Police Found Ways to Use Facial Recognition Tech After Their Cities Banned It (yahoo.com) 32
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:
As cities and states push to restrict the use of facial recognition technologies, some police departments have quietly found a way to keep using the controversial tools: asking for help from other law enforcement agencies that still have access. Officers in Austin and San Francisco — two of the largest cities where police are banned from using the technology — have repeatedly asked police in neighboring towns to run photos of criminal suspects through their facial recognition programs, according to a Washington Post review of police documents...
Austin police officers received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city's 2020 ban — and appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity. "That's him! Thank you very much," one Austin police officer wrote in response to an array of photos sent to him by an officer in Leander, Tex., who ran a facial recognition search, documents show. The man displayed in the pictures, John Curry Jr., was later charged with aggravated assault for allegedly charging toward someone with a knife, and is currently in jail awaiting trial. Curry's attorney declined to comment.
"Police officers' efforts to skirt these bans have not been previously reported and highlight the challenge of reining in police use of facial recognition," the article concludes.
It also points out that the technology "has played a role in the wrongful arrests of at least seven innocent Americans," according to the lawsuits they filed after charges against them were dismissed.
Austin police officers received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city's 2020 ban — and appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity. "That's him! Thank you very much," one Austin police officer wrote in response to an array of photos sent to him by an officer in Leander, Tex., who ran a facial recognition search, documents show. The man displayed in the pictures, John Curry Jr., was later charged with aggravated assault for allegedly charging toward someone with a knife, and is currently in jail awaiting trial. Curry's attorney declined to comment.
"Police officers' efforts to skirt these bans have not been previously reported and highlight the challenge of reining in police use of facial recognition," the article concludes.
It also points out that the technology "has played a role in the wrongful arrests of at least seven innocent Americans," according to the lawsuits they filed after charges against them were dismissed.
That is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Judges (Score:3)
Most judges are elected, so unless you want to put some sort of eligibility restrictions on whom can run for a judgeship, the people are going to vote for who they want.
Some judges are appointed, but the pool is usually from the judges that are elected.
The other issues is that there is a shortage of judges in most areas. There are also quite a few judges on the bench who shouldn't be there, as they are lacking the temperament or skillset to do the job. I don't even mean knowledge of the law, you have to be
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Most judges are elected
That is an American thing. In most of the world, judges are not elected by the public.
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That is an American thing. In most of the world, judges are not elected by the public.
How is that relevant with regards to the story? It's about police in Austin and San Fransisco. What does that have to do with the world outside of the US?
I'm not sure which option is better to be honest. Ignorant masses voting in their own self interest vs. corrupt politicians appointing someone in their own self interests.
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Are You Winning, Son? (Score:2)
Slashdot, just two stories back you had a piece praising the use of facial recognition tech in tracking down a white-collar criminal. [slashdot.org]
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Context matters. Was the facial recognition system an approved use in the jurisdiction or not? If it was banned and praised, then there's a conflict. If not, there isn't.
Banned is banned (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just as against the law for me to punch someone in the face as it is to trade favours with someone else so they punch someone in the face for me.
If a cop gets a favour to have someone else run a check their police department is banned from running, that's TWO breaches - one is conspiring to circumvent the rule and the other is breaking the rule.
Fuck'em. No badge for you, here's the unemployment line and a follow-up investigation to see if any charges apply. Anything less tells you exactly what the cops want - a way to pretend to do as they're told while they do whatever they want. ...It's going to be 'anything less', isn't it?
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Yes, and city councils who passed the ban in the first place have been making this point.
It is, however, much harder to find out that your police department has been using other people's facial recognition systems than it is to know that they're setting up one of their own.
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Any prosecution that relied on banned facial recognition should be thrown out and sentences vacated. Fruit of the poison tree.
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But the prosecutions aren't based on the facial recognition. Those are used as investigative leads and never presented in court. The police never tell anybody that they used them; that's why using other people's facial recognition systems works for them.
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They found the suspect using illegal facial recognition though. Shouldn't that be treated just like gather evidence by searching without a warrant?
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Only if somebody finds out how they found the suspect. It's not like a specific piece of evidence where they have to explain how they found it. "I just had a hunch that this was a guy worth looking closer at. Cop instinct, y'know."
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You can't just start a search on a "gut feeling", you have to have something more tangible, or the judge will declare all evidence gathered through such a poorly justified search to be inadmissible.
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Any prosecution that relied on banned facial recognition should be thrown out and sentences vacated. Fruit of the poison tree.
And any prosecutor worth their salt will explain to you that a city council enacting a policy banning a specific investigative method does not mean that it is unlawful for the police to actually use it as evidence during a criminal trial.
Also, I guess you are not familiar with the many exceptions to the poisonous tree doctrine.
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Rules or laws? One gets you (potentially) fired if it is not common to break the rule, the other gets you jailed.
You can make rules all you want, but the rule makers and the rule enforcers have to all agree on that rule and there are limits on what you can do when someone breaks the rule.
Laws are harder to make for a reason, but necessary to have a functional government. Everything that is not explicitly made into a law should not be enforced by a government.
FISA (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not even going to complain about law enforcement etc. This is just human nature. If there is a tool out there, people will use it. If its a powerful tool people will abuse it. When the incentives are strong enough and they think nobody is looking most folks will cheat.
Taken all these realities it should be clear that secret courts, domestic warrant-ess surveillance, etc is just antithetical to big R republicanism. It has got to go and poltico-s in the way of that no matter what letter is after there name need to primaried and kicked out their parities. Both (D) and (R).
Now personally I don't have a problem with face recognition used in public spaces, because you have no expectation of privacy there. However I do have a problem with members of state apparatus not following the rules. If there rule the public enacted is no-face recognition then agents/officers etc who break the rule need to be CANNED! Finding 'clever' ways to avoid the intent of policy should be treated as the act of insubordination that it is and result in being CANNED as well. There is a BIG difference between "I broke this obscure rule I wasn't aware of" or "I really thought this was allowable because it does not fall under ... and ... or ..." and what these guys did which was knowingly and willfully doing an end run around the rules.
This is real problem in modern American values; the reason our systems and laws don't work as intended largely comes down to people treat 'gaming the system' as a virtue rather than a vice. Geeks are usually the worst offenders too - hmm I'll try to get around rebroadcasting rules by renting a building somewhere and making it a porcupine of aerials and say I am just format shifting" or some some such nonsense, rather than just dealing with the fact the laws are stupid and lobbying to change them. Same thing with the entire darn tax code. While I don't think all tax 'avoidance' is done in bad faith, ie we are going to intentionally build corporate HQ out in the county because $CITY taxes are to high, is fine, but when it we are going to rent an store front in the county for our incorporation address and staff it with a single mail clerk while we have a 200 employees in $CITY office tower, that is the sort of cheating I am talking about.
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Now personally I don't have a problem with face recognition used in public spaces....
You should have a problem with it, as it is all too inaccurate when accuracy matters. And too many cops are all too stupid when intelligence matters.
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That is why acting on it should require a damn warrant, if the face recognition is the ONLY 'open source' against someone, the judge or magistrate should probably say 'nope nope, not good enough you can't search a guys house based on some geometry between his eyelids and ears taken from a grainy CCTV image. Go find something more'
Judges should be elected and they should have stand for elections often and the public should consider carefully if the guy they are putting on the bench is to willing to accept t
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The various city councils banned facial recognition because of too many judges wearing out their rubber approved stamps basically signing off on any warrant request placed under their noses.
Facial recognition should be used ONLY to provide similar photos that may then be compared by humans. BUT it should provide ten similar photos of different people with no indication of which one it 'believes' to be the best match.
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>Now personally I don't have a problem with face recognition used in public spaces,
You should, at least without strong regulation and enforcement.
Personally, I think we've hit the point where we need a legally defined retention period for video of public spaces and a distribution law beyond that - no, you cannot share your video with your parent, partner, or subsidiary companies. Or rebroadcast to the public unless you're a news outlet and it is relevant to a story.
For the government, they ought not to
Re: FISA (Score:2)
rather than just dealing with the fact the laws are stupid and lobbying to change them.
This applies to everyone, the laws meant for preventing facial biometric search just aren't good enough to do that.
Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney, says he saw evidence SFPD commonly employed a different workaround that gave them plausible deniability: sharing "be on the lookout" fliers containing images of suspects with other police agencies in the Bay Area, who might take it upon themselves to run the photos through their facial recognition software and send back any results.
Good luck with that loophole.
Kicking it old school (Score:5, Interesting)
Now scale up (Score:2)
Third-party spying - sharing surveillance data with each other, countries bypassing their own domestic privacy laws by getting intelligence gathered by their partner nations.
Part of a broad issue of police misbehavior (Score:2)
Technology changes faster than laws can keep up, so its an easy place for pol
SF cops? (Score:1)
Why would San Francisco cops want to use facial recognition?
Certainly not to identify criminals for arrest they'll just book and release the same day anyway.
What next? NYC cops use facial recognition? For what?