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FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

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101–110 of 128 posts

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#101

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

This might be the HN thread you remembered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20364523

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. No it isn't? I mean, I know it's a very common conservative fantasy, but if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters, and your puny guns won't change the outcome. Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those…

> if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters What is that supposed to do against the domestic population? Would they use their tanks and planes to blow up their own bridges and cities? Those are weapons used to claim territory from other governments. They're not very useful in a guerilla war where you don't even know who the enemy is. > Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your…

> What is that supposed to do against the domestic population? Would they use their tanks and planes to blow up their own bridges and cities?

To fight an insurrection of its own populace? This is what is being described.

This has precedent. See Tianamen, Soviet Union sending the tanks to its satellite republics, the Turkey failed coup.

The only time the federal government can be stopped is to wait 4 years and electing a new president. Allowing individuals to own AR-15 has no bearing on 'freedom' from federal attacks.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#103
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your credulous, at best, belief in law enforcement's use of the system largely ignores the prevailing example given in the article Law enforcement will always be a compromise. There will always be some who abuse it, and there will always be a need for it (if you want a reasonable level of civilization anyway). It's not binary. It's not "Give up all freedom and rights for infinite security" vs "Give up absolutely no…

> Law enforcement will always be a compromise. The problem with the compromise argument is that it only ever goes one way. We had certain law enforcement capabilities in 1965 and civilization didn't collapse. Why would we expect it to collapse if they had exactly the same capabilities today? Whenever this argument is used, it's always to add new invasions. Databases that were never needed before, facial recognition t…

part of the issue is technology makes being a criminal more sophisticated too.

If police were limited to 1965 tech, you could see any police car coming miles away due to radar and radio detectors.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#104

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

Don't you have to renew your driving license photo every few years?

If the old photos are still on file, having multiple photos in the same style of a person a few years apart is actually probably quite a good training set.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#105
post #48

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

>or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. We already have this. Look up the false positive rate of drug sniffing dogs.

This. Easiest way to circumvent the 4th amendment. Get the dog to bark.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#106

This line caught my attention: > The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches. What the GAO study[1] actually said: > However, we found that the te…

Ugh, this is the worst part about this mess IMHO. U.S. law enforcement has time and time again shown that they are more than willing to argue in bad faith about statistics. This is going to turn out no different than fishing expeditions based on partial DNA matches where the prosecution predictably finds some 1/100,000 match after they search a database of 250,000 people and use that as some cornerstone of "obvious guilt" and convince the jury that there's only a 1/100,000 chance that he's innocent.

So much of forensic science is a sham, we claim as a country to uphold a system of justice whereby you're innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, yet so many prisoners on death row have been exonerated, some posthumously even when there's no real incentive to look for evidence of innocence at that point.

Who wants to bet that prosecutors are going to start using flawed facial recognition results as if they are equivalent to a victim picking out a suspect from a lineup of 10 people? "There was a 99% chance of a match"

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#107
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single picture is surprisingly effective in recognizing that person in another photo. I've been playing around with a python wrapper on dlib's facial recognition [0] and it's astonishing how it can identify people from just one photo. It's not like other machine learning methods that include training a classifier or even fine tuning a classifier. It works by encoding the persons face to a 128 dimension vector and t…

These libs assume the angle is the same, i.e. square shot of the face. Cameras mounted up high are completely useless with these types of libs. Unless the tech. exists to magically rerender a front face shot so you can image how it would look from 12 - 20 feed raised up, this doesn't work.

That might be an interesting problem for a generative adversarial network. Train it based on some large corpus of faces and then refine it based on searching for the input vector that most closely matches the original image and then just change the pose in that input vector to generate a square shot of the face. In theory this would give you not only some generated face, but some reasonable space of facial features that the discriminator couldn't reject. I.e. beard / no beard if the chin was obscured.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#108
post #104

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

Don't you have to renew your driving license photo every few years? If the old photos are still on file, having multiple photos in the same style of a person a few years apart is actually probably quite a good training set.

My current driver's license photo is over a decade old and doesn't expire until 2023. At least when I renewed my license they didn't want to update the photo of me when I was 16 and just renewed it for 8 years. In theory I'll probably need to update my photo then, but as it is right now I look nothing like the photo on my driver's license.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#109
post #50

Imagine a USA where the citizens are no longer armed, and the 1st Amendment has been cannibalized by the passing of various "hate speech" laws that only serve the interests of the current elected... and then imagine trying to redress a Government gone full Orwellian. Just sayin.

How is this particular development relevant? The US government still has nukes, SSN, etc etc etc. This particular reading of the 2nd Amendment seems to have been frozen in time since the drafting of the Constitution.

There's a reason Kent State went down the way it did, and also why there's no US version of Tiananmen square. A radioactive crater isn't much of an economy, and the armed forces are made up of, well, you know, people who like most folk, don't enjoy shooting at people much like them.

The 2nd Amendment doesn't grant a right to bear arms - it prohibits the Government from restricting the right.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#110
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. No it isn't? I mean, I know it's a very common conservative fantasy, but if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters, and your puny guns won't change the outcome. Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those…

> Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined We've asked you so many times to stop posting this and other kinds of flamebait to HN, and you've so often ignored our requests to stop, that I momentarily banned your account when I saw this. On looking at your recent comment history, though, I saw that you mostly haven't been doing this lately (that's good), so I unbanned you. Please don't do it again, though,…

Wow you really showed him. He surely won’t do it again (he will).
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