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Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos 'To Anticipate Criminal Activity' (theintercept.com)
Presto Vivace quotes a report from The Intercept: With an estimated one-third of departments using body cameras, police officers have been generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser stores terabytes of such video on Evidence.com, in private servers to which police agencies must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and Taser -- which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and renamed itself "Axon" -- is hoping to change that. Taser has started to get into the business of making sense of its enormous archive of video footage by building an in-house "AI team." In February, the company acquired two computer vision startups, Dextro and Fossil Group Inc. Taser says the companies will allow agencies to automatically redact faces to protect privacy, extract important information, and detect emotions and objects -- all without human intervention. This will free officers from the grunt work of manually writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our prediction for the next few years is that the process of doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from the world of law enforcement, along with many other tedious manual tasks." Analytics will also allow departments to observe historical patterns in behavior for officer training, the spokesperson added. "Police departments are now sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage that gives them insight for the first time into which interactions with the public have been positive versus negative, and how individuals' actions led to it." But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future.
It works!!
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
"To Anticipate Ass Whoopings And Random Unnecessary Shootings (murders)"
I can only see this going well...
and so it starts...
>"But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future."
Yep. And by tying in facial recognition and other AI, it will be possible to make all kinda of inferences and connections and store all kinds of data about what normal citizens are doing. Things that might have nothing to do with the reason they were interacting with the police. Tracking where people are/go, who they associate with, what they are wearing, what they might be carrying with them, what was in their vehicle, what was written on their hat, etc. Lots of possibilities that can be great for crime fighting and a nightmare for privacy and freedom...
And before someone says "but you have no expectation of privacy in public", I will counter with "but at no time in history was it possible to have perfect video and audio recollection of everything that is happening that could be stored indefinitely, shared with anyone, and analyzed and interpreted in a zillion ways."
Truly a double-edged sword if ever there was one.
More YouTube videos of scared black people and children being tasked. Maybe this time we can get someone in a wheelchair Seriously though, can shit get anymore dystopian? Yeah, I suppose it can.
"Officer. Am I being detained?" "It doesn't matter. My data analytics say your pointing a gun at me... Zap!"
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
This will be great - just like precrime from Minority Report. Also software will be able to replace suspect face with a scary killer face and yelling "I will kill you!" to protect police integrity.
How can they tell which bits are criminal and which are routine? Do they have access to accompanying reports?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The company which used to manufacture just tasers, has now expanded into software, and changed its name to 'axon'. It is losing its way. Sort of like how Westinghouse got out of the nuclear reactor business, and entered broadcasting.
... that well see blooper reels of afro-americans getting tased because they were thinking about committing a crime. And odds are, they were.
Stop resisting! Stop resisting! Stop resisting! Stop resisting!
"But officer, I'm pulled over with the engine off and my hands are on the steering wheel while my seat belt is still on."
"Forget that! My computer says you will attack me with a knife in under 30 seconds! Stop, resisting!"
"But officer."
Zap.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
What a slippery slope you enter when you privitize justice...
Remember i am wearing the red tag...
per orders of so-called U.S. Attorney General Jeff Saaayyyyyssssiiiioooonnnnnssss !
Enjoy Bucketheads Against Trump
To anticipate criminal activity from the wearer, right?
YOU NOW HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY.
I think you'd better do what he says....
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But from the headline... now we have AI shooting energized probes at people. This is going to end up in a bad place.
Make it so that footage cannot be "lost" when it's an officer on trial.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Why shouldn't this invite a flurry of law suits from anyone who gets filmed by such a camera in California? It has some of the strictest copyright laws in the country. Seems like anyone in California should be able to sue Axon for using their video for financial gain without their consent.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
That would almost certainly be one of the subroutines.
After the software alerts them to every. damn. person. they. pass. in. the. street., the cops will be pulling off their body cams and flushing them down the toilet.
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2017/04/23/short-take-do-you-agree-to-be-tased/
If you don't use their product, your client sits in jail.
can a court order get data off of private servers if the local cops stop paying and the defendant requests it at trial?? can that be used an as get out jail free card?
Some disturbing language that indicates that they're analyzing from the perspective of the officer and presuming the individual did something to create a negative interaction. And having software automatically fill out your reports will be serving the client, police officers, and the last thing I want is for someone to find the most efficient language to paper over LEO mistakes. None of this sounds like it's going to be a benefit to citizens.
Surprised no 'nerds' commented about the impending Cybil system this will lead to, but oh well, can't expect that on slashdot anymore.
Leave it to the geeks here at Slashdot to miss the forest for the trees.
The truly troubling aspect isn't that this project might lead to some kind of half baked "pre-crime" system. It's that the prospect of filling out paperwork is often the only thing keeping cops from pushing he envelope even further than they already do. The fact that cops typically have to fill out several forms every time they discharge their weapons has kept countless non-threatening suspects from being shot in the back or otherwise summarily executed or tortured.
The prospect of a pain in the ass can be a real motivator when it comes to encouraging approproate restraint by law enforcement officersin the course of their duties. Do we really want to instead give them free reign to live out their cowboy fantasies of all action, all the time?
If it can figure that out, im gonna use it to figure out when i can expect a beat down from the cops.
Charges outrages prices for not much. And the unlimited ability to tax you to pay for it.
Has cause your house taxes to um to ten times what they once were at the local level.
Even fees that were once 15.00 for plates for your car are now 500.00 because of ricks like these.
Maybe they could analyze the video for signs that the cop wearing the body cam is about to murder someone.
So Taser, an already highly creepy company of dubious ethics, has decided to become an even creepier company and is changing their name to help hide who they are?
Sounds about normal.