Phoenix School to Install Face Scanners

I'm Spartacus! writes "CNN reports that a Phoenix middle school is intstalling face recognition scanners to help locate missing children and identify sex offenders. Civil Libertarians are justifiably concerned."

Comments

Question

[wampus]

I don't really recall hearing about lots of pedorapists stealing children from schools. Am I just not paying attention or is this a solution looking for a problem?

We had something like that...

[fireboy1919]

We called them "teachers." They were given some subroutines for face recognition during the first few years of their construction in order to recognize individual students and reject those who didn't actually go to our school. Apparently these had some other function as well, usually, but I forget what it was. Something about information transfer, I believe.

The advanced model of these, "administrators" also had some programming for student retrieval (of outlier students with difficient programming, leading them to go to well-traveled entertainment locations rather than going to the school). Administrators were also programmed for information retrieval, augmenting their face-recognition and reasoning skills - allowing them to run intrusion-detection hiring subroutines with heuristics designed to limit the presence of malicious entities at the school.

Is this a new model of administrator? How does it stack up to previous versions?

Faulty justification

[Camel Racer]

So these cameras are being placed in one school with the hope that funding will show up to place them in other schools, at $3K to $10K per installation with the sole justification being "If it works one time, locates one missing child or saves a child from a sexual attack, I feel it's worth it," . The article does not state that this is an ongoing problem -- rampant missing children or sexual attacks on campus. But the article does not contrast the time (money) spent on false alarms vs. spending funds for additional law enforcement personnel -- instead of paying for more unproven face recognition systems.

Lots of people mentioning this

[dandelion_wine]

so I'll just reply here.

Probation conditions often include a "no-go". For thieves/vandals, it's often the area around a store they've targeted, so as to prevent either striking again or hassling (or threatening) those storeworkers who testified against him/her.

For sex offenders, a no-go for schools, daycares and the like is not at all uncommon.

No-go's can be an infringement of rights if they are overbroad and interfere with a place the individual needs to go. I've seen a no-go that covered several blocks and included the pro-b's workplace -- obviously he had to violate it, challenge it, or lose his job (and guess what -- if a parolee instead, often he/she is under a condition to maintain employment).

If the pro-b has a kid, then things get complicated. Is there someone else who can pick junior up from school, meet with the teacher if need be, etc? If not, then conditions need to be worked out, like having to call the school first to announce he/she is coming down.

I know this will strike many as being contrary to the idea of justice being served, but this is what probation and parole are all about -- we consider the person rehabilitated and/or a minimal risk to society, provided that certain rules are observed -- if we allowed for no risk, we'd be keeping people in prison that may present no danger -- if we allowed for more risk, we'd see more paroles and pro-b's re-offending (often in exactly the same manner as their previous crime) and there'd be hell to pay, as there is when such things happen. We can't know what's in a particular person's mind, so we draw the line at some hopefully non-arbitrary point and call it fair enough.

I would add that if this seems unfair, consider the position of the sex offender who gets their name, address, and face plastered all over every neighbourhood they move to. This strikes me as completely contrary to justice, in that it:

a) invites vigilantism,
b) denies any realistic second chance (if their compulsions are a way of dealing with things, how will this contribute to straightening out?),
c) completely contravenes our ideas of having served time for the original crime and having been rehabilitated.

In the school example, the courts are trying to minimize risk without keeping people locked up indefinitely. In the post-your-face example, it's denying the person the second chance they're supposed to get, and certainly not contributing to the pro-b turning over a new leaf.

Imagine if we did that to convicted thieves? (of course, much less stigma, but imagine) If no one was willing to employ them, what options would they be left with? Yep. Way to straightjacket the situation. Great if you're looking for an excuse to just toss them back in.

Re:Why the concern?

[croddy]

alleged

this is not good.

Re:I Stand Against Privacy

[mcpkaaos]

Maybe you're trolling, maybe you're just pretending to be George Carlin, but I'll bite heh.

Get rid of privacy and you'll witness the slow death of individuality. Peer pressure and groupthink are powerful enough without the fear of your life being an open book for anyone to read/judge. I'm sure you'd have the best intentions, but many folks out there don't. For example: no matter how open you are willing to be, your government will remain just as secretive and private as ever (i.e., Bush administration). I hardly see that as an improvement.