If you want to see the horrors that result from law enforcement's use of AI and predictive policing, look no further than here[1].
It's several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes.
The videos are from a story that made the front page on HN about a month ago[2], if you want more details.
This incredibly disturbing. I grew up with family members telling me horror stories about state abuse like this, from more than 30 years past in a country that doesn't exist anymore: The German Democratic Republic. If this isn't classic Stasi Zersetzungstaktik, I don't know what it is. Aren't there any laws against abuse like this? How the hell is this legal?
I'm glad you've pointed this out. Comparisons to GDR and the Stasi often get ridiculed for being excessive and hyperbolic when in fact what's currently implemented would've been the Stasi's dream.
If anyone needs a good weekend movie recommendation, Das Leben der Anderen[1] is excellent and quite relevant.
It seems like in both of those cases the real problem was the pre-emptive actions taken by the officers. If someone is predicted to commit a crime it makes radically more sense (as far as avoiding acting on false positives) to surveil them in a clandestine fashion and simply allow them to commit the crime while you record the evidence. An arresting officer can be dispatched later to make the arrest without any need to risk escalating an in-progress crime.
The content, the name of the website, the logo they use — all make me initially trust them as my kind of people. I want to read this without questioning who the author is. It has the look and feel of something I might align with, instinctively.
Alas, this is a dangerous thing in the world of bogus news.
The author and his editors then refer to Founder Fathers (not Founding) and “tying” police powers (instead of “tying the hands of the police” or “curtailing the powers of the police”.) People learning English as a second language are, of course, allowed to make mistakes, but written journalism about US public policy isn’t. That’s the point where one stops and does due diligence on who these people are. This is hard, because the The Gradient’s team don’t really introduce themselves very clearly.
It would be great to have just a little bit more information about what this site is before delving into this article more. The about page suggests it’s a student/college magazine:
Somewhere between the end of the article and the bottom of the page is a mini bio on the author. They work in policy / politics, including working in DC. They also have a public bio on LinkedIn with more details.
I don’t mean to cast unfair aspersions, but am I reading a nudge piece from a lobbying think tank?
I feel guilty for even asking. How did the internet make me so skeptical?
I’m fine with think tank nudge pieces as long as they aren’t pretending to be news editorial.
On today’s internet, there is a strong requirement for being up front out one’s agenda otherwise how do we differentiate interesting opinion/blogging from the fake news bunkers?
In this case, a buried bio on a think piece I’ve never heard of wasn’t enough to suppress the “is this manipulative blogging dressed up to look like reputable journalism?” alarm bells.
(Even though, in fairness, this author does seem to be closer to the Bob Woodward end of the spectrum than the Ghanaian/Russian troll farm end.)
> And which kind of lobbying think tank is against giving more power to the police?
Any on the left in the US right now. Police enforcement has become a huge political issue for the November election. Anything to drive up more support for the notion that LE is corrupt/fundamentally broken is good for those aligned with a D sweep. This is not cynical, it’s just how the game is played in the lobbying/“think tank” world.
China perfected this all for us and now the U.S. government can piggyback off of their practices... great.
Serious note - the below is such a scary concept. There is a line somewhere and this feels like you are starting to cross it... both place-based and person-based predictive policing sound ripe for profiling / instigating actions that police can use as a reason to arrest an otherwise harmless person.
"Predictive policing programs are another illustrative example showing how data, surveillance technology, and a system of automated policing work together to spy on, search, and, ultimately, control Americans who have not committed or been convicted of a crime.
Predictive policing is premised on the idea that historical data of crime, demographics, socioeconomics, and geography can be used to forecast future incidents. Knowing where crime is likely to occur again, police try to intervene beforehand and prevent it.
Broadly there are two kinds of “heat maps” produced by predictive policing models: place-based, which uses less data to try to avoid systemic pitfalls of relying on crime and demographic data and surges police into specific areas, and person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network. "
> person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network.
There is no way the software actually achieves this. If it did we would have already heard about a well-off target identified by the software, a target with the means to mount a loud defense against such tracking.
And it cannot be that the software accurately returns such results but LE simply ignores them if the target seems to be too powerful. In that case we would have already heard from a leaker about a murder from a perpetrator that such a system correctly identified but LE neglected to follow up on. (Think of the value to the company of such evidence!)
No, I'm guessing this system gives LE cover for the same flawed systems they've historically used to target and harass people who don't have the means to loudly mount a defense. Just take the same process that a court has ruled against as unconstitutional, use its data as input to your ML algo, and voila! You've probably got at at least one more decade before society figures out you're just appending the words "through a sophisticated AI system" to your outlawed policing.
Why would we have heard about any of the failures? Part of the 'blue wall' is intended to hide policing failures from the general populace. Particularly when
* in the case of targeting a well off person who they decide to further investigate, they can simply use it as reason to look harder at someone, use parallel construction to build the case that the defense sees, and simply drop any cases where the defense happens to get too close. This is what they do with stingrays.
* in the case of targeting a well off person who they decide not to investigate, they can simply tell themselves that the person is a paragon of society and it must be one of the failures of the technology. Like when a boy escaped Jeffrey Dahmer's house heavily drugged, running down the street, bleeding out of his anus, begging anyone who would listen to not let Jeffrey take him back, the police got involved and gave him back since Jeffrey was such a paragon of the town. That cop later became head of the police union.
>>There is no way the software actually achieves this. If it did we would have already heard about a well-off target identified by the software, a target with the means to mount a loud defense against such tracking.
I mean it's more likely that the system is going to informing you about likely targets for certain crime types (less murder which is frequently singular and more drug dealing since repeated). It's going to help create lists of suspects to pursue on a matter. If one of them is also a senator's son or a CEO, you'd likely go in softer than Joe Poorperson
> I'm guessing this system gives LE cover for the same flawed systems they've historically used to target and harass people who don't have the means to loudly mount a defense.
This is exactly what happens. If we look at the evidence[1], law enforcement preys upon the poor and minorities who are not even committing crimes, but their predictive policing systems target them for harassment anyway.
Such software exists, it is as bad as you think it is and it produced well off targets that loudly complained. See the nsa skynet program that used map reduce on pakistans telecommunication metadata to identify possible terrorists and promptly identified Al Jazeera as a terror cell. As you correctly guessed LE did not go after them and did not bomb their office because, luckily, someone cross checked the automatons results. And then we did hear about it from a leaker.
There is far less known about such systems in police and fbi but what i read so far about the fusion centers that is, if not already achieved, at least a goal.
> However, as The Intercept's exposé last year made clear, the highest rated target [who travelled to Peshawar and Lahore] according to this machine learning program was Ahmad Zaidan, Al-Jazeera's long-time bureau chief in Islamabad.
ah my bad i misremembered: it was not the bureau in Islamabad, but the bureau chief from Islamabad and the system is also bit more intelligent and not only evaluates who calls who but also location data and suspicious pattern changes like sim swapping and buying second hand.
There is a misunderstanding. The skynet system did not flag them for any of the reasons you would flag them, it is not intelligent, it simply runs map reduce on "who talks to whom" data, with some scores set for some of the numbers. By nature of the algorithm it tends to mark journalists and lawyers as high value targets, because their phones were in contact with scored phones or low value phones that were in contact with such scored phones.
Point is: if such a system would be used against other populations, it would again flag journalists and lawyers as high value.
I'm not going to say ACAB, but many who do believe that no matter how nice of an individual a cop might be, they are still working within an organization that pushes for privacy shredding technologies like this.
You can be a sweet, community oriented beat cop out there doing your best, but behind you stands surveillance, militarization of police, and the tragedy of prisons in America.
Maybe this isn't a generalization that's fair -- should/do we fault all FAANG employees because their parent companies are doing unethical things?
I don't know the answer, but articles like this definitely make me think a whole lot more about whether individual police can be ethical while operating in the way the departments do today.
I don't think you can separate the individual from the organization when the organization either fundamentally or in practice is engaged in negative/harmful activities. Policing is broken in the US, and though its original intention is good, the daily practice of it today is systemically flawed and no longer has the original intent as its goal.
The same applies to companies like Facebook and Google. They fundamentally exist to extract data from their users. They never had another legitimate mission that was corrupted over time, unlike the police. Apple, Netflix, Amazon at least have services that do not revolve around taking advantage of their users and manipulating their behavior.
Organizations are made up of individuals at the end of the day. If you are a cop or work at companies like Palantir, Google, Facebook, you are helping prop up organizations that actively do harm to many people. You may not be as responsible as cops that murder or decision makers at the top, but their guilt would not be possible without you. Please think long and hard about where you work and why you work there.
I agree with much of what you have said but you appear to be lumping all policing organizations together on the basis of some recent high-profile events. Many cops work in local departments serving communities across the US and we simply do not have data on how prolific (or not) these abuses are, nor do we have data on the natural background rate of human-on-human abuses with which to compare the current level of abuses with a hypothetical alternative (such as mafia rule).
This is akin to saying that all programmers are evil because of the actions of google et al.
Is there an appreciably significant number of police departments that are structurally not prone to these kinds of a abuses? And if there are, how many of them don't enable others who do?
Cop!=Programmer, cops integrate into one social function while programmers integrate onto many. The correct mapping would be public employee <=> programmer, or Raytheon weapons engineer <=> Soldier, for example. It really is the social function that is core to this argument.
The issue is not the social function though, it’s flaws in some police departments. Even on the left, there are very few who actually don’t want police around serving the function of stopping crimes when they occur.
It's not a flaw in some police department, it is a flaw in the social order that manifests itself in abuses by numerous police departments, but the seeds of that are present in essentially all of them.
Expressing the violence of the state is much broader than stopping crimes when they occur.
the coercive function in society is prone to abuse but that does not imply that all personnel engaged in the coercive function are complicit in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy.
> Cop!=Programmer, cops integrate into one social function while programmers integrate onto many. The correct mapping would be public employee <=> programmer, or Raytheon weapons engineer <=> Soldier, for example. It really is the social function that is core to this argument.
The social function that cops represent is the enforcement of laws and many of these laws are of a net benefit to society. it is an error to reduce the law enforcement function to brutality and expropriation when there are plenty of violent, malevolent, and larcenous individuals who are not police and still engage in socially undesirable behaviors.
Sure, I'd agree with you, if the cops only implemented the social function of enforcement. But they don't, they implement the social function of intimidation and violence writ large, as well as the social function of taking care of people in sensitive situation. This is a huge issue. Cops should do enforcement and enforcement only, and limit as much as possible their engagement in all other social functions.
Finally, joining the police force means willingly taking on the social function of violence and intimidation for the state, as well as forces you to engage in corrupt behaviour against the interests of society, the so called thin blue line. As long as these social functions and social constructs permeate law enforcement it will be a problematic institution, and once they aren't anymore it will be a tremendously helpful and appreciated institution.
intimidating people into following the law and enforcing the law with violence are part of the social function of enforcement. You can't arrest people who don't want to be arrested without the threat of violence and you can't deter them from engaging in criminal acts that benefit them without giving them a credible threat of enforcement.
the social function of handling sensitive situations is also inseparable to a large degree, and we already have social workers who handle this function when it can be separated. frequently police are called to a domestic violence report that where there has been no dv, or a neighbor trouble report where the neighbor causing the alleged trouble is mentally ill. there isn't always a way to know, and dispatching social workers to these incidents in the past has resulted in the social worker being a victim of violence.
> Finally, joining the police force means willingly taking on the social function of violence and intimidation for the state
Indeed, and among the individuals who find this prospect attractive are some of the people who are also potential organized crime participants. Those people aren't going away, the best you can do is to channel their aggressive tendencies into a force for social good that is constrained by norms and incentivized by the prospect of a steady income.
> as well as forces you to engage in corrupt behaviour against the interests of society, the so called thin blue line.
I'm not convinced that this behavior would go away if you changed their uniforms. Organized crime has a long tradition and predates the beneficent social order we have fought to replace it with.
> As long as these social functions and social constructs permeate law enforcement it will be a problematic institution, and once they aren't anymore it will be a tremendously helpful and appreciated institution.
respectfully, I suggest you articulate a way to enforce the law in a way that doesn't involve violence or the threat of violence. I would be very interested in such a social order if it were possible.
>intimidating people into following the law and enforcing the law with violence are part of the social function of enforcement. You can't arrest people who don't want to be arrested without the threat of violence and you can't deter them from engaging in criminal acts that benefit them without giving them a credible threat of enforcement.
You're making a huge leap. The social function of violence is very distinct from the social function of enforcing norms, even if the second sometimes requires the first. The police's function is not limited to enforcement of norms, the police are used to impose the violence of the state even when there is no norm to enforce. You can easily come up with examples yourself. Same for intimidation, the state intimidates people in much broader ways than what is strictly necessary to enforce laws.
The way to make the police not an inherently detrimental institution is to give the pure function of state violence (social violence = state violence assuming the state's monopoly of violence here, which we do because we are talking about social functions) to another organism, and then the police would only exert violence as little as possible and purely in order to enforce norms.
>the social function of handling sensitive situations is also inseparable to a large degree, and we already have social workers who handle this function when it can be separated. frequently police are called to a domestic violence report that where there has been no dv, or a neighbor trouble report where the neighbor causing the alleged trouble is mentally ill. there isn't always a way to know, and dispatching social workers to these incidents in the past has resulted in the social worker being a victim of violence.
The obvious solution is to put whoever fulfills the function of the social worker in control of someone who fulfills the function of enforcement or violence, depending on the type of situation (enforcement for a domestic violence call, social violence for, say, a suicide that might turn bad). As long as the other is fully subordinate to the person who fulfills the function of the social worker then the risk is minimized, and this is indeed what the people saying "defund the police" are asking for.
Also, while social workers are sometimes victims of violence, sending police first empirically leads to much, much more violence, on both sides.
>Indeed, and among the individuals who find this prospect attractive are some of the people who are also potential organized crime participants. Those people aren't going away, the best you can do is to channel their aggressive tendencies into a force for social good that is constrained by norms and incentivized by the prospect of a steady income.
Absolutely not, that is a very bad idea for two reasons.
First, there are much better ways to legitimately channel aggressive people that might join organized crime than the police force. Indeed, there are two avenues to do so - either you put them in a very structured, organized emplacement where there is an absolutely clear and unbreakable subordination of them to someone that does not exhibit such characteristics, and then allow them to use their aggressive tendencies for good, and the only institutions that fits that role are organizations like the National Guard, Military, and so on. The Police does not do so because there is no clear subordination of the enlisted/officer type, and what's more the penalties for overstepping the boundaries are incredibly light in comparison to those in the military.
The other solution is to channel them into something where there is absolutely no power over other people and very limited opportunities for violence. Manual labour positions do this quite well.
Putting those people in the police is a bad idea at every level and much less preferable than both options above.
>'m not convinced that this behavior would go away if you changed their uniforms. Organized crime has a long tradition and predates the beneficent social order we have fought to replace it with.
There is no such problem among enlisted members of the military. Organized crime should not operate with the hegemony of violence.
>respectfully, I suggest you articulate a way to enforce the law in a way that doesn't involve violence or the threat of violence. I would be very interested in such a social order if it were possible.
There is no need to do, those that enforce the law should not be those that generally express the violence of the state. Their use of violence should be limited to the least amount possible at all to enforce norms. Again, the social function of violence is distinct from that of enforcing norms, even if sometimes norms must be enforced using violence, the general function fo state violence goes far beyond just that.
thanks for your detailed response and I'm not sure we will see eye-to-eye on this issue so please take this reply in the spirit of a quest for mutual understanding.
> The police's function is not limited to enforcement of norms, the police are used to impose the violence of the state even when there is no norm to enforce. You can easily come up with examples yourself. Same for intimidation, the state intimidates people in much broader ways than what is strictly necessary to enforce laws.
This is a fact of the existence of an enforcement mechanism and not something that can be administratively eliminated. Of course people who have the power to coerce others use it to benefit themselves when they are able to. The solution is to confront this reality, articulate norms that bound this enforcement ability, and document and punish enforcers who transgress those norms.
> The way to make the police not an inherently detrimental institution is to give the pure function of state violence [...] to another organism, and then the police would only exert violence as little as possible and purely in order to enforce norms.
No, they wouldn't. They would continue to use the coercive function to their own benefit when they were able to do so with a reasonable expectation of escaping punishment for such.
> The obvious solution is to put whoever fulfills the function of the social worker in control of someone who fulfills the function of enforcement or violence, depending on the type of situation (enforcement for a domestic violence call, social violence for, say, a suicide that might turn bad). As long as the other is fully subordinate to the person who fulfills the function of the social worker then the risk is minimized, and this is indeed what the people saying "defund the police" are asking for.
I'm not sure what you're asking for, but social workers already abuse their powers, including the power of directing the police to take children away from their parents in situations where it is unwarranted but of personal benefit.
> Also, while social workers are sometimes victims of violence, sending police first empirically leads to much, much more violence, on both sides.
its not always clear that the social worker is indicated and the police are not. sometimes a mentally ill person accuses others of violence and sometimes other people report a mentally ill person as a threatening individual. In fact, sometimes a mentally ill person actually threatens or commits acts of violence. In the first two scenarios its not clear that it would be wise to dispatch a social worker in lieu of police and in the third situation its unwise to dispatch a social worker without police. Finally the line between a criminal and a violent and mentally ill individual is not clearly defined and so its not clear that social workers can effectively respond to reports of (potentially) violent individuals.
For example, just the other day two police responded to a domestic violence call, one officer is now dead, the other was wounded. These situations cannot all be solved by social workers and when you are a dispatcher it is not clear which ones can be.
> you put them in a very structured, organized emplacement where there is an absolutely clear and unbreakable subordination of them to someone that does not exhibit such characteristics,
these individuals do not exhibit characteristics that allow them to be selected and segregated, such a process would be equally (if not more) prone to abuse as the current system of armed police enforcing laws, and finally its likely that there are no clear divides between 'sheep' and 'wolves' but more likely a gradient. such individuals self-select according to the options presented and they are unlikely to choose such and option, and finally its unlikely that an individual who does not share those characteristics to some extent would be able to command their obedience.
> the only institutions that fits that role are organizations like the National Guard, Military, and so on. The Police does not do so because there is no clear subordination of the enlisted/officer type, and what's more the penalties for overstepping the boundaries are incredibly light in comparison to those in the military.
this is false (there is in fact a clear chain of command in the police, to include separation between 'officer' ranks and 'enlisted' type ranks) and secondly you seem to be ignorant of the very same abuses of authority and violence perpetrated by members of the military.
> The other solution is to channel them into something where there is absolutely no power over other people and very limited opportunities for violence. Manual labour positions do this quite well.
I see. how do you expect to dissuade them from pursuing violence and larceny on their own time?
> Putting those people in the police is a bad idea at every level and much less preferable than both options above.
We do not put them in police. They seek out those roles because of the opportunity to engage in sanctioned violence and if that behavior is not channeled into a social good it will become a social evil, as it already does for individuals so inclined who are not able or willing to join the police or military.
> There is no such problem among enlisted members of the military.
You are misinformed. [0] [1] [2]
> Organized crime should not operate with the hegemony of violence.
I agree but to call enforcement of laws "organized crime" is to imply a political theory that is not currently shared by many members of the republic (regardless of my own feelings on the subject). Societies that fail to penalize acts of violence and larceny tend to succumb to violence and larceny on a society-wide scale.
> There is no need to do, those that enforce the law should not be those that generally express the violence of the state.
This is, or appears to be, a contradiction in terms and I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and asking you to explain how we are to enforce norms on people who do not subscribe to them without threatening violence.
> Their use of violence should be limited to the least amount possible at all to enforce norms.
Agreed.
> Again, the social function of violence is distinct from that of enforcing norms, even if sometimes norms must be enforced using violence, the general function fo state violence goes far beyond just that.
You are confusing the social function of violent enforcement with the abuse of that socially permitted ability by the individuals tasked with executing it.
[2] I'm not sure how many links it would take to make this point but there are more than enough readily available, please let me know if there is any doubt about members of the military committing violent crimes on and off duty.
By this poisoned well logic, you are responsible for any increase in crime that occurs from a reduction in policing. Adults that work for an organization which is critical to every civilization to date (law enforcement) work to fix it from the inside. Only immature people take the unethical stance that there should be no law enforcement because there are flaws in the current structure. Even in Minneapolis, the only thing the council can agree on is that “defunding the police” doesn’t actually mean taking away the police funding. Only a small anarchist percentage of the population wants nobody to actually be in the police.
> the daily practice of it today is systemically flawed and no longer has the original intent as its goal.
Care to say what the goal of the Boulder, CO police department is? How about the one for Waco? If the goal is not law enforcement, how does that square with the fact that people keep electing the heads of these orgs (Sheriff, Mayor, etc)?
Does defunding police increase crime? Police department budgets have absolutely ballooned in many places, but crime hasn't really dropped a commensurate amount. (In Seattle, police budget has increased over 33% in the past decade, while crime rates haven't moved.)
Reductions in policing are paired with increases in spending on community and social programs that address the root causes of crime rather than just punishing those who turn to it from necessity.
With the two combined, it's plausible that reducing police funding could actually reduce crime rates if the money was well invested elsewhere.
Depends on what defunding means. If it’s the textbook definition of stopping funds entirely [1], then it’s definitely going to increase crime. Only a fraction of criminals turn to it from necessity.
- The Kansas City mob is not operating out of necessity.
- The Mexican cartel is not operating out of necessity.
- Child traffickers are not operating out of necessity.
When someone hears their drunk neighbor beating his spouse, who should be called if there are no police?
Very few people think there should be 0 police officers or zero dollars towards policing. When a homicide happens or an arson happens, yes, there should be a department investigating and diving in.
Domestic violence could be responded to by people who are not police but are instead trained in dealing with this scenario. Domestic violence is generally handled poorly by police (who often struggle to find the aggressor, disbelieve the victim, show up armed and ready for additional conflict, etc.).
I'd much rather have a force that was trained in crisis intervention, drug abuse, and mental health, but who weren't also armed to the teeth, coupled with the prison system, and generally trained to think they are 'warriors'.
> but behind you stands surveillance, militarization of police, and the tragedy of prisons in America.
Prisons are not related to police anymore than the citizens who vote the legislators in who pass the laws and the judges who sentence to prison for violating said laws. As a cop (beat or all of the way up to chief of police) you have no say over private vs public prisons, prison policies, or even prison sentencing because they are not the same organization.
Moreover, surveillance and the militarization of police are both policies of local police departments. You can make a completely ethical decision to join the sheriff’s department in a local town that has none of these capabilities nor wants them. The law enforcement of a locality is strictly a result of that city’s politics. There is no national police force nor standard in the US that makes sense to hold all enforcement officers accountable for.
Prisons are absolutely related to police. The only way I'm aware of to get into prison is via an arrest by police.
So, every arrest a police officer makes, they need to consider, "knowing what I do about prison, is it ethical to arrest this person?"
Police militarization is supported at the federal level through grants of military equipment, and nationwide through the use of trainings that teach officers they are "warriors" or "sheep dogs".
And yes, police are fragmented from a logistical standpoint, but culturally they are very similar. Police unions make holding bad cops accountable nearly everywhere, prosecutors refuse to prosecute bad police because their jobs require a good relationship with police, the idea of the "thin blue line" permeates every police dept, etc. They might all have different funding and standards, but there are systemic nationwide problems.
> Prisons are absolutely related to police. The only way I'm aware of to get into prison is via an arrest by police.
Nope, you can go to prison without being arrested first if you showed up to court voluntarily.
> So, every arrest a police officer makes, they need to consider, "knowing what I do about prison, is it ethical to arrest this person?"
Nope, most arrests don’t result in prison time and unless the crime is particularly bad, the cop can’t even know if prison time is a realistic outcome. It sounds like your beef is with state prosecutors (e.g. Kamala Harris) and you just don’t understand the system well enough to know the actors involved.
> Police militarization is supported at the federal level through grants of military equipment, and nationwide through the use of trainings that teach officers they are "warriors" or "sheep dogs".
This is not “nationwide” in the sense that it’s up to each department if they want to participate. A city can absolutely refuse to participate in this programs and most rural places don’t (perhaps because they are ineligible, but either way not nationwide).
> They might all have different funding and standards, but there are systemic nationwide problems.
You have yet to identify these problems though. What issues do you think the officers in Cody, WY have?
> Nope, you can go to prison without being arrested first if you showed up to court voluntarily.
Pretty sure you cannot just check yourself into prison by going to court. Maybe I'm wrong. I suppose there are certain crimes that can result in a summons to court that are detected by automated or research.
> the cop can’t even know if prison time is a realistic outcome.
When I don't know the risk of a particular outcome, I generally need to consider it, which strengthens my original point. If cops aren't sure whether someone will be incarcerated AND they aren't considering the impact of incarceration, then we've got two problems.
> It sounds like your beef is with state prosecutors...
If you don't believe that prosecutors and police are strong, strong allies, I don't know how much further we're going to get. I literally commented on the relationship between prosecutors and police in the comment you are responding to.
> You have yet to identify these problems though. What issues do you think the officers in Cody, WY have?
Scroll up, my previous comment had a list. It was, in fact, the sentence previous to the one you quoted.
I can sense you are perhaps angry or frustrated by my comments. If not, it certainly reads that way to me. Can we agree to continue without resorting to jabs at each other? (E.g. "you just don't understand the system well enough" comes across as needlessly patronizing in a discussion that could otherwise be interesting.)
I'm usually not the 'reduce it to math' person but this seems like a perfect example. Facial recognition in policing fails at a mathematical level because of Bayes.
Let's say I have a database of 10,000 people's faces and I'm looking to match 1 accused criminal from a good quality image. Let's also say my algorithm is 99.99% accurate with 100% specificity (i.e., I always ID the bad guy as the bad guy).
So I get a true positive, I can correctly ID the guy. But in doing so I am 10 times as likely to get a false positive. at 99.99% accuracy. Scale it to 1,000,000 people and that likelihood of a false positive is 100x. Because you are looking for a small number of people as your database gets larger the value of a positive match (i.e., your positive predictive value) rapidly approaches zero.
Yes this is a simplification but the basic idea stands. These algorithms used at scale are flat out unacceptable because the concept of their use makes false positives more likely than true positives.
It's a consumer-facing photo editing app that uses adversarial AI to manipulate your photos in such a way that companies like Clearview AI can't train facial recognition algorithms off your data. You can download the Android or iOS version at trix.co - we're in beta right now.
>“We require that you sign up with a valid US phone number to verify your identity as a human for security purposes.”
How does collecting personal data improve security? Why is identity verification needed when the point of using the service is to avoid automated identification in the first place?
This is a measure designed to help us prevent facial recognition companies from gaining programmatic access to our api to test against it. In addition, because we are a new startup with limited computer resources such testing could also harm our throughput capabilities for actual users. Unfortunately, there are far better sources of simple name and phone number data such as whitepages.com, or any other CNAM service, so we doubt we would be a target of an attack for this data or that this data would be sell-able even if we were bad actors. Our perspective is that requiring phone verification allows us to provide a better level of service to customers.
Split your Privacy Policy into parts along technological borders like "site, crm, app" instead of one size fits all. Disclose what you are actually doing and restrict yourselve to that instead of trying to have as much wiggle room as possible. This sounds counter-intuitive because web-business standard is to be as consumer unfriendly as legally possible, but the privacy tool market likes higher standards.
After reading your policy and tos i think someone should check the app for facebook scraping, because the legal texts sure imply you are doing that:
> "By granting Trix access to any Third-Party Accounts, you understand that Trix may access, .. any information .. that you have provided to and stored in such Third-Party Account (“SNS Content”) ... all SNS Content shall be considered to be your User Content"
Some great advice from the privacy policy:
> "You should always review, and if necessary, adjust your privacy settings on third-party websites and services before linking or connecting them to Trix’s websites or Service."
Statements like this are red flags:
> "We may collect metadata associated with User Content. Metadata typically consists of how, when, where and by whom a piece of User Content was collected and how that content has been formatted."
> "Trix may transfer information that we collect about you, including personal information, to affiliated entities, or to other third parties" ... "for the purpose of providing the Service"
This is a typical blank.
Basically they reserve the right to do as they please with your data and all data they can access through services you link with their service.
technical cofounder of trix here. we do not currently have social logins for the app to this point doesnt make much sense. but we probably can further modify the templates we used for our tos/ privacy policy to asuage your concerns :)
we absolutely do not (and would not) scrape data from your social media accounts. unfortunately, terms like this are standard for many tech companies today.
I too find it unfortunate, that is why i am a bit picky about it. Nothing changes if people don't ask for change. I would find it in much better taste if your policy tells what you do instead of focusing on creating legal room for what you say you don't.
What i find most interesting is the metadata piece. Photos often have time and location information attached (exif), especially if your service sits close to the camera.
You reserve the right to harvest those. Why? (It's a rhetoric question: the answer is of course: the lawyer said such wording protects you from getting sued)
I very much appreciate that question, and having been in this space for a few years now, it's certainly one that's relevant to the tech as whole, but less so our app.
Our technology is simply indexed to a public data-set of 30k individuals and when our deep learning model scrambles the key-points on your photos to confuse the clearviews of the world it does in a random manner. The model truly is a black box in that way.
Good question, and one we have thought about quite a bit. We very much know that we’ll be involved in a cat and mouse game with facial recognition companies over time. Our objective is to protect users from facial recognition today and going forward. Even if next year, for instance, a facial recognition company can develop tech that works on protected images posted this year, if we are able to advance our protection to match advances in facial recognition next year the user will still be protected in real time - which is what really matters. So in short - it likely won’t matter if/when there are advances in facial recognition if we can keep up!
> Even if next year, for instance, a facial recognition company can develop tech that works on protected images posted this year, if we are able to advance our protection to match advances in facial recognition next year the user will still be protected in real time...
This isn't entirely clear to me. Are you saying something to the effect of, "While historical images would indeed be compromised, there is value in at least the current images not being compromised"?
The next HaveIBeenPwned is HaveIBeenBurned. May already exist for internal national security use cases.
I see what you’re asking and I share those concerns. This approach seems like it would only stop casual attempts, not determined large scale automated bulk collection, yet it is pitched as if it’s effective or could be improved to be effective. I would expect that its usage would be able to be detected in a photo even if it works, which would itself be meaningful information which could be tracked, like DNT in web browsers.
Hmm trying to download it on Android, I click the link and it starts to take me to google play but it just loads forever. Never gets to the page to download it
not OP but trix.co's Android link goes to Play's "Welcome to the testing program" and that has link "download it on Google Play" which gets "We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server."
It won't be long before we see more and more escalating instances of the population using traditional electronic and physical warfare techniques against law enforcement in these "battles." I predict we'll see someone in the general public shoot down a collection drone, or start to actively target these physical collection nodes installed on poles, posts, buildings etc.
There were already numerous documented cases of electronic warfare being deployed during protests at law enforcement - the jamming of their public safety 2-way radio systems.
Whenever there is an escalation of techniques against the "enemy" - the enemy fights back. There will be interesting developments in this space the next decade with regard to this. Law enforcement already needs advanced direction finding equipment - which is traditionally a military operation.
> Last month, it was revealed the Department of Homeland Security authorized the domestic surveillance of protestors and journalists, training a system usually reserved for hunting terrorists overseas with drones on American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
wait wat
edit: the articles linked source doesn't actually say that but instead talks about “Baseball card” dossiers.
This is where policing in America has been headed for at least a decade now. Everything is so polarized that people who would normally be opposed to this view those being tracked as their enemies, and thus fair targets. (For example, I'd imagine that right wing or libertarian types would normally consider surveillance to be a real bad thing. But if it gets deployed against George Floyd protestors... Ehhh... nbd)
When you hear politicians talking about being "tough on crime" or "law and order", this is exactly the program they are pushing for.
>...In 1971, the fledgling Libertarian Party (L.P.) called for "the repeal of all 'crimes without victims' now incorporated in federal and state laws," such as the prohibitions on drug use that have driven so much of the escalation in aggressive police tactics. The same platform declared itself opposed to "so-called 'no-knock laws'" of the sort that got Breonna Taylor killed by cops this year when they crashed through her door at night, unannounced, looking for illegal drugs.
>..."We support full restitution for all loss suffered by persons arrested, indicted, tried, imprisoned, or otherwise injured in the course of criminal proceedings against them which do not result in their conviction," the L.P. proposed in 1976. "Law enforcement agencies should be liable for this restitution unless malfeasance of the officials involved is proven, in which case they should be personally liable."
Modern surveillance capitalism is at its core a very libertarian thing because libertarians believe there should be no regulation about what data companies can collect and how they process it. There is a difference between mass surveillance and law enforcement.
>...libertarians believe there should be no regulation about what data companies can collect and how they process it.
Such an overly broad statement is wrong. The libertarian position is more nuanced than that with people (at least in their minds) generally trying to balance privacy without hurting innovation. See for example
>...There is a difference between mass surveillance and law enforcement.
There is a difference between Facebook collecting data about its users and Homeland Security/FBI/NSA/etc etc collecting data about citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
The original context here was
>...But if it gets deployed against George Floyd protestors... Ehhh... nbd)
Mass surveillance by the government is a big deal to libertarians and always has been.
My iron rule of human relations. If you see someone do something shitty to someone else, stick around long enough and they'll do it to you to.
That's why watching the US's power elites callously using the nations resources to screw smaller hapless nation states scares me. Not to mention they keep grudges.
Don't think it's cited in this piece, there is also this recent piece of news - "Controversial facial-recognition software used 30,000 times by LAPD in last decade, records show"
I guess it's reasonable for police to use this technology, but not without more transparency and accountability... Feels like this year that's becoming very clear.
You're not the only one. If you read the opinions in United States v. Jones, the supreme court makes a pretty big distinction between the kinds of surveillance a police officer could reasonably do on their own, versus the scaling up that technology allows, and how that might kick otherwise allowed surveillance without a warrant to requiring a warrant just about the sheer amount of information being acquired. And that's even with data that could be available from watching from public streets, if there were enough officers to watch everyone.
Can this be used against employers to detect wage theft? "Time shaving" should be easy to detect. If cell phone tracking, W-2 payments, and employer time records are in substantial disagreement, wage theft has been found.
I initially read this the other way: used by employers to detect wage theft.
Supervisor Drone: You are allotted two government-mandated 15-minute breaks a day, but our third-party right-to-work service detected you away from your work sector for an average of 16.8 minutes per break period over your past 3 shifts. You are hereby terminated and liable for service fees you agreed to as part of your original employment agreement.
By whom? The government has shown time and time again they aren't interested in policing attacks against labor (see: the toothlessness of the NLRB, the gig economy, weakening of unions/organizing, etc) so it wouldn't be them.
The companies aren't going to do it because LOL wut?
So how are you going to get labor to do that? And if they do, who do they take it to (because again, NLRB is underfunded and relatively weak)
The same issue as drug enforcement arises - how does it stay a profit center when those you punish are those that fund your election? It may be a profit center for the vault of the State, but it is very much not so for pockets of the campaigns. The reason why wage theft is inexplicably and reliably the biggest and yet the most overlooked shape of theft seems to me to be that one.
And why do they scan the demonstrations asking for police accountability - right away that sounds like a conflict of interesting. You never hear about the AI scanning faces at places where actual criminals hang out - like maybe a pawn shop (possibly selling stolen goods).
Because the "demonstrations" have devolved into riots where "asking" means firebombing. Combine that with local prosecutors refusing to pursue charges, and you've got a situation where the police a highly motivated to identify everybody in black bloc chic.
With rare exceptions, police are strongly addictive personalities. There's no bit of power over the public that cops can use in a reliably responsible way.
Surveillance & control are drugs, ones that they are not capable of putting down.
That is true of almost everybody, not just police. Petty tyrants are a dime a dozen, they just lack the ability to legally kidnap you.
People are bad, so we need a government comprised of people are bad, so we...
I already hear the cries of "But who will build the roads?!"
Well yeah, that is the solution that was arrived upon hundreds of years ago, and has been the norm ever since. Like Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others. Declaring cops to be inherently powermad junkies is not an expression of accountability, it is a flawed value judgement that can only serve to justify very bad policy decisions (defund the police!).
I think it's an insightful observation. All humans are subject to being corrupted in by power. It's explained by our biology. Until our biology is no longer a meaningful problem, we need systems that hold those in power accountable. No one should be above the law. We need true equality.
"...police are strongly addictive personalities... Surveillance & control are drugs, ones that they are not capable of putting down."
That is insightful, when you acknowledge the fact that it is actually part of the human condition? Okey-dokey. If you mean "equality under the law" then I have good news: no need to wait for robotization - we are already have that equality (unless you want to marry a tree, sue a massive corporation, or some other edge case). True equality would be the end of us all, the death of art, the halt of social progress. Any action that could yield a change to one's circumstances would need to be coordinated and executed with every other human at the same time. I can't think of a scenario where that could happen that doesn't involve a complete loss of personal identity.
It's true that AI is a bit of an overloaded term these days, but in the modern usage of AI you have all types of machine learning and neural networks, which this certainly is. The AI you're thinking of is usually referred to as AGI. But all that aside, in the end your comment is still a little off the mark because what is any flavor of AI but computer power.
It's several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes.
The videos are from a story that made the front page on HN about a month ago[2], if you want more details.
[1] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871