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IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage To Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color (theintercept.com)
Three months after the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Amazon provided facial recognition technology to local law enforcement, a new report by The Intercept says that IBM collaborated with the New York City Police Department to develop a system that allowed officials to search for people by skin color, hair color, gender, age, and various facial features. VentureBeat: The Intercept and the National Institute's nonprofit Investigative Fund, citing "confidential corporate documents" and interviews with engineers involved with the project, write that IBM began developing the analytics platform roughly 10 years ago in partnership with New York's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative counterterrorist center, after an earlier experiment with the city of Chicago. Using "thousands" of photographs from roughly 50 cameras provided by the NYPD, its computer vision system learned from 16,000 points to identify clothing color and other bodily characteristics, in addition to potential threats like unattended packages, people entering off-limits areas, and cars speeding up against the flow of traffic.
Did Nazi that coming from an international company like IBM.
It's like they want to say "Hey, look ClearCase, DOORS and Jazz aren't the worst thing our company has made, and selling it to you isn't the least moral decision either."
Searching camera feeds based on physical human traits. Quelle horror.
While this could be open for abuse, I don't think IBM was trying to be racist in this case, it is just a visual factor to help narrow down a search. Just like how law enforcement will also identify people by the tattoos or scars they may have.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes IBM helped the Nazis deal with the jews!
IBM profit at any cost take your pick H1B, anti jew, anti black, etc.
They may even help north Korea as well.
Oh no, someone mentioned skin color. Racist! Racist! Racist.
Burn the Witch!
So, police searching by characteristics that a suspect, you know, has, is bad? Why?
I've long joked that our national obsession with race would lead to people being unwilling to simply describe people ("well officer, he was ... er ... tall?") but I guess reality has outrun my sense of humor at this point.
BM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage To Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color
They are quite capable of doing that themselves
Pretty sure white is a skin color too.
Next, posting pictures of a suspect will be deemed racist because of x skin color (except white, because you can never be racist against whites right)
If a white person commits a crime, we also should be searching for blacks?
OH NOES!!!
Instead of looking for people by race in this country, we tend to identify them by skin color.
Race is not skin color; race is a collection of traits which make people from different groups appear, act, and be constructed slightly differently from those of other groups.
Since we cannot talk about race ("African-American") we identify suspects by description in the news, including skin color. Here's the relevant quotation:
We are looking at one of the 16,000 point here.
Alternative Right.
The title should say:
"IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage To Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Physical Features"
The NYPD can now go after the purple people eater.
Governmemts can ease off antitrust investigations in exchange for helping spy on people (we will ignore for now wiggling fingers behind the back for "donations", the source and driver of much corruption in the world).
Nah, this never happens. Nevermind.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I do not think it is acceptable to use this type of tool for anything resembling data science or statistics, and access to it needs to be very tightly controlled with transparent policies and a justifiable purpose.
I saw a documentary on the NYC surveillance capabilities a few years ago, back when they could search only by clothing color and a few other visual cues easier than race/ethnicity. This is a system for responding to descriptions of suspected terrorists (or criminals?), allowing easy filtering of a massive collection of CCTV cameras (the documentary demonstrated a real-time filtering of CCTV feeds, seeking somebody wearing red. It was eerie). I'd be okay with this if it had a strict access control policy requiring highly detailed audit logs and ideally something resembling a warrant procedure, especially if it were limited to terrorism investigations.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
why is this news?
Search for: Orange skin, fake blonde hair covering a bald head, wanted for treason, collusion, tax fraud, wire fraud and stupidity.
found in under microsecond.
Nice!
until of coarse Pakistan or China steel the technology.
Where are all those , if we don't build it , someone else will, folks who frequent here , who always think developing every piece of technology is good.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
We are looking for Terrorists.
It is OBVIOUS that the 80 year old swedish Nun is the terrorist!
Ignore the 19 year old muslim male with no job and lots of passport stamps from Syria and Yemen. GOT to be that Nun instead.
" develop a system that allowed officials to search for people by skin color,..."
They had an analog one already for decades.
It's called 'RacistCop 1.0'
Thirteen percent do seventy percent of the crime. Might be time we started paying attention to what the skin color is of the people who are actually causing the problems.
Can you identify your attacker?
Yes. Between 5 and 6 feet tall. White male. Wearing a black jacket.
Thanks. We'll ignore all that and talk to everybody in the city. "not profiling" is more important to us than finding the dirtbag who attacked you.
Discrimination in a legal aspect is far different than discrimination - or should I say, categorization - by physical attribute. The latter should be allowed in the same way that the former should be defended against. That this article even exists is proof that some loud folks believe both types of discrimination listed above are the same. Otherwise, how could you consider that police using skin color in any aspect would be anything but normal, unless you somehow consider that to be wrong on some moral, ethical, or legal level? That's a problem, because at that point, it's just an attempt to whitewash reality with what today is considered politically correct. In fact, it sounds like .
Searching for suspects or describing victims based on known attributes is just a rational, good practice. Imagine if police were not allowed to consider gender, skin color, age, hair color, eye color, height, or weight in their official records. Imagine if it were hospitals that were not allowed to use those traits when treating patients.
Sounds absurd to you, like this is one of those 'taken to a logical extreme' examples that no one would ever consider?
Well, I've got news for you. It's already creeping in. Apparently the practice of using someone's apparent or legal gender and legal name for police reports is deeply upsetting to folks. The TG community calls it 'deadnaming,' and considers the use of the original or legal name to be violence, done both to the victim and to the TG community.
They're actually upset that the legal name and gender are being used by police in any capacity.
There's a good point in there, where their preferred name might be known and can be used while interviewing folks. The thing is, they say it like it's new, like there's not a 'known aliases' field somewhere. Or perhaps 'important notes: TG male to female, named X'. The folks advocating against deadnaming don't want that though. They don't want notes. They want this to be used for the official, primary fields. They state that even bringing up name in a historical reference about the individual should be disallowed, and go on to include things like parents (who might not approve) and so on.
Now, this isn't like other minority rights issues. For example, marriage is a legal definition that confers real legal entitlements, and the LGBT* marriage rights is about getting official recognition for any couples regardless of gender (which is what we should be doing, and is so obvious I have a problem even considering alternative viewpoints) . But that's not what this is. This is lying about reality to make someone feel good about themselves, or at least, not make them feel bad, or in the case that they've died, getting others to feel good knowing it won't happen to them.
Those advocating for absolute validity of personal feelings are going to be constantly confronted with the premise that the physical world doesn't care much about political correctness, and they're not going to just make their peace with it. I actually worry that we're going to have to legally protect concepts like critical thinking and scientific method as they're nickle and dimed away over time. ... well, I went off on a rant there. Anyway, let's not let political correctness become legally enforced stupidity.
Seems like the obvious feature to search by - nothing here says anything about discrimination. If you are looking for a white criminal, filtering for fair skin color seems like an obvious choice.
One should use all the information one has available. Selectively ignoring relevant information would be self-destructive and self-defeating.
Where's the opt out button? Can't find it!
THAT'S what's sad.
He foresaw this moment and was completely prepared.
What's immoral about this? I understand the objections to mass surveillance, but what's wrong from analyzing the footage to find what you're looking for?
Nothing, once-off. But suppose what you're looking for is, say, a confidential "anti-terror watch list" with tens of thousands of middle eastern men on it, and the machine stops every middle eastern man? Now it becomes racial profiling, and a very different moral question.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let say your a detective and have a witness that gave you a physical description of a suspect, but doesn't know the person's name (a very common scenario.) It seems like this would be a good way to find that suspect in a crowd. Frankly this is a sensationalist news piece.
THIS SHOULD BE DISALLOWED!
Government should only use AI to view and catalog and track people by actual individual faces, walking gait, clothes, clothing style probabilities, license plate, vehicle type, vehicle damage deltas, phone emissions, Bluetooth reflections, WiFi reflections, infrared, night vision, and more all feding into a live tracker database panopticon they can just type your name into to find where you are right now.
Adding skin color to that is racist and just going too far!!!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Here's a little known fact: If you separate the luminance and chrominance of skin color (YCrCv), everyone is the same color (chrominance) within a very narrow band not separable by race. We had the opportunity to look at millions images of first grader's of all races taken in the middle of winter in identical lighting conditions and cameras. This eliminated things like makeup and sun burn and other skin color changing factors. The test was done for some proprietary process I cannot talk about. We noticed a surprising detail that we were not looking for. The only difference is in the luminance. So sorry all you racists and race baiters, skin color ain't a thing.
Mmmm...IBM...Third Reich...Skin Color...oh, now I see the connection. Common, media.
Just look for Gorilla's!
To be fair, instead of doing a search based on a racial feature, the system should return a perfectly random suspect.
Yes IBM helped the Nazis deal with the jews!
IBM profit at any cost take your pick H1B, anti jew, anti black, etc.
They may even help north Korea as well.
Didn't they also provide the translation system for the Nuremberg Trials?
Microsoft tried it once, and had to shut it down.
The Jews should have demanded IBM's disencorporation for their contributions to thr Holocaust.. IBM is at it again. Fascists never change.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
police: "can you tell us what the person looked like?"
witness: "5'10" male, brown hair, dark skin"
police: "Okay, we can't search by skin color so that'll end up being 3 million results. When we're going through those 3 million results we can use our brains to filter out the wrong skin color but that will take a couple weeks. Can you tell us anything else to reduce the search results?"
witness: "Sorry, that's all I remember"
police: "It's a good thing you're telling us now because soon their going to make it so we can't filter by sex too."
Enough with the click-bait bullshit!
Just trying to get the 'muh racism' clicks...
If they were searching by sex would it be sexist?
If they were searching by age would it be ageist?
If they were searching by height would it be heightist?
If they were searching by hair color would it be colorist?
For fuck's sake - it's just the ability to search through footage based on criteria - enough with the bullshit!
So, are we expecting that police officers, when looking for a suspect, will not go to the most obvious feature of a person while scanning a crowd? How would that conversation go?
Officer 1: OK, let's search for that black guy that is suspected of robbing that bank.
Officer 2: Gottcha. I'll look for some guys with black skin and....
Officer 1: No, no, no. Don't LOOK for guys with black skin. That's racist.
Officer 2: Soooo... I SHOULDN'T look for guys with black skin? Isn't that the guy we are trying to arrest?
Officer 1: Well, yes, you should LOOK for a black guy, but don't ACT like you are looking for a black guy!
Officer 2: Wha....?
Officer 1: I don't know... just... search casual.
I can't believe how clickbait slashdot is these days. It's almost like they want people to be upset about racial stuff so they deliberately make titles misleading to imply that it's not a search based on physical attributes, but a racial issue. You deserve all the racial nonsense shit you bring it upon yourself. I hope all your future articles are shitted up by "racists" from both sides.
discrimination? Be specific.
Do you mean "Affirmative Action"? Because that's usually what folks mean when they use language like you just did. If so, for what I wish was the last time "Affirmative Action" is _not_ a quota system. All "Affirmative Action" does is require businesses keep records of their hiring decisions and furnish them on request. This is necessary if you're going to make discrimination on the basis of protective classes illegal since otherwise it's the businesses word against the person they refused to hire.
Now, if you're going to point to private quotas then that's all well and good, but those quotas are illegal and if you cared to be bothered you could get them ruled as such. Yes, "White Male" is just as much a protective class as "Black Woman".
If you mean something else entirely then that's fine. But your tone is a touch on the hostile side and you explicitly call out the government for enforcing discrimination when since the 60s the gov't has done the polar opposite. Usually that means you're leaning towards the alt-right talking points I mentioned above. If that's not the case please elaborate.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Most of what you think of as "Social Justice Warriors" these days are Russian Trolls trying to divide the country.
There's a very, very small number of nut job feminists running out of community colleges. They've got absolutely no power but they're blown way out of proportion by the likes of Fox News for much the same purpose as the Russian Trolls pretend to be SJWs: They're trying to get a rise out of you and distract you from economic problems with meaningless social ones (to wit: A loss of social standing).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It is "quelle horreur"
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Pretty simple.
Even though it's ok to be white. I can read between the lines if you print it on a shirt.
GB2bed Ivan.