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574 points nh43215rgb | 65 comments | | HN request time: 0.9s | source | bottom
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hexbin010 ◴[] No.45781498[source]
> “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,”

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"?

replies(13): >>45781606 #>>45781662 #>>45781821 #>>45782252 #>>45782541 #>>45782817 #>>45782848 #>>45782971 #>>45783123 #>>45783772 #>>45784468 #>>45784720 #>>45786967 #
1. rgsahTR ◴[] No.45781662[source]
> They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right?

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.

replies(5): >>45782107 #>>45782130 #>>45782878 #>>45783028 #>>45783384 #
2. JKCalhoun ◴[] No.45782330[source]
Since your account is 17 minutes old, I have to assume you have been lurking for some time to "remember when…" on HN.

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.

replies(4): >>45782729 #>>45782820 #>>45783159 #>>45783196 #
3. throw-the-towel ◴[] No.45782729{3}[source]
This is probably a throwaway account. (Also, its username reads, shall I say, suspicious.)
4. zoklet-enjoyer ◴[] No.45782820{3}[source]
I lurked on HN for YEARS because I didn't even realize it was a message board haha. I had subscribed to the RSS feed and read the links but not comments. I thought it was just hacker news, as in a news aggregator.
5. bko ◴[] No.45782878[source]
It's better that the alternative which is humans. Unless you think enforcing laws or ever having the need to establish identity should never take place
replies(11): >>45782905 #>>45782914 #>>45782959 #>>45782980 #>>45783029 #>>45783156 #>>45783385 #>>45784431 #>>45787217 #>>45788483 #>>45792841 #
6. jMyles ◴[] No.45782914[source]
Humans are great at identifying each other. As the internet matures (and ease of long-distance communication obviates the need for massive nation states), we can constrain state authority to geographic batches small enough that people are known to one another.
7. watwut ◴[] No.45782959[source]
It is not better if it ends up harrasing and harning more people and is unaccountable.

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

8. sennalen ◴[] No.45782980[source]
It's humans. This is like TSA's fake bomb detectors with nothing inside the plastic shell
replies(1): >>45783387 #
9. roywiggins ◴[] No.45783028[source]
The alleged facts are worse than an AI simply making mistakes:

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

10. gessha ◴[] No.45783029[source]
As a computer vision engineer, I wouldn’t trust any vision system for important decisions. We have plenty of established process for verification via personal documents such as ID, birth certificate, etc and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
replies(2): >>45783373 #>>45785072 #
11. 01HNNWZ0MV43FF ◴[] No.45783156[source]
The real alternative would be the inalienable human rights we were promised
replies(2): >>45783313 #>>45783395 #
12. pfannkuchen ◴[] No.45783313{3}[source]
This sort of thinking is kind of a retcon, no? The people who wrote the line you’re referencing also decided that none of the people ICE is involved with were even eligible for citizenship. If their rules held out, this wouldn’t even be a thing. I’m not arguing that their rules were correct, just that picking and choosing things they said feels intellectually dishonest.
replies(1): >>45784725 #
13. bko ◴[] No.45783373{3}[source]
So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?

You can't be serious.

replies(5): >>45783474 #>>45783516 #>>45783667 #>>45784466 #>>45786816 #
14. bko ◴[] No.45783387{3}[source]
You think the person at the TSA that gets paid 40k a year is better at facial recognition than a computer?
replies(7): >>45783450 #>>45783557 #>>45783603 #>>45783644 #>>45783650 #>>45783831 #>>45791172 #
15. ◴[] No.45783450{4}[source]
16. verdverm ◴[] No.45783452{4}[source]
Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.

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

17. ToucanLoucan ◴[] No.45783474{4}[source]
I love how you're contrasting the credibility of demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have been the basis for establishing identity for more than a century.

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

18. shadowgovt ◴[] No.45783516{4}[source]
That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.

> 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).

19. snovv_crash ◴[] No.45783557{4}[source]
Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical document with their name and likeness on it already makes up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.
replies(1): >>45786553 #
20. Larrikin ◴[] No.45783603{4}[source]
Stop presenting your opinion with no evidence as obvious facts on the ground that people need to argue against with sources.
21. tchalla ◴[] No.45783644{4}[source]
Are you saying that a computer should be trusted without human intervention? If so, I have a computer right now that says you should be banned on the Internet.
22. novemp ◴[] No.45783650{4}[source]
Yes.
23. convolvatron ◴[] No.45783661[source]
well, given that the current US regime has been dancing around the notion that criticism of the state of Israel should be _illegal_. Such criticism has already been used as the pretense to detain and deport legal residents. Combined with the popular notion that law enforcement should be digging around in people's social media accounts to ascertain if they are a member of the 'enemy within', some people might be legitimately concerned about posting anything that casts doubt on the morality of the current conflict in Gaza.
24. bryanrasmussen ◴[] No.45783667{4}[source]
(using he as gender neutral here)

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.

replies(1): >>45787234 #
25. atmavatar ◴[] No.45783831{4}[source]
It's likely the TSA employee's five year old child is better at facial recognition than a computer, too.
replies(1): >>45783926 #
26. bko ◴[] No.45783926{5}[source]
Please don't spread unscientific misinformation. You can say ICE bad, or you don't believe in borders, but saying computer facial recognition is inaccurate compared to humans is just factually incorrect.

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

replies(2): >>45783978 #>>45783993 #
27. Kinrany ◴[] No.45783978{6}[source]
Better-than-human facial recognition existing doesn't mean that all facial recognition technology is that good.
28. esseph ◴[] No.45783993{6}[source]
https://abc7ny.com/post/man-falsely-jailed-nypds-facial-reco...

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.

replies(1): >>45784134 #
29. verdverm ◴[] No.45784134{7}[source]
Looks like GP is using ChatGPT (see the utm_source in their link) to find the first result that supports their viewpoint rather than doing a broad discovery and analysis
replies(2): >>45785206 #>>45786543 #
30. anigbrowl ◴[] No.45784431[source]
Your subsequent comments like 'If you deny the need to know anything about anyone at any time, you're just so far gone that there is no discussion that could be had' indicate that you're sarcastically trolling people, and I suggest you do that somewhere else in future.
31. AnthonyMouse ◴[] No.45784466{4}[source]
> So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?

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.

32. UniverseHacker ◴[] No.45784725{4}[source]
It’s more complex than that- initial drafts of the declaration of independence were more explicit about literally covering all people, and even had a rant about how slavery was unethical, and they compromised by cutting these in order to get enough consensus to make it happen at all. Thomas Jefferson himself was a hypocrite- he wrote a lot about how slavery was wrong and should be ended, all the while owning slaves himself.

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.

replies(1): >>45787886 #
33. gatesbillz ◴[] No.45785072{3}[source]
KYC disagrees.
34. ◴[] No.45785206{8}[source]
35. bko ◴[] No.45786543{8}[source]
The horror! Someone using an LLM for basic information gathering like "is AI facial recognition accurate compared to humans?" rather than going off vibes or one off sensationalized articles.
replies(3): >>45787198 #>>45788024 #>>45788516 #
36. bko ◴[] No.45786553{5}[source]
If you really worked in this space you would know that AI models don't scan 200M people because... why would they? Seems kind of weird.
replies(2): >>45786676 #>>45788494 #
37. snovv_crash ◴[] No.45786676{6}[source]
The database of potential US citizens that could be matched to a face scan is where the 200M comes from.
38. DANmode ◴[] No.45786816{4}[source]
It’s ALL security theater of varying degrees until we’re using public/private keypairs as identities.
replies(1): >>45787233 #
39. verdverm ◴[] No.45787198{9}[source]
Apparently it has not given you broad coverage of the subject, others have provide more references showing the opposite result of your claim

LLMs are sycophants, how you ask matters

40. array_key_first ◴[] No.45787217[source]
Literally how is it better than humans. You can't just say that, you have to justify it.
41. Terr_ ◴[] No.45787233{5}[source]
We'll still need a layer for replacement and revocation though. It'd be nice if nobody ever had their private key lost/destroyed/stolen but it's going to happen.
replies(1): >>45787265 #
42. gessha ◴[] No.45787234{5}[source]
> Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.

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.

replies(2): >>45788698 #>>45792263 #
43. DANmode ◴[] No.45787265{6}[source]
DNA+iris, and or whatever the next thing is.

Also: social recovery via trusted relatives.

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

replies(2): >>45787773 #>>45791668 #
44. DANmode ◴[] No.45787773{7}[source]
//

> 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

replies(1): >>45788008 #
45. pfannkuchen ◴[] No.45787886{5}[source]
Sorry is ICE going around enslaving Africans? I thought the topic was people being targeted for removal based on looking like a Native American. What does Jefferson’s view on slavery have to do with anything?
replies(2): >>45790560 #>>45791392 #
46. justinclift ◴[] No.45788008{8}[source]
> they coordinate with a quorum of these guardians

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.

replies(1): >>45788897 #
47. justinclift ◴[] No.45788024{9}[source]
> Someone using an LLM for basic information gathering ...

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. :(

48. queenkjuul ◴[] No.45788483[source]
I would much rather have a forgetful, error-prone human, who has empathy and intelligence to assess a situation beyond the metrics put into a computer
49. queenkjuul ◴[] No.45788494{6}[source]
So the model is verifying faces against ... A database of zero faces? Surely there's 200M faces in there, or else how does it work?
replies(1): >>45788661 #
50. queenkjuul ◴[] No.45788516{9}[source]
LLM is equivalent to vibes, sorry
51. ThrowMeAway1618 ◴[] No.45788661{7}[source]
>So the model is verifying faces against ... A database of zero faces? Surely there's 200M faces in there, or else how does it work?

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. :(

replies(1): >>45789127 #
52. bryanrasmussen ◴[] No.45788698{6}[source]
I assumed you knew what you were talking about, but yes it's not my domain. Thanks for the explanation.
53. DANmode ◴[] No.45788897{9}[source]
Definitely.

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)

54. actionfromafar ◴[] No.45789127{8}[source]
In 18 months the discussion will have moved on to make excuses for the conentration camps. Alligator Auschwitz and such camps must be much larger to hold everyone.
55. ◴[] No.45790560{6}[source]
56. rpdillon ◴[] No.45791172{4}[source]
People are exceptionally good at facial recognition because of the Fusiform face area, which is a specialized portion of the temporal lobe optimized for it.

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

57. UniverseHacker ◴[] No.45791392{6}[source]
The context is the question of if human rights are universal or only for certain privileged groups
replies(1): >>45794465 #
58. elondaits ◴[] No.45791668{7}[source]
It’s possible to lose one’s irises. Most identical twins have almost identical DNA. Then there’s the “right to be forgotten”, people on witness protection, refugees and immigrants who enter the system as adults, etc. I don’t think there’s an easy technical solution.
replies(1): >>45792006 #
59. DANmode ◴[] No.45792006{8}[source]
Blind twins* will need to carry an alternative. /s

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)

60. TrololoTroll ◴[] No.45792263{6}[source]
The discussion is missing the point of the original snarky comment

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

replies(1): >>45792605 #
61. bryanrasmussen ◴[] No.45792605{7}[source]
>Reminds me of the whole discussion around self driving cars. About how people wanted perfection,

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

replies(1): >>45793242 #
62. Arrath ◴[] No.45792841[source]
Bullshit! The alternative is mentioned in the article, trust the official documents presented by the 'suspect', as that's the purpose of the documents. As in OP's quote:

“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.

63. TrololoTroll ◴[] No.45793242{8}[source]
As someone who has dealt with humans all your life, do you think humans are trustworthy?

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

replies(1): >>45794288 #
64. bryanrasmussen ◴[] No.45794288{9}[source]
somehow it seems not as magic as setting the mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria that fails 99% of the time. (percentage chosen to show absurdity of claiming that mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria is inherently superior)

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

65. pfannkuchen ◴[] No.45794465{7}[source]
Those are your personal abstraction boundaries. It is a perfectly coherent set of positions to oppose enslaving humans while at the same time being selective about which humans you allow into your nation. The “founding fathers” factually prohibited non-whites from being citizens of America. So what if they were opposed to slavery or not? Those are entirely different matters, and a position on slavery does not imply anything about a position on “any person on earth can be an American”.