when the President of the country you are in is calling you all rapists and killers. You think that the white people have forgotten how great it was to have zero cost labor, and how effective terror is? You think that just because, on paper, people are "free" that they are in a position to stand up to this? These are people, we just learned, are actually essential workers! Where are the H1Bs for these guys? No? Of course, not, because then they could get a better job and we wouldn't have slaves to pick what needs picking.
Great replies thank you. I’ll get to it: Had highly addictive substances in mind. And agree our system is forcing that money south. Obviously not all of it comes from MX.
Next step isn’t clear re highly addictive drugs. Yeah 50 steps from now of people want to do whatever and law enforcement gets out of the way and we can provide those people solutions to get off drugs or exist on them without turning to crime? Something like this. The ‘highly addictive’ is a key feature which I feel sad about. Some of those substances are as hard to get away from has asking someone to unlearn English or Physically stop opening their eyes for the Rest of Their lives. Like literally the analogies are really far more appealing than kicking those habits, quite nearly 2nd handedly certain.
We have a lot of stuff to complain about , and everything needs to be torn apart and rebuilt. But social cause and international crime - falling into the hands of highly successful corporate thinkers (us) where we have a bias for action and are better than insulated from unseen errors but encouraged to rage forth and develop and experiment and invent. Only here from everything I have read, 1) Agree with the need 2) but we have no fucking clue what we’re doing
Please share stuff to read if anything comes to mind. I’m especially interested in learning about better understood insights on action here (non of this refers to immediate action on racism/police) but more about homelessness, drug policy.
If people can't get off drugs, provide them with a supply of the drug, therapy, and health care.
The lifestyle and life expectancy of a drug addict is 95% society, 5% the effect of the drug on the body. Heroin addicts can work as hard as anyone else, and tend to, but all of that work is put into pursuing the next dose of a drug that costs 5¢ to industrially manufacture.
I think there are an awful lot of misconceptions about "highly addictive" substances. Yes, they're addictive. That doesn't magically ruin peoples lives though.
For a really obvious example, consider alcohol. For a slightly less obvious one, consider that the stimulants prescribed for ADHD are by and large amphetamines (in fact methamphetamine itself is one of them). When a significant percentage of the population is consuming the equivalent of meth on a daily basis and not experiencing significant issues it strikes me as extremely misguided to attempt to pin addiction issues on the substances alone.
Regarding addiction itself, I'd suggest that life circumstances has much more to do with it than anything else. (There is research regarding this but I don't have it to hand right now.)
One of the reasons addicts commit crimes is to get money to pay for drugs. However, they generally pay significantly higher prices for lower quality products compared to the local pharmacy. They wouldn't need to commit crimes in many cases if the drugs themselves were more affordable. This is entirely due to prohibition and the black market.
Another common reason they commit crimes is because many of them struggle to obtain good jobs and stable housing. Much of the time this is due to their criminal record, which is often due to a drug related arrest, which is again entirely due to prohibition.
Add to this the observation (already noted elsewhere in the thread) that prohibition singlehandedly fuels much of the black market and thus much of organized crime throughout the world. It also (often as a direct result) drives police militarization, widespread surveillance, and authoritarian political agendas.
As far as I'm concerned, the moral panic surrounding the consumption of intoxicating substances has singlehandedly caused a significant portion of (possibly even the majority of) society's ills at this point.
I have been closer to drugs/dealers and crime since I was about 12 than a PhD to books.
Your heart and faith is beautiful, and it’s very very true in some instances. Really wonderful bright people get swept up.
But there are some people out there like cities worth who are just wired for a different ‘normal’ (re crime). I’ve ran with them and even years in their capacity for exploring new levels of instilling fear in innocent people and demonstrating carelessness for property, hard work, and vulnerability. . I can’t type specifics.. just out of a learned built in anxiety over even getting this into it.
People get way f*g addicted. By 8th grade thanks to people smoking oxy, the gentle cool kid from the nicer end of town was stealing cars and punching his mom in the face for cig money. If that is t addiction night and day who is this person behavior 180 degree change strictly due to the pursuit of or gap of time between the possibility of having another hit of whatever.
> I have been closer to drugs/dealers and crime since I was about 12 than a PhD to books.
Then in my opinion you have been surrounded (and your views significantly influenced) by a vicious cycle which is fueled by prohibition.
The entire situation is directly analogous to the US prohibition of alcohol in the early 20th century. It should be incredibly obvious in hindsight how that directly caused harm and failed to solve any problems.
> there like cities worth who are just wired for a different ‘normal’ (re crime)
... ok, and? That's what we have law enforcement for. How is that related to chemical substances and addiction? (I don't agree with you by the way but I also don't see how such a claim is relevant to the topic at hand.)
> thanks to people smoking oxy, the gentle cool kid from the nicer end of town was stealing cars and punching his mom in the face for cig money
I'm arguing that such situations aren't at all simple - there's a lot more going on than just "addiction to a chemical". Importantly, I'm arguing that there's no reason to expect decriminalizing various chemicals to result in more of that. (In fact I'm arguing the exact opposite - that decriminalizing various chemicals would result in much less of that the world over.)
Have you been to any of the regions where these drugs are produced? They aren't victimless crimes. The drug trade creates very real social problems in both the regions they're produced and where they're consumed. Now, maybe certain policies and the war on drugs create more problems than they solve, but the problems they aim to address are very real, and do have victims associated with them.
Prohibition, not war. You don't need a war on drugs to create those situations, as France currently proves, you need prohibition. It's the laws that create the incentives, not how crazy you enforce them.
So the whole OxyContin scandal is based on false accusations? What we had here was a quasi-legalization of drugs that should be strictly regulated. It destroyed families, lives, whole communities. This is what you get if you fully legalize drug trade. It's insanity.
If addiction were not stigmatized, in (very) large part due to the war on drugs, there would not be a OxyContin scandal. Legalization has nothing to do with that.
If sugar was illegal you'd see the same sorts of crimes. You can't blame it on drugs or drug users the same way you wouldn't blame it on sugar or sugar users. The blame rests squarely on bad laws and those who create them.
I think you can still blame murder, bribery, and corruption, all of which are associated with the drug trade and occuring in the US and elsewhere, on the people committing them, while also admitting that some aspects of the problem are caused by the US government's own actions.
I think that blame isn't exclusive. The US government is responsible for the entire problem, because murder, bribery, and corruption are being used by people purely in reaction to government policy. That doesn't somehow exonerate people that kill to preserve the cash flow that US policy institutionalizes.
The bribery and corruption actually occurs within government, so it's weird to separate those acts from the people in government that benefit from them.
There's no reason I know of why an above-ground drug trade would be violent, corrupting, or even attractive, other than if they're taxed wildly out of proportion to the strain that their effects would put on (a hypothetical) health care system, preserving the illegal trade to some extent. Sin taxes themselves are a form of corruption that attacks a minority by convincing a majority that they deserve it due to some moral failing. We can certainly figure out how to maintain a drug war on the poor while still legalizing drugs. If we don't bother, drug usage will become a chronic medical problem, like asthma.
> other than if they're taxed wildly out of proportion
Amusingly this seems to have happened to a limited extent with weed in Washington state. There's still a bit of availability on the black market, but not nearly as much as before. (Of course tobacco is also available on the black market the world over so I suppose it isn't unexpected.)
I'm genuinely curious why some of you think they wouldn't try? They're a company with a product to sell to few industries, even fewer where it can be leveraged as completely as in law enforcement.. so why wouldn't they?
Indeed, some comments here are ridiculous. They are a company, they want to earn Money. Contrary to what people might think, just because a company tweets they support the BLM movement, that doesn't immediately mean(in fact, it almost never means) that they're genuinely interested in being benevolent. Stop being naive.
I guarantee you MS has enormous software and support contracts in place doing all kinds of work for the federal government with regards to surveillance. There is just too much funding out there to ignore that space.
I can't think of any enterprise IT firm that could be take seriously by shareholders if they planted some stake in the ground that they were going to NOT go after that business. There is no way.
Are there any useful applications for face recognition that don't have massive potential for abuse? I have thought about this for a while and it seems all cloud based face recognition can (and probably will) be abused. I think we are building a scary future. Just wait until microphone technology is good enough to listen to every public conversation.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but "does this technology have potential for abuse" is not a great metric IMO. E.g. computers have potential for abuse, phones have potential for abuse, pretty much any tech we've ever developed that helped someone also coincidentally helped people we wish it wouldn't, whether it be criminals, or just made the government more powerful (if that's something that worries you).
I’m not face-blind, but I do suck at remembering who people are. I want it for my Google Glass so it tells me who I’m talking to so I stop embarrassing myself when someone greets me - now if only wearing GG in public was socially acceptable...
To be fair, that could easily be implemented in a personal manner with manual tagging. There's no need for giant centralized databases or violations of privacy to achieve your usecase.
I was referring to facial-recognition in general - I could train a recognizer on my phone's contacts photos. I didn't mean getting a GG app that used a database trained on public Facebook and LinkedIn photos.
What about something like: extremely dangerous, wanted criminal is on the loose. He's known to be a in a large city, and you use facial recognition to find/track him before he can commit a bombing or something like that.
He said that "didn't have potential for abuse", I think the situation you gave defines abuse. Tracking everyone to catch one person is not acceptable in my opinion.
Yeah but what about: Some guy you really hate for his speeches hides in the city. Why not go there and suicide him before he goes and tells the people how their lifes can be much better or nonsense like that.
Or related to that: Let's assume you really hate the Jews for, I dont know, existing maybe. Why not track them all down and put them in camps? It's not like they can hide from you you, you know where everyone is all the time after all.
That’s exactly the situation that has the potential for massive abuse. There is a central institution that’s tracking all movements of all people. What’s stopping them from going after inconvenient people or selling information?
Visual recognition of individuals seems useful as authentication in a lot of scenarios, in conjunction with secrets. I’d feel better about my bank or title company authenticating me visually for certain operations in addition to current methods. Though maybe a simple trusted video recording without recognition would do just as well for resolving disputes.
End the War on Drugs. Invest in harm reduction and rehabilitation centers. Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs. Unrestrict researchers from performing research on psychedelic compounds.
It's inhuman and stupid to put people in prison for selling drugs. In the meantime the US is going to crumble under policies like this, while gangs will become increasingly powerful.
The cynic in me says that Microsoft/Amazon/Google will not be selling to police agencies, but instead to wholesalers who then sell the services to them.
I think that’s obvious. That value/point of this article for a concerned citizen might be not ‘why are sales people doing this?’ But instead ask ‘should this be happening, will it damage civilian life, us economy/future, bleed into the rest of the world in a damaging way.?’
Not a fan of the DEA or any TLA for that matter. However, I believe we need to do this right and police everything which is morally questionable. Including but not limited to health insurers, student loan companies, high frequency trading and wage slavers (which is most retailers).
I think people have their heart in the right place. But the hate shouldn't be directed at MSFT in my opinion but on the legislators and ultimately at the DEA. Boycotting Microsoft for trying to get a government contract will not solve shit. Ultimately, the government can (and does) seed private companies to do their shady tech shit if Microsoft or some tech giant refuses to provide it.
The theoretical use case is that somehow it helps tracks suspects. Obviously that's only reality in a case where you either have broad facial recognition profiles across the population, or you have additional facial recognition cameras in an area of interest, both of which raise additional concerns.
In reality I suspect this is a solution in search of a problem. I was witness to a serious hit and run, caught video of the person who fled - clear pictures of the person, car, license plate. Should have been the easiest case in the world to handle but leos didn't even ask for the footage. Only group that has ever accepted dashcam footage from me is insurance.
Most law enforcement agencies have a lot more data than they can reasonably handle, but it's easier to complain about a lack of data than explain you can't actually analyze it.
- Black box that will confirm authority's bias about who is guilty, and who isn't.
- Black box to absolve authority of accusations of bias by offloading the bias to another biased party.
- Black box to absolve authority of responsibility, because they were just following the black box's orders.
- Dragnet identification of people in order to investigate, charge, serve warrants or make arrests.
The latter is their most likely stated reason, there are several reports of law enforcement going through footage and pictures to identify people with outstanding warrants and to issue others with new charges. There is also a strong desire to identify everyone a suspect interacts with, because they must be guilty by association.
Law enforcement is very paranoid, in general, and like most of the general public, think what they see computers do on CSI is real.
What are people seeing on CSI that is or isn’t real?
I know of the show but have not seen. And I doubt CSI is presenting tech which is as advanced as reality. I have seen black mirror, and reality isn’t too far from that. (Referring to the direction/trajectory of our development of ML, sensors etc)
This stands in stark contrast to IBM who announced halting facial recognition offerings, Google who has prohibited use of facial recognition against non-public figures from the start, and Amazon who just announced a moratorium on facial recognition use by law enforcement. Not a good look for MSFT.
"Newly released emails show the company has tried to sell the controversial technology to the government for years, including to the Drug Enforcement Administration in late 2017."
I dont think Microsoft is selling it now, even though they might have been in 2017
I am not fan of the DEA, but this trend of generating bad PR for tech providers of governmental agencies ridiculous. Attack the agency or vote in politicians to change or dismantle them. As of 2020 Millennials are the largest adult generation. They have more voting power than the Boomers, if they actually get out and vote.
Voting with your wallet is an extremely powerful and simplistic tool. Generating bad PR enforces the former and informs the latter (actual voting)
You make the process of handcuffing the DEA in any capacity sound easy.... but lets walk through some high level steps:
You would need to formulate enough PR to generate a movement, that PR would probably need to span political parties, those political parties (because we only have two) would need to work well between themselves to systematically allow for such an approval to pass. Ignoring the fact that most voters are no single-issue voters AND ignoring the fact that gerrymandering has removed/hamstrung entire voting demographics.
It's a mind-numbing exercise to think of generating enough support in today's environment to effect serious change though voting.
I don't really care about the companies here, just on what is effective. Would you rather have a handful of companies put a moratorium on selling to facial recognition tech to governments or state and local ordinances banning their use no matter what company the tech is from?
It just such a poor solution to the problem. The DEA has hundreds of suppliers. I don't think attacking GM for selling them Suburbans is going to make much of a difference.
Plus, from the commenting here of HN, it appears there is a large group of people that want more regulations on facial recognition irregardless of its use within the DEA. These conflations of messages do resonate very well with me. Reforming the DEA and adding regulations to facial recognition are two important issues that stand on their own. The solutions to the issues are more the responsibility of government rather than corporations.
That's a strawman though, nobody thinks "the solution" is attacking only Microsoft, nobody proposes that, and nobody is doing that. The question is whether both the DEA and Microsoft should be criticized, or if Microsoft should get a free pass for some reason. Microsoft isn't being singled out either, numerous government contractors have been criticized for taking those contracts. Criticism of military contractors in particular is very common, you know that.
I mean this is good, right? There are a LOT of illegal aliens involved in the drug trade. These people aren't known for their propensity to have correct ID. The only practical way to ID them is with facial recognition, DNA, and fingerprints.
You know, education is also a weapon, as is financial enablement. Both are cheaper and have better results than arming the likes of the DEA and ICE, both of which have mixed results at best. Heck, even with all the money that they sink in to that, only a small part goes to the education of the people within those organisations, making it a problem stuck in a perpetual state of marginal benefits to keep it running in vicious circles.
There will always be people that do bad things for the sake of doing bad things, but most of the abusive situations stem from a lack of basic physical and mental safety and the capability to resolve one's own problems.
No, it's a drug that has legitimate use cases. It's only being put out there "recreationally" because the illegal drug market is unregulated and "safer" drugs are not accessible.
The War on Drugs was never about protecting people from self-harm. If you think otherwise, you're imposing some sort of moralistic revisionism.
To promote ending this disaster is not the same as promoting drug use. It's about reducing the crime that it creates and make the world safer for everyone.
Slightly tangential - the safety of fentanyl isn't significantly different from any other opiate. The issue isn't the chemical itself but rather the huge difference in dosage combined with the unreliable nature of the black market.
If you know what you have is a specific concentration of fentanyl, you can measure out a safe dose. If you know what you have is a specific concentration of heroin, you can do the same. If what you have could be either fentanyl or heroin and you have no idea what the concentration of either might be, then there's no straightforward way to consume it safely.
Using fentanyl for recreation is wrong on so many levels.
It wouldn't be a topic of discussion now if opioid users had safer and better alternatives.
Disclaimer: I'm not a recreational opioid user. My brother, on the other hand, was an opioid addict who died of a heroin overdose. This topic is personal to me.
