Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Prompting Outcry Over Surveillance (nytimes.com)

Nick Wingfield, reporting for The New York Times: In late 2016, Amazon introduced a new online service that could help identify faces and other objects in images, offering it to anyone at a low cost through its giant cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. Not long after, it began pitching the technology to law enforcement agencies, saying the program could aid criminal investigations by recognizing suspects in photos and videos. It used a couple of early customers, like the Orlando Police Department in Florida and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon, to encourage other officials to sign up.

But now that aggressive push is putting the giant tech company at the center of an increasingly heated debate around the role of facial recognition in law enforcement. Fans of the technology see a powerful new tool for catching criminals, but detractors see an instrument of mass surveillance. On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union led a group of more than two dozen civil rights organizations that asked Amazon to stop selling its image recognition system, called Rekognition, to law enforcement. The group says that the police could use it to track protesters or others whom authorities deem suspicious, rather than limiting it to people committing crimes.

Comments

Should law infocement be hard?

[jellomizer]

I get that Law Enforcement in general is trying to help the public, and are trying to find tools to make their job easier and more efficient. However in order to protect our freedoms law enforcement needs to be hard work, even if it means our lives are measurable less safe.

We cannot have Safety and Freedom. For increase safety there is a trade-off in freedom. While there may be some rules that will increase safety by a factor of ten and reduce freedom by one tenth, and may be considered a fair trade off, there are other things that may give us marginal safety benefits with a large hit to our freedom.

Law Enforcement professionals work with the scum of the earth all the time, this is affecting their judgement, and their job is to keep people safe. So I do not fault them for wanting more tools to make their job easier and more effective. However we as citizens need to stand up and say. "We thank you for the effort and your hard work. But we can't let your job be easier at a high costs of our freedoms"

Re:Should law infocement be hard?

[imrahilj]

I think this is the way to think about things. The problem is that once a freedom decreasing measure is tried, it brings along with it a bureaucracy that will argue for it's continued existence, regardless of effectiveness. The TSA brought us a decrease in freedom, without an observable increase in security. Now that it exists, however, any discussion of its failings will not lead to a discussion about dismantling the TSA, it will only lead to discussions about how it must use more resources and be more intrusive. The ratchet swings only one way.

Re:Should law infocement be hard?

[gweihir]

Law enforcement must be hard and it must be unable to catch all criminals or even most of them. Because the alternative is a police-state and that is much, much worse than having some unsolved crime. Law enforcement itself is mostly unable to see that problem. They believe by solving all crime, they make a better society. Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth. They routinely overlook what that does to freedom and they usually completely forget that "the law" and right and wrong can be arbitrarily far from each other. Utterly immoral and destructive campaigns like "the war on drugs" would give nice examples where the problems lie, but they just cannot see that.

where is the line?

[supernova87a]

Ok, I know there is somehow a fundamental difference between a computer system with unlimited memory and processing power, versus a person who has really good memory.

But entertain me on this thought experiment. Why is having a police force use such a system so different from if they had on their payroll someone who was really really good at remembering faces? Or someone who knew everyone in town?

At what point is an automated / faster system an unreasonable infringement of your rights compared to what each of us can do to some degree? Is it the natural size (200-300 people?) of our memory and human facial recognition that sets the limit on what is an invasion of privacy or not? Where is the line? What is different about using this system compared to a police officer asking everyone he/she can find whether they know person X?

I find the definition of reasonable privacy difficult to nail down.

Re:where is the line?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. No one actually really cares about them scanning faces.

What people care about is other people then using that data to do bad things, stalking, harassment, silencing political opponents, blackmail etc. All of which are things that have repeatedly happened with state and private surveillance. The real privacy issue is that you can't trust others to actually be responsible and hold themselves correctly accountable to even entertain the idea of giving people this power.

Re:What "outcry"?

[kilfarsnar]

I am American and many people agree that the vast majority of the public SUPPORT this kind of law and order in this country and you libtards are the minority, AGAIN. This is why we support who we support even though it makes you weak snowflakes so angry, the people who will make this country great are the ones who oppose the city thugs who terrorize our daughters and cuckold our sons.

See, this is why the rest of society thinks you're dumb. You have not thought this through, and it shows. You only support this because you think it will be used on those you deem undesirable, whether that be people convicted or suspected of crimes, or people in this country illegally, or "libtards". But there is nothing stopping it from being used on you and your fellow travelers; at which point you will cry about your rights and how unfair it is.

What if this service were used to keep track of NRA members, or people in a citizens militia? What if it were used by the FBI to watch for people wearing MAGA hats? Would you still support it? Or would you recognize it as the affront to your rights that it is? Whether you like it or not, when one group loses its rights, it makes it easier to take them from another group. You should fight for the rights of all people, not just those you like or agree with. Because that's how you protect your own.

Re:What "outcry"?

[gweihir]

Indeed. The reason fascist states can still be constructed is that there is a large population of morally-challenged morons that a) are willing to apply any amount of violence to anybody that is not like them and b) that have no clue that they are just a bit later in the chain of victims.