Clearview AI, Used by Police To Find Criminals, Now in Public Defenders' Hands (nytimes.com) 61
After a Florida man was accused of vehicular homicide, his lawyer used Clearview AI's facial recognition software to prove his innocence. But other defense lawyers say Clearview's offer rings hollow. From a report: It was the scariest night of Andrew Grantt Conlyn's life. He sat in the passenger seat of a two-door 1997 Ford Mustang, clutching his seatbelt, as his friend drove approximately 100 miles per hour down a palm tree-lined avenue in Fort Myers, Fla. His friend, inebriated and distraught, occasionally swerved onto the wrong side of the road to pass cars that were complying with the 35 mile-an-hour speed limit. "Someone is going to die tonight," Mr. Conlyn thought. And then his friend hit a curb and lost control of the car. The Mustang began spinning wildly, hitting a light pole and three palm trees before coming to a stop, the passenger's side against a tree. At some point, Mr. Conlyn blacked out. When he came to, his friend was gone, the car was on fire and his seatbelt buckle was jammed. Luckily, a good Samaritan intervened, prying open the driver's side door and pulling Mr. Conlyn out of the burning vehicle.
Mr. Conlyn didn't learn his savior's name that Wednesday night in March 2017, nor did the police, who came to the scene and found the body of his friend, Colton Hassut, in the bushes near the crash; he'd been ejected from the car and had died. In the years that followed, the inability to track down that good Samaritan derailed Mr. Conlyn's life. If Clearview AI, which is based in New York, hadn't granted his lawyer special access to a facial recognition database of 20 billion faces, Mr. Conlyn might have spent up to 15 years in prison because the police believed he had been the one driving the car. For the last few years, Clearview AI's tool has been largely restricted to law enforcement, but the company now plans to offer access to public defenders. Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive, said this would help "balance the scales of justice," but critics of the company are skeptical given the legal and ethical concerns that swirl around Clearview AI's groundbreaking technology. The company scraped billions of faces from social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and other parts of the web in order to build an app that seeks to unearth every public photo of a person that exists online.
Mr. Conlyn didn't learn his savior's name that Wednesday night in March 2017, nor did the police, who came to the scene and found the body of his friend, Colton Hassut, in the bushes near the crash; he'd been ejected from the car and had died. In the years that followed, the inability to track down that good Samaritan derailed Mr. Conlyn's life. If Clearview AI, which is based in New York, hadn't granted his lawyer special access to a facial recognition database of 20 billion faces, Mr. Conlyn might have spent up to 15 years in prison because the police believed he had been the one driving the car. For the last few years, Clearview AI's tool has been largely restricted to law enforcement, but the company now plans to offer access to public defenders. Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive, said this would help "balance the scales of justice," but critics of the company are skeptical given the legal and ethical concerns that swirl around Clearview AI's groundbreaking technology. The company scraped billions of faces from social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and other parts of the web in order to build an app that seeks to unearth every public photo of a person that exists online.
Pro-crime lobby? (Score:2, Interesting)
We're constantly getting powerful new tools that are better than what we had before, like the horrible state of actual people trying to recognize others, and every time we get all these stories about how awful that is. Why are journalists so distraught that we might catch the right people for crimes with strong evidence, again? They constantly organize freakouts on that. Seems like there should be some explanation for that, no?
You mean black people (Score:1, Insightful)
If you don't have the balls to say it, don't weasel out with a dog whistle. Keep your trap shut.
Now onto your claims. Ignoring that the vast majority on the left oppose direct reparations in favor of class based aid, nobody has said jack or shit about ignoring crime. Stop putting words in our mouths.
Instead what we've said, repeatedly, is that when you adjust for income levels black people commit cri
Do as you say, not as you do? (Score:2)
Is the DA of LA a "nobody"? Do you somehow distinguish between "ignoring" crime and declining to prosecute certain classes of crime?
Source [abc7.com]
How about the DA in
Wow, you really put effort (Score:2)
Let's see:
1. He's declining to prosecute misdemeanors. This is a counter to what's called "broken windows policing", e.g. where cops over police minority neighborhoods so that their citizens are more likely to have criminal records, relying on the fact that we punish people long after they're paid their debt to society. It's a well documented phenomenon.
Nobody said anything about not prosecuting crimes. What we're doing is not prosecuting minor infractions black people co
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> Nobody said anything about not prosecuting crimes. What we're doing is not prosecuting minor infractions black people commit that most white folk would get let off with a warning.
So you distinguish between crimes and... crimes? I note that you're retreating from your position that 'nobody' said this. Meanwhile you talk about "dogwhistles" to put words into my mouth a couple posts down from claiming that people are stuffing them into yours. Hypocrite much?
The McDonalds guy was out on bail the next da
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Dude didn't actually hurt anyone at McDonalds and got out on bail soon after. Yeah, I still don't think it makes sense either but that's what I've been saying.
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Do you have any examples of this? (If you read the summary, of course, you know that this story is about trying to get exculpatory evidence.)
I think that without an example, nobody is going to have a clue what you're talking about, and they might conclude that you're just making up this nonsense.
Re:Pro-crime lobby? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because large parts of the US criminalize a lot of things that shouldn't be illegal (should be treated as medical/social issues at most).
Sex work. Personal use/possession of drugs by adults. They're trying to criminalize out of state travel to get an abortion as well in some states.
Fuck those laws. Fuck those who made them. Fuck those who enforce them. It's good that some people can be exonerated, but there are also people who are legally guilty, but did nothing MORALLY wrong.
This move by Clearview does nothing to help them. Since American legislators are often Fascist cunts, the only way to fix this is to encourage civil disobedience (jury nullification -- always vote to acquit in cases of victimless crimes, even if legally guilty) and publicly shame police enforcing certain laws.
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Publicly shaming cops doesn't work (Score:2)
I learned this when at a neighbor's party when her friend came by with her husband... who was a cop. Made everyone at the party uncomfortable because you never know when you're gonna break some petty drug law and get arrested.
Cops can't really hang around the rest of us. We give them too much power and encourage them to abuse it. That means outside their immediate circle of friends and
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Made everyone at the party uncomfortable because you never know when you're gonna break some petty drug law and get arrested.
You can't even leave the drugs at home for a couple hours to go socialize. Explains so much!
Relax, Public Defenders still only get (Score:3)
Re:Pro-crime lobby? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's two parts to it, really. The first part is that there's still some question around the accuracy and efficacy of these AI facial recognition systems. Testing is ongoing, but there's some question about the accuracy of the kind of search where you look for a specific face amongst the entire dataset. There's been some promising results with comparing two photos of the same person, as of last year, but direct random searches are still mostly untested and unproven. Also, since even at best it's not a 100% thing, people are concerned that because it's the new trendy hotness, a false positive will end up getting someone convicted based solely on that. Same issue we've seen with fingerprints, DNA, and some other forensics where they're one of several tools that should be used but they end up being treated like the one single gold standard test that by itself can prove a case (or, in the case of things like blood pattern analysis and lie detectors, complete pseudoscience that ended up being treated seriously).
Secondly, there's some concern about where they got the data to seed the databases with. They've allegedly (and have been fined) broken various T&Cs and laws to gather it, which start raising the question of how enforceable those are, what they mean in an era of big data and things like social media, and who ultimately owns/controls that data. If I've posted a picture on social media, even on a "public" setting, the site T&Cs and my own expectations may be against a company using it in that way.
Anyway, the ultimate thing right now is it's still unclear how effective it is and whether it's fully trustworthy, even if there's been some high-profile successes with it. I don't think it's a pro-crime lobby (which is silly) but people very aware of how past "innovations" have ended up causing more harm than good.
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WTF with paywalls (Score:3)
public defenders but not private ones? (Score:2)
public defenders but not private ones?
They've already been able to get the data (Score:2)
Missing from TFS (Score:5, Informative)
Missing from TFS, and buried deep down in TFA (which is paywalled and I refuse to sign up for - but view source works)
The cops didn't get the name of the good samaritan who pulled Conlyn from the car - from the passenger side, but via the drivers door (bad cop for not get details of the samaritan, or a definitive stamens of what the samaritan did). But they did have body cam footage of the samaritan.
When the body cam footage was eventually plugged into ClearView, it came up with an image of the samaritan that had been scrapped by ClearView from the internet.
The samaritan was tracked down, and he provided evidence that exonerated Conlyn from the charges of vehicular homicide.
Happy endings all around - except for the scrapping of all those images by ClearView.
ClearView AI = Privacy Rapists (Score:3)
Happy endings all around - except for the scrapping of all those images by ClearView.
Nothing good ever came from known privacy rapists.
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"scrapping" or "scraping"? In this context, it's hard to tell, and they're basically antonyms here.
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"scrapping" or "scraping"? In this context, it's hard to tell, and they're basically antonyms here.
Scraping - obviously in this context. But I make no apologies for my typos. Like "definitive stamens" which I saw after I posted.
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Why wouldn't the bodycam images be good enough here? Police were too intent to convict someone?
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Why wouldn't the bodycam images be good enough here? Police were too intent to convict someone?
They had the body cam images of the samaritan, but didn't have the samaritan's name or address.
So the defense used ClearView to troll through the entire internet looking for him, as they needed the samaritan to give evidence of what he did prior to the police arriving in the scene.
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How is this even possible? Every interaction I have with NSW or Victoria Police in Australia (usually to report a public safety issue of some kind), they take my name, address and phone number. Isn't it standard operating procedure?
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How is this even possible? Every interaction I have with NSW or Victoria Police in Australia (usually to report a public safety issue of some kind), they take my name, address and phone number. Isn't it standard operating procedure?
How that was possible is a totally separate question.
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Happy endings all around
15 years late.
except for the scrapping of all those images by ClearView.
Why? That's what lead to Conlyn's exoneration. But finding the good Samaritan from those images should have been done in the days or weeks following the accident. In time to drop charges before the trial. By the police in the normal course of doing their f*king job.
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> an image of the samaritan that had been _scrapped_ by ClearView
> the _scrapping_ of all those images by ClearView
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
https://www.dictionary.com/bro... [dictionary.com]
https://www.dictionary.com/bro... [dictionary.com]
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Surely the issue here is that someone was wrongfully accused and this was the only way to prove them innocent.
That sounds like a situation where proof that they committed a crime beyond reasonable doubt should not be attainable, given that any available evidence must have been circumstantial or incomplete to wrongly suggest that he did it in the first place.
I dont see a issue with this (Score:2)
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Re:this ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The communities elected those DAs, based on promises made and campaigns ran by people with very strange agendas.
Why not observe, record, analyze, and then apply corrections to the results obtained? Why keep electing the same trash over and over?
This is a problem created by the very communities affected, and as long as they keep voting like they're voting it won't get fixed. The ones getting hurt are the ones who most need help, and they're not going to get it from the people they're voting in.
But sure. B
Re:this ? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "community" is often packed with the stupidest globs of yeasty prostate discharge in existence ... case in point, the American "community" elected Trump in 2016.
This being said - Florida has a long history of felon disenfranchisement, so 10% of their public of voting age can't vote. The system perpetuates itself through disenfranchisment. Historically, it was designed to disenfranchise people based on crimes of poverty, so the poor and/or non-white people were more likely to be locked out of voting. It's a vicious cycle.
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case in point, the American "community" elected Trump in 2016.
The "community" didn't. Trump didn't win the popular vote. Now, there is still something to be said that nearly half of the voters voted for him.
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Re:this ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means...
If this technology had been invented in 1920 (Score:2)
we could now pay visits to the good samaritans who threw nickels at homeless Hitler!
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The problem is that going to trial is expensive in the US, and there's a lot of pressure from the pigs in the DA's office (in collusion with the trash in the judge's bench) to accept a plea bargain. Possible sentences in shithole known as the "Land of the Free" are so absurdly long that many factually innocent people are (justifiably) afraid to exercise their Constitutional rights. And the authorities typically keep delaying the trial date to keep the accused's life on hold (or keep the accused in jail if
the justification rings a little hollow (Score:2)
why did his defense attorney need access to clearview AI in order to prove he wasn't driving? Surely all he needed was access to traffic cameras to prove that he was in the passenger seat prior to the accident? Why would someone need AI to do any kind of facial recognition to do that? Or is it that clearview has a realtime feed of traffic cameras and they needed to search for particular faces to find a corroborating image rather than just subpoenaing output from cameras they passed along their route and
Re:the justification rings a little hollow (Score:5, Informative)
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Sorry, misclicked and down-modded. I meat to give you an up-mod!
Posting to clear that mistake.
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I wish that the police could not threaten the defendant. Plea bargaining reduces the work load on the courts, but sometimes it causes a person who is innocent to plead guilty because the police are threatening the defendant with larger penalties if the case goes to trial.
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