>bypassed ban
Broke the law is the phrase we want here. They did an illegal thing. They didn't just scoot past a barrier, they violated people's rights.
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Broke the law is the phrase we want here. They did an illegal thing. They didn't just scoot past a barrier, they violated people's rights.
Why does the fire department need access to run facial recognition?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
Edit: While I said "duty" I meant that I really hope the that the police investigate all allegations of hate crime assault properly.
I am 100% sure of this because the government has been 100% consistent and 100% abusive about this, 100% of the time.
Even the Civil War was clearly orchestrated and the people were abused and not just rights, but the very core Constitution was essentially destroyed and nullified, and what we’ve had since is nothing more than an abusive invalidated social contract upheld my sheer force, delusion, and bribing. The delusion and bribery part being what keeps people from realizing that.
Curious why this is downvoted?
I don’t, I deleted my social media accounts a decade ago and wasn’t into posting my own photos prior to that anyway. But other people can post photos with me/including me and I can’t control that (and since I don’t use social media I don’t even know when they do that).
1. US foreign policy is uniparty. As terrible as this administration is, remember that quashing anti-war protests happened under Biden, too. Columbia, Hind Hall, etc were all under Biden. That being said, moving to deport or denaturalize pro-Palestinian protestors is new; and
2. The state will turn violent to quash anti-imperialist sentiment.
Let me give you some examples:
1. The MOVE bombing. In Philadelphia in 1985 there was a black liberation group called MOVE. After a day-long standoff with police, the police dropped a C4 explosive from a helicotper on the house. The resulting fire killed 11;
2. Kent State. In 1970, there was an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio. The Ohio National Guard had been called in. The protestors were unarmed. The National Guard were at least 100 yards from the protestors. Yet at some point the protestors got scared and fired on the protestors, killing 4; and
3. At a pro-Palestinian protest at UCLA, the encampment was attacked by pro-Zionists. The police stood by and did nothing and the next day used that violence as an excuse to violently break up the protest.
Facial recognition, mass surveillance, social media checks at ports of entry, weaponized deportation, etc. The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
All because of a protest against a foreign country committing acts of genocide. It's unbelievable when you think about it.
Actually neither happened. The article says they were not able to find any identifiable information online. They had to use drivers license instead.
> the fire marshal sent links to Clearview AI face search results, an archive of school play photos and another to an archive of high school formal photos. He said he couldn’t find associated social media but offered to get a driver’s license photo for the detective. “We have access to that,” he wrote.
I read the sequence as,
1. They started with a protest video
2. Clearview provided public images of the same person, but no name. It was certainly more identifiable (e.g., their high school).
3. Then somehow they get the driver's license photo. Do they use the original protest video, or the Clearview images? How does this search even work? Nobody knows. Lazy journalism.
As readers, we have no idea if the Clearview search was actually important, or a dead end.
If I photograph you in public, where you have no reasonable expectations of privacy, you should have no expectations of privacy over the photograph’s contents nor over my commentary about it.
If I photograph you in a private setting, you should expect that privacy extends to the photographic record of it as well.
You have the judge coming down on the side of privacy, which is good; but the circumstances of the particular case are troubling (allegations of someone throwing a rock at someone else).
I'd be happier gaining ground for privacy rights with cases about, e.g., blanket surveillance, using surveillance for political purposes, surveillance capitalism, etc. Then we figure out where the best lines are for when surveillance actually should or can be used.
(Edit: And ill-considered downvotes is why I'm not going to bother to try to have a meaningful discussion on HN.)
The 2nd amendment and the notion that we have physical power over the government is going to be whittled away as facial recognition and omnipresent government spying via data brokers gives them all the info they need to spy on every citizen, all the time.
AI means they don't only collect all the data they want for when they need it ala NSA 2008, but they can have a robot army of analysts transcribe photos and phone calls instantly and analyze for sentiment, flag for review.
If we don't demand, as a society, that government stay out of the business of the people, and that the military stay out of the business of civil society (ICE/National Guard/Marines), we are in for true evil.
Only in regards to one foreign entity.
> Let me give you some examples:
2 of those 3 directly involve the US and US action. The outlier says a lot.
> The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
The current administration ran on an anti-imperialist platform. You can protest american, russian, french, chinese, british imperialism all you want. You can quote george washington's warning about empires and foreign wars all day long. What you can't protest is israel. Period.
If you believe the government would only use that data for just purposes then you probably wouldn't then believe that there is a 1A issue. But if you think the government would use it to identify persons at a protest and then take adverse actions against them on the basis of their presence alone (which to be clear, seems distinguished from the immediate instance) you would probably think there is a 1A issue.
The person hit by the rock is a victim of whomever threw it, be this person or another.
And this person is the victim of the police department's policy violation.
These things can coexist.
“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
And? Do you think the authorities would go to such extremes over a rock throwing incident if it didn't involve israel? Better yet, if it was the pro-israel counter-protestor throwing the rock, do you think the authorities would have wasted a second investigating the matter? Let alone breaking the law to get the suspect?
Allegedly. The article doesn't mention any evidence that he actually did.
> "Per the record before this court, there is no additional evidence connecting the defendant to the alleged incident — no surveillance video to and from his home, no independent identification by others in attendance."
No evidence.
> "This case is premised on the complainant's word that he was the target of criminal actions by another person, and that other person was the defendant."
Weak evidence (with potential bias.)
> "The NYPD digitally altered the defendant's DMV photograph [...] never sought the metadata which would clearly indicate how, when, and perhaps by whom the photo was doctored."
Manufactured evidence.
> "That statement alone renders these medical records discoverable as possible impeachment material, necessitating their disclosure [...] Yet the People [...] have articulated no efforts to obtain these records"
Withholding evidence from the defence.
All in all, utter bullshit from the prosecution.
If you read the judgement, there's no evidence that he did.
Probably people reading the article title without reading the headline, not realizing that that it's not only literally about shouting in movie theaters.
But tbh most commenters/voters on this site are reflexively imperialist, which is not surprising for a forum run by (and for!) capitalists in the imperial core. That's doubtless a big factor as well.
> Sounds like an actual attack on democracy.
There is. And it's by the side you are on.
The police should be the ones investigating crimes, under extremely strict and limited guidelines (eg. 4th amendment) which in this case include not being allowed to use facial recognition software.
It read like a privacy issue. Then I read your comment, and was confused.
> More proper would be "NYPD Bypassed Facial Recognition Ban to ID Rock-Throwing Assailant"
This is inaccurate. The charges were dismissed. At best, it's an alleged rock-throwing assailant.
> In the end, this is not a free speech issue except tangentially; it is a privacy issue.
That's what the original headline suggested to me on first reading. Why did you think the headline was a free speech issue?
That being said, the threat of a government disobeying its own rules and policies is a deterrent to free speech.
SCOTUS ruled there are some instances where private use of a service is 1) effectively necessary for modern life and 2) leaks a huge amount of information about the person, then the government cannot utilize it without a warrant even if handed over or sold willingly by the third party.
I am suggesting that we likely need to expand Third Party Doctrine to things beyond cell tower data because 1) we don't have absolute control over how/where our images are used and associated with our names, and 2) the technology to later affiliate our always-on/always-visible identities (like faces, gaits, or fingerprints) with our names is getting better and better.
You're right that today this is not illegal, but I am pointing out that your argument for "what to do instead" is literally the precise argument for why it should be: it chills protected expression.
The system has tools like warrants for this. It appears to me as just sloppy policework.
To be clear: attempting to destroy a people for simply being a type of people is different from focusing on a state.
One can be at war and still be committing genocide.
Like, this guy was identified off video of him throwing a rock at a protester that hit them in the face. By all accounts this is someone who is trying to violently suppress peoples rights. That he got off on police misconduct in the investigation is a loss to society, no matter how many waxing words try to twist him into being a "protester violated in his rights".
Walking around with a photo versus walking around with a hundred million photos and asking everyone simultaneously should not be considered about the basic same thing.
This is such blatant lie that it exposes you outright.
> You don't have the right to throw rocks at people.
Who says you have the right to throw rocks at people? Other than god in the torah, I know of no one who supports throwing rocks at anyone.
> If you think Israel is controlling the US
I don't have to think. The leader of israel literally went on american news and ordered the administration and state leaders to crack down on protests on US college campuses. And it immediately happened all over the country from ny to texas to california.
> getting them to arrest peaceful Palestinian protesters
Arrest violent palestinian and Israeli protestors. I don't care. But why lie about the crackdown on peaceful protestors?
I think the situation is also not as simple as lawbreakers being investigated for breaking the law. What law did Mahmoud Khalil break to get himself arrested? The administration basically accused him of hate speech while being here on a Visa, not of breaking the peace or throwing rocks. The case in the article is different; with a very clear crime he should have been properly investigated for by NYPD. But this news is in the context of several other cases around these protests, and so attention to the lengths NYPD went to here is newsworthy.
Let me be clear, I agree wholeheartedly statements like "Israel controls the US" are an antisemitic trope that can be dismissed out of hand. But "protests against important US ally Israel have special attention from law enforcement agencies" - that's very different, and seems like it might have evidence here.
Part of the investigation is determining whether the event is actually a crime. I'd much rather have subject matter experts make the determination of arson vs. act-of-god rather than "every nail needs a hammer" police force.
If Israel is committing a genocide can you explain the following:
- Roof knocking
- Aid convoys
- Pamphlets and phone calls warning before strikes
- Arab Israelis
- Israeli boots on the ground resulting in Israeli casualties. Why not just carpet bomb?
- If Israel is just trying to kill Palestinians, can you explain this? Are they just really bad at genocide? "Israel dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined"[1]. If this is true and Israel is trying to wipe out Palestinian the casualties should be a multiple of what it is now. During WW2, in two day "It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000"[2]. The bombing in Hamburg: "killing an estimated 37,000 people in Hamburg, wounding 180,000 more"[3]. And there is also the blitz: "More than 40,000 civilians were killed by Luftwaffe bombing during the war, almost half of them in the capital, where more than a million houses were destroyed or damaged." So two questions: Were the Allies committing genocide in WW2? How are there so few casualties when the Gaza strip is so dense? How is there anyone alive at all?
[1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/amount-of-israeli-bombs...
[2] https://www.britannica.com/event/bombing-of-Dresden
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_Wa...
>A minute later, the detective sent the fire marshal Ahmed’s name, date of birth and driver’s license number. Within five minutes, the fire marshal replied, “Bingo.”
I believe that is supposed to say that the fire marshal sent the detective the license information. The Fire Marshal was clearly able to find identifiable information online, in the form of multiple high school photos, but was unsuccessful getting a match to any social media accounts. So the facial recognition worked and found matches in Clearview AI’s database of scraped school photos, but not their database of scraped social media photos.
Then the Fire Marshal offered to get a driver’s license photo, and says he has access [presumably to the DMV database]. The fact the about a minute later, license information was passed, sounds like a search was run by the Fire Marshal, a match popped up, and he sent it to the detective. But it could be that the detective used high school photos (being higher quality and full front facing) to run a search against the DMV records (which the police have access to with “permission from supervisors”) but according to other articles about the NYPD in general, it doesn't seem like that are able to run facial recognition on DMV records.
Either way, I think the ID came directly from the information the Fire Marshal passed and the Judge said as much.
>The NYPD would not have identified Ahmed but for the FDNY’s Clearview AI search and accessing the DMV photo, the judge indicated in her ruling
You attacked the idea of free speech for the other side in the same comment where you said this. I would assume based on reference to government infringements that you're referring to the first amendment as "free speech" if you hadn't specifically emphasized "idea"; conservatives have no real first amendment case, but they do get censored and suppressed by people with power. The idea of free speech is very much still in play when university admin cancels a guest speaker or a forum moderator only allows left-wing or non-political posts. What am I missing here?
I am not excusing their use of the technology, only that the state and specifically the police have a compelling interest to find people who commit crimes. There are lots of limitations on their powers to accomplish this end, but we do want police to investigate crimes.
Separating out duties to experts is more effective. Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system. Same with mental health emergency cases. More social workers and experts dealing with a variety of mental disorders will be better to work people in crisis since they are trained for that.
At what point do you listen to humanitarian organizations and the UN? Amazing that you think 24 people is a genocide but not 60,000+.
In Germany, we have the same separation. We have solved the issue by having dedicated units for stuff like political crimes, online crimes, fire/arson investigators, organized crime, property crimes, violent crimes, drug units, you name it.
They're all policemen and -women, but at the very least they stay on the unit for many years and learn on the job, or they get additional education, or they get actual professionals (aka, the police officers do the police/bureaucracy side of things, the expert does the forensics).
> Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system.
Bad idea, there are lots of things to take care about when collecting and securing evidence.
My comment was targeted at the government/ICE's notorious targeting of anti-Israel protesters broadly. It's absolutely clear that we're giving up rights left and right for this total farce, the same way we did for 9/11. It is imperative to the survival of liberal democracy that this ceases.
There'a a balance though. I think that allowing police misconduct would be a larger loss to society.
When the state loses winable criminal cases because of police misconduct, it should be motivation at multiple levels to avoid such misconduct in the future.
To engage in this discussion, you have to avoid falling into at least 4 major schisms where you can assume the other person is wrong about everything and dangerous to you, from Israel/Palestine, US privacy rights, US first amendment rights to protest, and US attitudes on policing.
[0] fiction about ml writing controversial news stories that tear communities apart https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
I'm actually against parallel construction and feel that is far more dangerous than a lot of other activities in that it literally prevents you from knowing your true accuser in terms of laying out a defense/confrontation in court.
This whole story is just full of bad guys all around to a large extent.
Not a bad idea at all. The people from the fire department investigating arson are highly specialized. The only difference between the two systems is which head organization it falls under. So it would be like your fire/arson investigators working under the fire department instead of the police.
US policing has regularly been used to commit abuse and harassment as well as straight crimes. So having that consolidation of power is not good. This store is a perfect example of why they need to be separated because the police cannot be trusted to use facial ID tech responsibly.
Again, it's not just "potential suspects" it's potential witnesses, or identification of potential casualties. I don't feel great about state actors of any type using facial ID, but I can think of any number of reasons why a FD might use it in the course of their duties, and I would much prefer they have it over the PD.
a) The rights were preserved, the assaulter walks free on account of the NYPD's misconduct. The rock throwers have zero cause to be upset, the law protected them from the police overreach successfully.
b) The student was not charged with "anti-war sentiment". He was charged with assault, for throwing rocks at people.
It is likewise misleading to imply that the fact they are a student protester is irrelevant. They are trying very hard to make an example out of these people.
I don't consider throwing rocks/bricks at people "free speech". I also don't consider launching fireworks into crowded buildings "free speech" either.
It's comically to talk about International Law when Israel has so many violations that Netanyahu has a warrant for his arrest by the ICC. It's also incredibly convenient that the IDF indiscriminately bombs and shoots civilians and civilian structures and claims they were Hamas. Including journalists. The cherry on top is preventing anyone else from confirming it. The IDF has continually done this. Claimed all houses are secret ICBM sites and that all civilians in other countries are terrorists. With zero evidence and when they are proven factually wrong they say some captain screwed up and that they will investigate. Yet it keeps happening.
Every civilian in Gaza is starving and cannot get any aid at all because Israel is denying all foreign aid or distribution. These are text book conditions of genocide. I look forward to the future when these atrocities are finally acknowledged. But I have no doubt that will be after the people responsible are long gone sadly.
>Is it so rare to see someone who genuinely cares about this stuff, not just for those who agree with me?
Yes, absolutely. I can name maybe 8, including the both of us.
Like I can totally see the potential debate about if this type of ban should be in place. Sure! But the fact is, that's the current situation. The police can't, and shouldn't, just ignore or bypass rules if they feel like they're too limiting. The police should have basically 0 say (a part from voting) in what the rules they have to follow are.
If I start deciding to ignore laws and rules that I don't like, that would probably be a crime. So why should the police be able to do the same?
Because it seems highly unlikely that if I were to walk out of my apartment right now, walk down to the waterfront, and throw a rock at a group of people sitting at Marsha P Johnson park that the NYPD would even respond to the call. Never mind getting a fire marshal involved to run my photo through a facial recognition program. They've got more important things to deal with. (I'd also, of course, never do this).
This was a protest movement that was a national story and included congressional hearings, so it does seem relevant to have the context.
It provides context. The US has an extensive history of illegal/unconstitutional/questionable surveillance of protesters. This could be seen as either another example of exactly that or, at the very least, as a warning that the police in NY are willing to illegally use facial recognition when it suits their interests.
- the fire marshal happened to be the route chosen in this case
- but there are many other routes
- so the fire marshal detail is kindof insignificant.
Is that a correct understanding? If so, I still wonder why the fire marshal has access?
I get that it's a slippery slope and it is a bit invasive to even establish many of these databases... not to mention the license plate tracking, cell tracking, etc. I also don't like jerks throwing rocks at people.
Self defense usually implies a "reasonable" use of force, what's happening there hasn't been reasonable for more than a year now.
If someone points a gun at you you can kill them, that's self defense, if you burn their entire village down, track and kill their family members 3 generations up it's not self defense anymore
Saying that fruit of the poisonous tree is not admissible is a vast understatement of the complexity of this area of law.
Like, is a victim of life threatening domestic violence who shoots their abuser during an attack a "murderer"? Or is an abuser who killed their spouse in a rage a "murderer"? Obviously these are different and the prosecution/defense hash that out over a very, very long time.
Details matter. Ask any public defender.
Note that we're talking about murder because the comment that set this off tried to pass off "throwing spears" as benign comparatively. No it isn't!
This is very different from the interstate case. If a state shoots another state in the leg and runs away, the only way to establish a deterrent is to shoot back. There is no police force to do it for me. This is the main diffference between civil law and international law.
There's no guarantee they would have done this or that they would have gotten the same answer, though, is kind of salient to the point. There's a chance they wouldn't, because you (hopefully) don't want to make someone look like a suspect to their entire community if their chances of being involved in a crime are low. And even if you do, there's a decent chance you wouldn't have gotten a reply -- especially if their loved ones believe they are innocent. And it would've alerted them and they would've had a higher chance to escape. Which is terrible thing for society if they're a genuine criminal, but a good thing when you're persecuting a non-criminal.
Probabilities and collateral damage matter. If you just treat everything that is "possible" uniformly, then you might as well claim that they COULD generate a random number and just happen to identify the person correctly by sheer luck, so who cares if they do anything to optimize that.
Even in international self defense there are criterion and limits
The spectrum stuff is about the likelihood of harm was my interpretation. Obviously we shouldn't be throwing spears, but there's probabilistic side of it that doesn't exist with nukes, and there's a spectrum between all of that with various probabilities of extents of harm. So if the harms of using these technologies intrinsically carries similar probabilistic risks (false arrests, elevated charges, etc), why not treat it as a risky object worthy of kicking someone off the range? I'm reminded of situations of waiting for the rangemaster to walk away so you can do something stupid and risky.
did you miss the part of the article where the charges were dismissed with prejudice because this absolutely is not the guilty party? You seem to be arguing as though everyone you're arguing against is on the criminal's side but this person didn't do what they were accused of and still had their rights circumvented.
Whether those people use facial recognition software or not isn’t exactly relevant to the law because the police didn’t use it. And it’s legal for other people to use it. As far as the police are concerned, they could have just been the person’s neighbor…