Police Use of AI Facial Recognition Results In Murder Case Being Tossed (cleveland.com) 50
"A jury may never see the gun that authorities say was used to kill Blake Story last year," reports Cleveland.com.
"That's because Cleveland police used a facial recognition program — one that explicitly says its results are not admissible in court — to obtain a search warrant, according to court documents." The search turned up what police say is the murder weapon in the suspect's home. But a Cuyahoga County judge tossed that evidence after siding with defense attorneys who argued that the search warrant affidavit was misleading and relied on inadmissible evidence. If an appeals court upholds the judge's ruling to suppress the evidence, prosecutors acknowledge their case is likely lost...
The company that produced the facial recognition report, Clearview AI, has been used in hundreds of law enforcement investigations throughout Ohio and has faced lawsuits over privacy violations.
Not only does Cleveland lack a policy governing the use of artificial intelligence, Ohio lawmakers also have failed to set standards for how police use the tool to investigate crimes. "It's the wild, wild west in Ohio," said Gary Daniels, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. The lack of state regulation of how law enforcement uses advanced technologies — no laws similarly govern the use of drones or license plate readers — means it is essentially up to agencies how they use the tools.
The affidavit for the search warrant was signed by a 28-year police force veteran, according to the article — but it didn't disclose the use of Clearview's technology.
Clearview's report acknowledged their results were not admissible in court — but then provided the suspect's name, arrest record, Social Security number, according to the article, and "noted he was the most likely match for the person in the convenience store."
Thanks to tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) for sharing the news.
"That's because Cleveland police used a facial recognition program — one that explicitly says its results are not admissible in court — to obtain a search warrant, according to court documents." The search turned up what police say is the murder weapon in the suspect's home. But a Cuyahoga County judge tossed that evidence after siding with defense attorneys who argued that the search warrant affidavit was misleading and relied on inadmissible evidence. If an appeals court upholds the judge's ruling to suppress the evidence, prosecutors acknowledge their case is likely lost...
The company that produced the facial recognition report, Clearview AI, has been used in hundreds of law enforcement investigations throughout Ohio and has faced lawsuits over privacy violations.
Not only does Cleveland lack a policy governing the use of artificial intelligence, Ohio lawmakers also have failed to set standards for how police use the tool to investigate crimes. "It's the wild, wild west in Ohio," said Gary Daniels, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. The lack of state regulation of how law enforcement uses advanced technologies — no laws similarly govern the use of drones or license plate readers — means it is essentially up to agencies how they use the tools.
The affidavit for the search warrant was signed by a 28-year police force veteran, according to the article — but it didn't disclose the use of Clearview's technology.
Clearview's report acknowledged their results were not admissible in court — but then provided the suspect's name, arrest record, Social Security number, according to the article, and "noted he was the most likely match for the person in the convenience store."
Thanks to tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) for sharing the news.
Only a temporary problem (Score:3, Informative)
The so-called "inadmissibility" will vanish by the tip of a black Sharpie marker, when the "right" "AI company" provides the software.
Re: (Score:1)
Helped by an unelected immigrant no less.
Re:Only a temporary problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I just completed my tax return early AF to find out that immediately may have been too late, I just spent that SOB too. Good thing it wasn't that much, it looks like our payroll department 100% nailed the overage they were trying to leave as a small and reasonable cushion, as in down to the penny.
Re: (Score:2)
Generally, there is no requirement that evidence for a search warrant be admissible in court.
For instance, hearsay is inadmissible in court but used all the time to obtain a warrant.
Re: Only a temporary problem (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Im sorry that is absolutely not true.
You are wrong.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Illinois v. Gates [wikipedia.org] that an affidavit based on hearsay can be used as part of a "totality of circumstance" to obtain a warrant, despite hearsay being inadmissible in court.
Re: Only a temporary problem (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
By your own words, hearsay alone is not the sole basis of the warrant.
I didn't say that, nor did SCOTUS say that.
What SCOTUS said is "the totality of the circumstances".
One anonymous hearsay likely wouldn't qualify. But multiple hearsay reports or a single hearsay from a known credible witness likely would qualify, despite not being admissible in court.
Re: (Score:2)
The credibility of the witness reporting the hearsay has nothing to do with why hearsay is not admissible. It's that the person whom that witness is reporting on may be lying, and is not subject to the pains and pnalties of perjury. The witness may be entirely truthful in that that person said it, but one can't be sure whether the third party was lying, that's why hearsay is not admissible, unless say it be a declaration against interest, in which case veracity is more likely to assume.
Re: (Score:2)
The credibility of the witness reporting the hearsay has nothing to do with why hearsay is not admissible.
Of course not. But that's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about obtaining search warrants, where the credibility of the witness does matter.
I don't get it (Score:1)
How is facial recognition any different than partial license plate match search? Or is it because Clearview used a prior arrest record to bubble up that particular suspect to the top of the list? I think being able to use a prior conviction record to bubble a name up to the top of the list is OK. But maybe not arrest (not leading to conviction) or profiling based on legal or race/religion based behavior. That fine, but let's keep in mind non-facial recognition techniques are worse .. where a detective sees
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, the detective seeing partial evidence and using prior experience to jump to conclusions is bad, but an AI doing it is fine. Right. Gotcha. Makes perfect sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said that? Are you hallucinating?
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
I think being able to use a prior conviction record to bubble a name up to the top of the list is OK.
The judge absolutely disagrees with you.
McMonagle agreed with defense attorneys, saying the AI identification of Tolbert was akin to an anonymous informant, which is not enough to establish probable cause.
Re: (Score:3)
Though the murder was captured on a surveillance camera, the images weren’t clear enough for police to identify anyone.
I don't at all understand how AI can identify someone, if the human eye can't....turns out
That AI report turned up eight photos, two of which were pictures of Tolbert. Other photos included Instagram and YouTube pages now listed as private, a social media post of a man riding a bicycle behind a statue in Minneapolis and another YouTube video of several people tasting Buffalo Wild Wings.
If you look at the actual evidence, the cops have almost next to nothing other than it kind of looks like him and random coincidences.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't, but admissibility in court, like all laws and legal principles, is based on ridiculously uneven standards and respecting tradition. The simple reality is that new technology is held to a far higher standard of reliability than old, established customs, such as human facial recognition which has been shown time and time again to be completely unreliable. Or that polygraphs are not admitted because of how unreliable they are, but somehow a human layman can give testimony as to whether he thought someone acted like he was lying or not, which is surely no more reliable, probably less.
All laws are uneven nonsense when held to proper scrutiny, because they grew organically over time and lawmakers don't want to revisit old laws that only came into place when nothing better existed. Also, politicians are idiots and political debates is like debating religious truth and one is quickly with the feeling of “One cannot reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into to begin with.”. Laws are not formed based on any rational analysis. And yet, they influence every aspect of our lives, and decide who is guilty, and who is not, as in this case.
Re: (Score:3)
The "probable cause" standard required to obtain a warrant, is very different, and less strict, than the "admissibility" standard used for evidence presented in court. Probable cause can be based on something as inconclusive as an unusual smell or sound, or a citizen's suspicion based on an unusual observation. These aren't admissible in court, but do provide legal basis for probable cause.
I think the court got it wrong here, they used the wrong standard.
Re: (Score:2)
That's true, but even aside from that, admissibility in court is very arbitrary. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a.i. turned out to be more accurate at recognizing faces than human eye witnesses, not to mention being far less likely to wilfully lie.
Re: (Score:3)
How is facial recognition any different than partial license plate match search?
there is a qualitative difference: facial recognition exploits biometric data and is far more privacy intrusive than license plate recognition. it is also much more complex and less understood/verified tech. for those reasons it rises far more concerns and understandably legislators and courts are still reluctant to accept it.
you are right that human recognition is similarly dangerous and prone to error and misuse, but we are sort of the gold standard for ourselves. also, there's the question of scale: mass
Re: (Score:2)
It's a sliding scale of security versus privacy. You can't have perfect of either without lots of negatives. For instance, we could have a surveillance society but that still wouldn't result in no crime. Alternatively, we could have privacy as our number one value but bad actors would most certainly take advantage of this to profit.
At the moment, it looks like we are trying to find the proper balance for identifying a suspect with new technology but we don't want to overly embrace this technology as it coul
Re: (Score:1)
Oh, that's the optimistic view of it.
When you realize that the "security" is just unvetted AI theater that can easily send innocent people to prison, and that it's all a dance for $$$, it might not seem so "fun". Or maybe it will, until it happens to you.
Because it doesn't work (Score:4, Insightful)
So it very quickly becomes like drug sniffing dogs where it's used not to actually find crime but to come up with an excuse to get a search warrant where there isn't enough evidence. And that quickly gets abused.
It's basically modern phrenology at that point. Just more broken windows policing which will gradually spread to your community
Re: (Score:2)
So it very quickly becomes like drug sniffing dogs where it's used not to actually find crime but to come up with an excuse to get a search warrant where there isn't enough evidence.
Great analogy. The easiest way to explain is they have a hunch on who it is, but can't prove it. They use AI to get a judge to rubber stamp probable cause, whether it's right or wrong, and then work backwards to keep the evidence admissible. That is not how the criminal justice system is intended to work.
That AI report turned up eight photos, two of which were pictures of Tolbert. Other photos included Instagram and YouTube pages now listed as private, a social media post of a man riding a bicycle behind a statue in Minneapolis and another YouTube video of several people tasting Buffalo Wild Wings.
Just for all those that say AI is so great and super accurate, it gave 7 possible matches.
Re: (Score:1)
At most 7 and at least 4 (5 if you assume the private pages on instagram and youtube are different people, which would be silly).
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
On a partial license plate match search, you are comparing each letter/number against a well-defined and small set of characters and you also have a well-defined null hypothesis that the observed character doesn't may any one member of the character set significantly better than the others. You then get a set of passible matches THAT YOU THEN HAVE TO REFINE.
For a facial recognition search, what is the null hypothesis? At what point do you say the "best" match is or is not good enough to be an actual match?
The facial recognition system got it right (Score:4, Interesting)
The painful reality is that a murderer is likely to walk free because a police officer forgot that the system's evidence couldn't be used in court. This is bad. The alternative approach is, as I understand it, seen in the UK where if an invalid search produces significant evidence, it can still be used in court, but if it doesn't the officer responsible gets a reprimand and the victim of the unlawful search a large payout. Note that the large needs to be LARGE...
Re: (Score:3)
The logic the U.S.A. and many other countries maintain is that if this were possible, police officers would resort to illegal searchers if they be willing to pay the price for it personally, or they would perhaps shift blame and be protected.
Every time evidence is suppressed of a clearly guilty person it seems like a very bad idea, but consider all the times illegal searchers were done where someone wasn't guilty, whose privacy was unduly violated.
That having been said, the U.S.A. accepts many doctrines as
Re: (Score:2)
The US has no such trust that individuals will act responsibly. Thus, a great many things in our system are basically insurance policies against tyranny. We might never have to active that insurance policy, but we pay the premiums anyways.
Most European systems don’t allo
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. That list of European characteristics was a real eye-opener for me, as a US citizen. To my eye, those things will work just fine, as long as society is peaceful and functional, and everyone behaves, ESPECIALLY the judges.
Do they work fine? I feel the U.S.A. has immense class justify and guilt and sentencing disparity. I wouldn't want to be the poor black male accused of a crime he didn't commit in the U.S.A. to be honest.
The US has no such trust that individuals will act responsibly. Thus, a great many things in our system are basically insurance policies against tyranny. We might never have to active that insurance policy, but we pay the premiums anyways.
That is your perspective that these stop tyranny. From where I stand, they cause it. Judicial review has led to a lot of tyranny of the minority in the U.S.A. where a small group just decided things were as they were despite the majority being against it, ostensibly because “the constitution said it
Re: (Score:2)
I had the same misinterpretation as GP of
and I know how the Spanish system works. Possibly you're translating from a word in your language which necessarily involves an oath, but "testify" doesn't. I think it would be far clearer to phrase it as "defendants do not have to swear to tell the truth in their testimony, and are immune from perjury charges".
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I know, in English too “testifying” always happens under oath under the threat of pain and pnalties of perjury and is not called testifying otherwise.
Furthermore, it's not a case that they don't “have to”. They're “not allowed to.” They can never take an oath and in many countries this isn't limited to defendants, but to anyone whose testimony wouldn't be credible to begin with due to an obvious conflict of interest such as a close relative or friend of the defe
Re: (Score:2)
The Oxford English Dictionary gives meanings like "to assert or affirm the truth of (a statement)", "to proclaim as something that one knows or believes". The closest it gets to anything involving oaths is "to declare solemnly".
Re: (Score:2)
That's not the legal sense. A witness providing testimony in the legal sense is always under the threat of risking perjury charges should the testimony be found to be false and there are of course a strict legal protocol to be followed.
Re: (Score:2)
In Canada, it's the same - you are generally put in front of a judge. You can request a jury trial, but convictions generally show a greater chance of conviction by jury than by judge.
And jury trials are no mean feat either - because there historically have been all-white juries for a colored d
Re: (Score:2)
european courts are not at all superior to US courts
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're describing countries where people don't go to jail for killing holocaust survivors or holding lynch mobs that scream "slaughter the jews" but do go to jail for mean tweets. Failed states aren't a good barometer here.
The US' problem is that corrupt courts don't actually enforce the laws the US already has to protect people. "Shall not be infringed" turned into "Shall be infringed whenever we feel like it" with a side order of de facto total immunity and taxpayers paying the consequences for their own
Re: (Score:2)
You're describing countries where people don't go to jail for killing holocaust survivors or holding lynch mobs that scream "slaughter the jews" but do go to jail for mean tweets. Failed states aren't a good barometer here.
Yes, because any such country actually exists. Making up wild nonsense anyone with a functioning brain could see is false isn't an argument and just shows you're completely out of touch with the world. You don't actually believe such countries exist do you?
Re: (Score:2)
Those are real events that actually happened in France and Sweden. Thanks for proving once again that SJW's always lie.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm sure you have a source on that then that doesn't come down to “Someone suspected of a certain crime was acquitted because not enough evidence or, as in this case, evidence was illegally obtained.”
Do you actually believe it's legal in France and Sweden to kill holocaust survivors or hold lynch mobs? You are completely detached from the world and need to get off the internet algorithmic outrage feed.
Wrong standard applied (Score:2)
The standard for "probable cause" is very different, and lower, than the standard for admissibility in court.
Probable cause (needed to obtain a search warrant) can include many things not admissible in court, such as a commercial genealogy DNA match, an unusual sound or smell, or unusual behavior.
Admissibility requires someone to testify to the authenticity and source of the evidence, among other things.
I think the court applied the wrong standard here, applying the admissibility standard when probable caus
Re: (Score:2)
Where did you get your law degree?
Slashdot Pundits always make absolute judgements with zero reference to their actual credibility.
Re: (Score:2)
Well then if you are so much smarter than I am, please teach me! How is my statement incorrect?
You don't have to have a degree in a particular subject, to be able to have an informed opinion on it. No, I can't practice law, but I have served as an expert witness, and have built software to support insurance court cases.
Why automated recommendation became prohibitive? (Score:2)
It was clearly stated, that facial search was one of the many clues, pointing to the particular person. Core body features, dressing, suspect actually being not a once in the proximity of particular home - decision for search was derived from the bunch of identifying clues, where AI involvement was suggesting recommendations to resolve research. I can't comprehend how it suddenly became sole show-stopper. Defense may picture it this way, but how come the judge did submit to the absolute no go. After all, th
Courts keep missing one simple thing (Score:2)