You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying

They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?

This was also one of the more advanced theories about the people selection and targeting AI apps used in Gaza. I've only heard one journalist spell it out, because many journalists believe that AI works.

But the dissenter said that they know it does not work and just use it to blame the AI for mistakes.

I am happy though that we are starting to seem more of this kind of content on HN. I understand that these political (?) posts can descend into finger-pointing and trolling. And that is too bad since I think we should not have blinders on in these rather unsettling times.

I will say that I remember when posts like this one were very quickly flagged when they hit the front page. I am happy to see that more and more people are finding them (unfortunately) relevant.

I'm in the country legally, and I don't care at all how often that is confirmed or by whom.

> What's the alternative? Human beings eyeballing a license a few seconds?

The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.

As long as the state can feign incompetence (let alone launder it with a facial recognition app), this power can easily grow to arbitrary executive authority.

I have no problem with faces being recognized; that's a normal part of living in society. Computers doing it is just a bit more efficient, as you point out. The trouble comes when the state uses it as a liability limiter for their crimes.

And do you believe that some secret ICE app is likely to be that best technology?

I have no reason to believe that ICE has any meaningful biometrics that would identify me as a citizen.

But that's not what this is because it cannot be challenged. This is just an adjustable tool to arrest anyone and fits any need.

You can eventually punish humans abusing power. Cant do that wuth software designed to be abusive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).

1: https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/191249066980685851...

No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.

> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...

What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.

People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.

Man, remember when the entire right wing lost its shit for months on end over Obama's birth certificate? Truly a magical time to be alive...

ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.

You can't be serious.

I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.

HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven

Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.

ICE is operating outside the bounds of law and basic human decency

> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports

To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).

Incidentally, I was reading about the Lincoln County War recently and realized it was a microcosm for all the kinds of corruption that we see on display nationwide today. The rings controlled commerce and any upstarts were facing brutally low chances for success and would be snuffed out if they became a threat.

> pretending to understand things

Yes, like pretending not to understand that ICE is intentionally bypassing the due process guaranteed by the constitution.

“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”

The awkward ‘Siemens and the holocaust’ section was so pathetic.

Immigration rates have not drastically shifted in the last 4 years from the 20+ prior, averaging 1M a year, or .3% of the population. Without immigration, we are below replacement rates

By leeway, do you include the beating people and excessive use of force, or should those agents face consequences?

he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is for standard ids that he would want these things as they are part of the standard id set.

He said he was against computer vision identifying people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer vision engineer implying that they know what they are talking about. Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.

Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them, which they never claimed to do either, they discussed established processes, which a process may or may not be more involved than being handed a piece of paper, depending on context and security needs.

>You can't be serious.

I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.

A legal resident would say "As someone here legally..."

> ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am

1. You cast doubt on your legal status.

2. The APP says you are not here legally.

3. You have no opportunity to present those things proving you are here legally.

> It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.

It's amazing how much conservative dicourse is just them literally not understanding things, thus making discourse impossible.

Consider the literal evil stuff you support, discourse with you is 100% worthless.

“Yeah, I know this is terrible and inhumane, but like, my taxes are kind of high and I’ve got to blame someone. Immigrants seem like maybe they somehow caused all the problems as long as I don’t think about it very hard.”

Sure is weird that DHS claims two million illegal immigrants have left the United States this year but nothing seems to have gotten better yet. Probably just need more deportations. I bet that’ll fix everything.

https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt11.html?utm_source=chat...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/met-polic...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01634-z

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/facial-recognition...

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2479&con...

Yeah it's pretty fucking shit, actually.

Here's the science.

We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.

If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.

When they decide that someone is in the US illegaly using the app... what happens? Is the person apprehended? Driven straight to the border? Taken into custody while more data about them is gathered?

Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.

Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.

...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.

The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).

In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.

It's borderline farcical.

And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral outrage that feels earned around all of this.

Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.

This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44285276

But they're not going to, because the people in charge don't sincerely care about the topic.

As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.

> an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien

You should be less credulous.

> It's not a stretch to say ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am.

ICE is yelling from the rooftops that they don't give a shit about this. It's a stretch to think they will use this information, regardless of can.

As long as they can claim that whatever they did to you is part of their official duties (which, again, good luck expecting the current federal government to take your side on this even if the ICE officer clearly oversteps their duties) only the federal government/DOJ can prosecute them for misconduct, which also obviously won't happen under the current administration.

Okay, I'm officially confused.

IIUC, the ICE announcement says that their facial "recognition" results trump actual documents.

And given that for some groups, state-of-the-art facial recognition algorithms have a 35% false positive rate, that means that for every 100 people snatched up by ICE (with your understanding that "illegals have limited rights.") 30 of them are not who they think they are and being generous, that 10-15% of those are also undocumented despite not being properly identified by the facial "recognition," 25 out of every 100 people in that group arrested will be legal residents or citizens.

And since ICE says that they can ignore actual documents in favor of their "app," those citizens and legal residents may well be deported (to god knows where if they're actually born here) without due process. As such, the whole "Probable cause is something for your lawyer to argue about later." bit may well be irrelevant given your statement about illegals having limited rights.

If ICE assumes incorrectly that you're undocumented, even if you and multiple generations of your ancestors are all born in the US and you can prove it. They explicitly said they will ignore that proof.

As such, based on what ICE claims, you're contradicting yourself. Either folks scooped up by ICE have -- because ICE says so -- "limited rights," and don't require traditional due process for detention and deportation, how does one then get access to a lawyer or court?

I expect you can see why I'm confused about your seemingly contradictory arguments.

I may very well be missing some important detail(s) here. If you could help me to understand what I'm not getting, I'd really appreciate it.

There's no "custody", these people aren't being afforded the Constitutional, legal, or human rights. This is internment by militarised fascist gangs.

"Officer", ha. These are people given a gun and told to go out and brutalise others. There not performing an office of state, they're far outside the law. All, it seems, to try and force those who support democracy to step out of line so Trump/Vance and their handlers can have more people killed and claim civil war is getting in the way of having elections.

LLMs are sycophants, how you ask matters

Good point. Computer vision systems are very fickle wrt pixel changes and from my experience trying to make them robust to changes in lighting, shadows or adversarial inputs, very hard to deploy in production systems. Essentially, you need tight control over the environment so that you can minimize out of distribution images and even then it’s good to have a supervising human.

If you’re interesting in reading more about this, I recommend looking up: domain adaptation, open set recognition, adversarial machine learning.

Also: social recovery via trusted relatives.

Downvoted should know I’m not referring to SSO, or social media network auth.

> allows users to regain access to their funds without a traditional seed phrase by leveraging trusted contacts (guardians) and a predefined recovery protocol. If a user loses access, they coordinate with a quorum of these guardians, who each provide a piece of the necessary information to restore

If the computer says you’re in the US illegally, but you have documents that say you are a US citizen, then you are put in custody until the discrepancy can be resolved.

It really depends on whether or not there is a standing deportation order for that person. If not, then it’s a lengthy process where you appear in front of a judge who may release you (yes, low risk aliens are still being released) or held in custody until the trial is held.

If you have a standing deportation order, and your identity is confirmed, then yes, you may be deported quite quickly.

No due process is being denied. If you have a standing deportation order, you can be deported.

So ICE go around masked and put people in some kind of camps based on what some app says? And then when they are in the camp what happens?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-64980565

Readers are likely to interpret this generally and it may act as a lightning rod - the statement may need some qualifiers to define what is not denying due process.

Hmmm, that sounds like it would fail outright in some severe edge cases.

For example mass casualty events (fire, earthquake, war, etc) that only leaves a few survivors.

While doing so can be ok, you should probably do some checking via non-LLM means as well.

Otherwise you'll end up misunderstanding things that you _think_ you've learned about. :(

Yeah, this is exactly the problem. It is not, in fact, illegal to be in this country without a visa. It's a purely civil matter. Like, parking ticket level.

Hauling citizens (or anyone, really) off the street and holding them for indeterminate amounts of times when they haven't committed any crime is not due process.

I don't believe there's a clear picture of what happens next.

Though I know some report the conditions inside the camps are pretty bad, access to lawyers is spotty, reportedly some people are deported without an official removal order / due process, and some people we don't know because they disappear from the public database that's supposed to inform family about the detained person's condition and whereabouts.

I'm not sure if all of that is covered in this BBC report, but feel free to read other journalistic sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy3zel0r3go

I'm always surprised more people don't know how many Nazis were in NATO offices and the West German federal police

It's not like people aren't still frothing at the mouth to repeat the same mistake in Venezuela or Palestine or Yemen. Maintaining empire requires shows of force. There's always profit to be made along the way. It motivates itself

JP Morgan was sloppy in it's mortgage approvals contributing to the financial crisis of 2007. Do you think that's not a serious matter? That was entirely a civil, not criminal matter.

And overstaying a visa has serious consequences. It's not a fine and you can go on living in the US illegally. You will be deported and receive a 3-10 year ban on re-entry. Reenter again and it's criminal matter.

But you're also ignoring the numerous criminal violations that occur with illegal immigration. Illegal entry, reentry after deportation, immigration fraud, using fraudulent documents, human trafficking, recieving social services reserved for citizens. All of these are criminal violations.

And no, investigating a possible civil or criminal matter and detaining people while you conduct your investigation has nothing to do with due process. Police and immigration officials need these limited powers to do their job. Each of these people detained will either be released or stand in front of a judge, which shows they received due process.

No. The model is, "Hey! this guy is being a pain in the ass. He even claimed that The President wasn't blessed with superintelligence and doesn't actually smell really good!

We need to get this terrorist off the streets! He sure looks a whole lot like that illegal on the FBI most wanted list, doesn't he? Off to CECOT with him!

What's that? He's a twelfth generation citizen? No way! Look, the app I used to claim this guy matches an illegal who's also a child rapist!

Your papers are all fake (if, as a citizen he's even carrying them). Onto the plane with you Senor.

That's the model. Feel free to disagree, but come back and reread this comment in 18 months. I hope you read it then and think "what a paranoid guy! Nothing like that could ever happen here!" But I'm not holding my breath. :(

Those events require special government attention and cost anyway.

Getting Grandma's taxes paid? Not so much. Or: shouldn't!

(The idea is to remove as much user and support burden as possible, not solve societies woes, haha)

Paul Bremer made something very, very stupid.

This dire-ness, it's recent and not something that's been going on since forever? It's something that the last person messed up, and it's an emergency that only the new person can fix, and it's such an emergency that we need to give them powers that WILL later be used against you? It's that dire?

Perhaps because your peers are recent immigrants who are culturally and linguistically foreign to you, and are physically here primarily because the place they are originally from is terrible, rather than because they are actually interested in joining your community and sharing its values.

They have repeatedly violated the normal procedures, ignored court orders and even lied to judges. They obviously have contempt for the law so it doesn't make sense to assume that they are following proper procedures.

But at the same time, when the prior norms were incredibly lax to the point many immigration laws were ignored, suddenly enforcing what is on the books can look rather jarring.

Maybe start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uleKvJ5Xsw8

But regardless it’s a 30 min video, so is there something you feel is important because I don’t have the time. Maybe an article from a more reputable source?

I mean it starts with “ICE agents breaking car windows”. If you’re asked to exit your vehicle by a federal law officer and you just roll up the window that will happen. The US (and in fact no country) has rules where a law enforcement officer with probable cause is supposed to give up when a suspect refuses to follow orders.

The five minutes I listened to seemed suspect since it’s a women just saying “they do this” with no sources. Am I just supposed to take her at her word?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area

If you are an actual citizen, the law basically says they can briefly detain you to verify. Brief here is meant to be like "15 minutes". However, it is now taking weeks or months in some cases.

These are clear due process violations, and they are happening regularly now.

They also cannot simply ignore authoritative evidence of citizenship because a computer says otherwise, without violating due process (because it affects their ability to have cause).

Certainly they can ignore like a printout or something, but if you have a valid passport or real id drivers license (IE something considered authoritative), it's almost certainly a due process violation to ignore it and detain you for weeks anyway based on a facial recognition match.

Of course the technical solution isn’t easy, (or necessarily all good),

but that doesn’t make it any less likely, or intriguing to discuss the roadmap.

(You combine the scanned data together from both of those scans, regardless of value, as your recovery mechanism, by the way - accounting for abnormal anatomy in a defined, reproducible way is a challenge, not a barrier)

So you don't trust the computer vision algorithm...

But you do trust the meatbags?

Reminds me of the whole discussion around self driving cars. About how people wanted perfection, both in executing how cars move and ethics. While they drove around humans every day just fine

sure, if an expert in self driving cars came in and said self driving cars are untrustworthy.

“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”

"Trust the word of the black box" is pure technocratic dystopian nonsense.

That's the magic with not setting a mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria. You just fall back to that kind of horrible argument

no I don't think humans are trustworthy, I think the procedures discussed are more secure than the alternative on offer which an expert in that technology described as being untrustworthy, implying that it was less trustworthy than the processes it was offered as an alternative to, and then gave technical reasons why which basically boiled down to the reasons why I expected that alternative would be untrustworthy

Sure if you produce some secure form of proof that has no indication of being fraudulent there is no cause to detain.

But that’s not what’s happening in many cases. People using others ID. Questions about fraud in the immigration case itself.

If you have any examples of US citizens being detained for extended periods (actual citizens, not just a verbal claim) I’d be interested to read about them.