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Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

therecord.media

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Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#81
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resolving this pathological impasse is straightforward - differentiate between personal activity and commercial activity . Individuals recording the police, other people happenstance, or even spending a considerable amount of their personal time compiling a self-administered facial recognition database of people - fine. Businesses (or really, entire industries) creating surveillance databases that would make a Stasi…

I don't see how you can differentiate between humans and corporations. They are both fundamentally the same. They are born... and oh wait, yeah. But still under the 14th ammendment's equal protection clause the Supreme court determined they were in 1886 (some argue 1819). Maybe we shouldn't treat corporate speech the same as human speech under the 1st amendment, but that would allow regulation of corporations giving…

> I don't see how you can differentiate between humans and corporations. They are both fundamentally the same

No they are not.

Legal fictions aside, it should be obvious

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#82
post #73

I was appalled to see TSA facial recognition scanners at airports recently, where instead of checking your ID and boarding pass they scan your face. Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out. I’m not sure how the eventual forced violation of biometrics can be stopped when most people don’t care.

I grew up in a post 9-11 world. To me, flying has always been something involving security and federal oversight. I have no problems with the federal government knowing that I have taken flight A123 to Chicago, or something. If I wanted to travel incognito, I'd take a train, or perhaps a greyhound bus.

Pre 9/11, the government still knew what flight you were taking. You ID was checked at the gate just prior to boarding the plane, and the passenger manifests were uploaded to a federal database in real time. A similar process happens on trains and Greyhounds - your ID is checked and manifests are monitored - so those are not necessarily more incognito options.

However, non-passengers (such as family members or friends) could accompany travelers to the gate, or meet them there when they disembark, passing through security without a ticket

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#83
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this seems variable based on point of entry. I had (have?) a flagged passport for awhile and I never got the oh shit face from CBP until they scanned my passport.

Curious, why are you flagged? Visited an unsavory country?

Maybe like Tulsi Gabbard they made an enemy of someone in power.

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#84
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this seems variable based on point of entry. I had (have?) a flagged passport for awhile and I never got the oh shit face from CBP until they scanned my passport.

Curious, why are you flagged? Visited an unsavory country?

[deleted]

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#85
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this seems variable based on point of entry. I had (have?) a flagged passport for awhile and I never got the oh shit face from CBP until they scanned my passport.

Curious, why are you flagged? Visited an unsavory country?

I fought in a US-allied foreign militia against ISIS . So yes.

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#86

The issue with governments implementing mass warrantless surveillance is not training or standards, NIST or otherwise. It should be straight-out illegal. Governments do not have "free speech" rights. As for private citizens doing it: I think there are already sufficient laws about recording people without their consent. You can hire someone to stand on a corner and watch for a specific person to walk by, but a law pr…

It should be illegal for the government to monitor what is, in most cases, public property (airports and border crossings)?

> should be illegal for the government to monitor what is, in most cases, public property

This is fair. The problem is it's being done with zero controls, let alone verifiable ones.

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#88
Genuine question, are the ethics of "anonymous facial recognition", where the system keeps track of a particular face, does not remember the face, and does not correlate the face to a identity , comparable to a social-credit like system?

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#89

You have no right to privacy in public. If you make this illegal private companies will do it instead, and the first amendment makes that impossible to stop.

It's not exactly about the privacy in public, though. YMMV, but I'm 101% fine if a camera looks at me and a machine processes the image. What matters is what happens afterwards.

Heck, I want an aid like that - my built-in wetware face recognition is barely functional (I don't even recognize actors in the movies, save for a few most iconic ones), and tying faces only works after repeating it a dozen times. I can pinky swear I won't be sharing this with anyone. I probably won't even keep records, because it's literal digital junk (but I'd like to have a right to record everything that happened around me that I could've possibly remembered naturally). But that's not about it - I just hate how mass surveillance made a lot of people hate all the cameras without making any distinctions (sure, I think I get it).

What this is about is that while individual privacy in public is not expected (save for stalking or other forms of harassment, which aren't exactly about privacy anymore), privacy at scale is an open question. Large entities, like governments or big companies, can collect unprecedented amounts of data, and at that scale it holds a significant potential both for good use and for abuse. So, in a functional democracy, it must prompt a public discussion and search for a consensus. It can be argued that there are benefits, and whenever benefits outweigh the risks, and it also can be argued that old principles must be still upheld to the letter, or if reality had changed too much and those principles are not matching to the ideas and reasons...

It especially matters when it's about the government, because government abuse can get really nasty, even deadly. That's why all the safeguards, checks and balances.

Basically, I think it's not really about cameras, it's about ability to build large databases with information that may be, uh, socially sensitive.

Re: Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition

#90

Genuine question, are the ethics of "anonymous facial recognition", where the system keeps track of a particular face, does not remember the face, and does not correlate the face to a identity , comparable to a social-credit like system?

  > anonymous facial recognition
I don't have an answer to the specific question, but I have experience working on single and multi-camera person tracking systems and I can tell you that they highly focus on the faces for recognition[0]. There is no such thing as anonymous facial recognition or even person tracking. Data creeps in through things that can be later extracted, though you can make this process more difficult and that's about the best you can do.

For a non-technical intuition of this you might notice that you can often recognize a friend walking away from you (no visible face) down the street. Even if you don't know why you can recognize them, it is down to subtle things like the way they walk, dress, hair style, etc. It might be harder to identify people this way and more prone to mistakes, but even when less accurate you could significantly narrow down possible candidates (even more with correlating information like location and time).

[0] This was a surprising thing to me because I suspected clothing would be a stronger indicator especially when face isn't always visible but this could also happen for other reasons and can be highly influenced in pretraining. Even saw it with blurred faces in testing, but depended on how these were blurred. Gate tracking also seemed to be picked up but I never confirmed.

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