Many Police Departments Have Software That Can Identify People In Crowds (buzzfeednews.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: As protesters demand an end to police brutality and the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation, police departments around the country are using software that can track and identify people in crowds from surveillance footage -- often with little to no public oversight or knowledge. Dozens of cities around the country are using BriefCam, which sells software that allows police to comb through surveillance footage to monitor protests and enforce social distancing, and almost all of these cities have hosted protests against police brutality in the weeks since George Floyd was killed in police custody, BuzzFeed News has found. Some of the cities using BriefCam's technology -- such as New Orleans and St. Paul -- have been the site of extreme police violence, with officers using rubber bullets, tear gas, and batons on protesters. Authorities in Chicago; Boston; Detroit; Denver; Doral, Florida; Hartford, Connecticut; and Santa Fe County, New Mexico have also used it.
Founded in 2007 by Hebrew University researchers and now owned by camera company Canon, the Israel-based company sells a system called "Protect & Insights" that lets police and private companies filter hours of closed circuit television and home surveillance and create excerpts of a few relevant moments. Protect & Insights has built-in facial recognition and license plate reader searches, and lets police create "Watch Lists" of faces and license plates. The company also said its tool could filter out "men, women, children, clothing, bags, vehicles, animals, size, color, speed, path, direction, dwell time, and more." [...] There are currently no federal guidelines restricting the use of video analytics, license plate reader, and facial recognition software offered by companies like BriefCam. Neema Singh Guliani a senior legislative counsel with the ACLU said that city governments often acquire these technologies without public oversight or debate.
Founded in 2007 by Hebrew University researchers and now owned by camera company Canon, the Israel-based company sells a system called "Protect & Insights" that lets police and private companies filter hours of closed circuit television and home surveillance and create excerpts of a few relevant moments. Protect & Insights has built-in facial recognition and license plate reader searches, and lets police create "Watch Lists" of faces and license plates. The company also said its tool could filter out "men, women, children, clothing, bags, vehicles, animals, size, color, speed, path, direction, dwell time, and more." [...] There are currently no federal guidelines restricting the use of video analytics, license plate reader, and facial recognition software offered by companies like BriefCam. Neema Singh Guliani a senior legislative counsel with the ACLU said that city governments often acquire these technologies without public oversight or debate.
The goatse guy seems pretty appropriate, eh? (Score:3)
Spread 'em for the blujahideen.
False positives? (Score:1)
I wonder how many of them can be fooled by a Halloween mask of Richard Nixon's face.
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It is better if everyone wears the same kind of mask, black and not because black lives matter but it hides contours better and at dusk or in shadow it is awkward to recognise, beard and moustache. Don't forget sunglasses and everyone wear a black lightweight beanie. It'll drive the facial recognition software crazy and look really odd on the streets, everyone wearing a black mask, a black beanie and dark wrap around sunglasses.
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So, what I'm getting from this is... (Score:1)
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I think there's a good chance we're already seeing the effects of this and just nobody has really noticed yet.
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There are AI programs that can distinguish how a person walks. So if someone was framed they could easily bring this up and it could be proven not to be them.
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To be honest that's probably something that can be studied and faked just as easily.
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Brilliant (Score:3)
More power to them
stop being a criminal (Score:1, Insightful)
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White privilege is so unbelievable awesome I wish non-whites could experience it.
We whites get to watch mobs of 90% black people loot and vandalize and torch black-owned businesses in black neighborhoods where mostly black people work, and then watch all the black people and liberal media blame whites for the destruction.
If that isn't enough privilege, generally everyone gets to act racist, prejudiced, and bigoted towards whites, show blind hate towards whites, blame whites for all their problems and poor l
Re: stop being a criminal (Score:2)
Doesn't help. The owner of the gym i go to, who is white, got profiled and pulled over by a local sheriff. He was wearing one of his gyms shirts which are tie dye, had his son with long hair with him, riding in his beater pick up. So they pulled him over looking for drugs. The cop even lied and and claimed he could smell it (he doesn't even do drugs). Then when the cop wasn't getting anything from him, he went over and tried to interrogate his 9 year old son.
I wonder (Score:3)
If this is the same company whose product we evaluated around 2005 when I worked with a public safety software company. The initial request from our clients was to use it to identify suspects from mug shots.
We elected not to pursue the product - too many false positives and misidentifications. And, that was on clear mug shot photos.
Itâ(TM)s scary...horrifying, actually, knowing that it is capable of using less than HD video feeds.
If a cop can do it legally, so can a machine (Score:3, Insightful)
It is perfectly legal — indeed, useful — if a policeman looking at a crown can recognize faces.
Therefor, it is just as legal — and useful — for a machine to help him. Technology improves many jobs, including that of a police officer.
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This sexist limitation never made sense to me either... Whatever can be legally perceived, can also be be legally recorded. Or, at least, that's how things should be. Classified materials are different — because in order to legally see them, you have to agree to not make unauthorized copies.
But skirts aren't like that at all... It is disgusting, but I don't see, how it can be illegal in a free country.
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No difference from a live policeman remembering it either.
Yes, and a live policeman's report is there forever too.
"Yeah, that's him!" (Score:3)
Why are these articles always, "Police officers identify suspect by using AI Software."?
None of them are ever, "AI Software used to identify police officer in brutality claim."
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Lawyers and rights orgs have been using facial recognition to identify cops who cover up their identification. It used to be a slow manual process but now it can be somewhat automated.
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the problem is still that you need overwhelming evidence to even prosecute police misconduct, and even then the jury will be heavily biased, and if that's not enough police enjoy a pretty good corporatist safety network and lots of loopholes to evade sanction.
it could be useful to expose them to the public opinion, though.
at some point it won't matter, though, drones will just probably shoot people on the spot as soon as the algorithm fires. for public safety.
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I'll go with select criteria of * (Score:2)
dwell time
We just did this a few threads back, didn't we?
Open season (Score:1)
No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone with access to Python can easily hack together facial recognition. OpenCV does most of the work.
The problem is having a huge database and a massive amount of processing power. This is also really quite easy. If law enforcement agencies each invest in a few stacks of nVidia or IBM machine learning nodes and a few stacks of Ceph nodes, it will not even require much effort. I know, I work with this every day.
Make the compute nodes boot from LAN with CentOS. Write a script to manage elasticity using IPMI. Mount machine specific partitions as NFS based on MAC address. Deploy K8S on previously unmanaged nodes. Then when it is all up, just run a brute force algorithm as a container.
The algorithm is simple... covnet images of who you are looking for, establish a series of points of interest (wrinkles, nostrils, etc...) then look for points in a database of previously scanned images. Add points for matching characteristics between images and once passing a given threshold, use ML to attempt positive/negative matching in an is it a hotdog style.
It will have horrible results in the beginning, but as the ML is trained, it will increase accuracy over time.
The ease of doing this is very high. It is no longer a science requiring top companies with top talent to accomplish. It is strictly a matter of money and time.
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You are right. It's also not like only the big players would have such software or access to the needed resources. The big players already use the technology themselves for various purposes that have in common making more money.
It's also not always obvious they already use it, Microsoft make it sound like they developed it but are sitting on a piece of tech they developed and are clueless whom to sell to but certainly not a gov.
But there's always some little anonymous Ukrainian, Rumanian or Israeli company
Lyrics (Score:1)
Many old protestors can block them! (Score:2)
Yeah, and many 75 year old Antifa agitators can use their interference black boxes to block all police attempts at scanning the crowd! I heard it from the president.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes (Score:2)
Three indicted for allegedly throwing Molotov cocktails at NYPD vehicles, face life in prison. [nypost.com]
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