sailfast4 hours ago
Always easier when you can avoid the law and just buy it off the shelf. It’s fine to do this, we say, because it’s not being done by the government - but if they’re allowed to turn around and buy it we’re much worse off.
digiown4 hours ago
That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.
I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.
asveikau3 hours ago
The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.
That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.
pixl973 hours ago
>A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row.
A private company can 100% do this in many ways. They already do this buy putting up and using their technology in minority areas, for example.
unethical_ban3 hours ago
It's a distinction. Private companies are partnering with the government to take away personal liberty.
We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.
bjtan hour ago
The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant.
The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.
On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.
dimitrios1an hour ago
> The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.
Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?
asveikau3 hours ago
I also personally think there are some private collections we should ban, or put in place limitations on how it can be used, in the interest of general privacy.
That is trickier to decide on and surely there's room to debate.
helterskelter3 hours ago
Yeah but these companies are operating hand in glove with govt such that there's no discernible difference between the current system and government just doing it themselves. Ban it outright.
asveikau3 hours ago
I don't disagree with the sentiment. I feel like what we're seeing lately is that private companies are doing the thing that would violate the 4th amendment if government did it, then they sell to the government. The idea that it's not the government itself violating the constitution because they did it through a contractor is pretty absurd.
What specific legal measures you do to enforce this, I don't know, there's some room for debate there.
digiown2 hours ago
I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media. Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment. The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data". To have an expectation of privacy, the data needs to not be shared in the first place.
I don't think tying the hands of the government is a viable solution. The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions, as well as legislation to impose costs on data collection.
- Teaching that "the cloud is just someone else's computer"
- E2EE cloud
- Some way of sharing things that don't involve pushing them to the whole internet, like Signal's stories.
- GDPR type legislation which allows deleting, opting out, etc
magicalist14 minutes ago
> The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data"
This isn't actually true (it varies by type of "cloud data", like content vs metadata, and the circuit you're in), and there are multiple recent carveouts (eg geofence warrants) that when the Supreme Court bothers to look at it again, suggests they don't feel it's as clear as it was decades ago. Congress can also just go ahead and any time make it clear they don't like it (see the Stored Communications Act).
It's also, just to be clear, an invented doctrine, and absolutely not in the constitution like the fourth amendment is. Don't cede the principle just because it has a name. Technical and social solutions are good, but we should not tolerate our government acting as it does.
asveikauan hour ago
> I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media
Neither is there an expectation that automation would slurp it up and build a database on you and everyone else. Maybe the HN crowd is one thing, but most normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed.
> Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment.
Every time I see someone make a statement like this I think of the Iraq war era when a Berkeley law professor said torture is legal. Simply saying something that clearly violates the spirit of our rights is ok based on a technicality, I would not call that a moral high ground.
> The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions,
At this point and points forward I think your comment is much more on the mark.
digiown35 minutes ago
I think we clearly both agree that mass surveillance is problematic regardless of whether it is done by the government or corporations. With that said
> normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed
Despite knowing about this, most continue supporting the various companies doing exactly that, like Facebook and Google.
> Neither is there an expectation [...]
Expectation is not law, and it cuts both ways. The authors of the 4th and 5th amendments likely did not anticipate the existence of encryption - in their view, the flip side of the 4th amendment is that with a warrant, the government could search anything except your mind, which can't store that much information. We now get to enjoy an almost absolute right to privacy due to the letter of the law. You might feel that we should have that right anyway, but many other governments with a more recent/flexible constitution do not guarantee that, and in fact require key disclosure.
WrongAssumption2 hours ago
But that is his point with "or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect"
The company doesn't have that power, but the government can compel companies to provide them with the same data as long as it exists, and then abuse it in the same way as if they had collected it themselves.
heavyset_go2 hours ago
A private company can put you on a list and you'll never have a home again.
digiown2 hours ago
A private company can rat you out the government in the same way that a private citizen can report you to the police. I don't see a reasonable way to change this.
The government should be held to higher standards in terms of being able to appeal its actions, fairness, evidentiary standards. But the government shouldn't necessarily be prevented from acquiring and using information (which is otherwise legally obtained).
I don't disagree that we should perhaps more restrictions on private processing of data though -- GDPR style legislation that imposes a cost on data collection is probably sufficient.
kristopolous3 hours ago
The separation between private and the government is purely theatrics - a mere administrative shell.
I really don't understand why people treat it with such sacrosanct reverence.
It reminds me of a cup and ball street scam. Opportunistic people move things around and there's a choir of true believers who think there's some sacred principles of separation to uphold as they defend the ornamental labels as if they're some divine decree.
I mean come on. Know when you're getting played.
asveikau3 hours ago
In some cases yes, especially when it comes to surveillance, the distinction doesn't feel like very much. When the government hires a contractor specifically because they break the spirit of the 4th amendment, it's hard to argue that it's not the government breaking the law.
tintor3 hours ago
People die all the time, because of decisions made by private companies.
bcrosby952 hours ago
Uh, the government can pay the private company for the data so they can lock those people up.
mrguyoramaan hour ago
Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore.
What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance.
Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos.
The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos.
Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is?
We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation.
That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.
koolba19 minutes ago
What would such a ban look like?
A private company can surely link its own cameras and data to create a private use database of undesirables. I’m certain that Walmart and friends do exactly this already. It’s the large scale version of the Polaroids behind the counter.
bad_haircut7210 minutes ago
wouldnt "Any person found to have implemented a system which violates the rights of people in xyz way will be punished with imrisonment" work ?
koolba4 minutes ago
In what way? A business can refuse to service any individual as long as it’s not a direct violation of things like civil rights laws.
CGMthrowaway3 hours ago
[flagged]
throwaway8943453 hours ago
I would much rather have a democratically elected and constitutionally constrained government than private enterprise with limitless power. It would also be helpful if the “government is bad” people would stop electing the people who seek to sabotage the government.
plagiarist3 hours ago
Facial recognition is not a legitimate private enterprise. It is a complete failure of legislation that it is allowed to exist.
CGMthrowaway3 hours ago
Apple Face ID is not a good or legitimate feature? You just upset hundreds of millions of people
heavyset_go2 hours ago
Most people miss Touch ID on the iPhone.
CGMthrowaway2 hours ago
So biometrtics are OK as long as it's not your face? Trying to derive the first principle here.
plagiarist2 hours ago
When it's allegedly stored in the Secure Enclave and the data unable to leave the device, it is obviously not the same interaction. I personally would be fine with a law making that distinction with the on-device recognition as legal.
runlevel12 hours ago
Just like when Verizon sold its customers' precise location history to data brokers who then sold it to law enforcement agencies.[^1] Laundered.
[^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...
Manuel_D21 minutes ago
That's not how the law works in the US. The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself. This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment, despite the fact that it was a third party that was doing the actual banning at the behest of the government.
The government could legally create its own facial recognition technology if it wanted to. They're not avoiding the law, facial recognition isn't illegal.
mothballed18 minutes ago
That's pretty much how KYC works. The government can't just willy nilly demand papers of everyone going into the bank to open up an account due to the 4th amendment. So they just make the bank do it so it is a "private" act, and then for instance IRS is authorized to do warrantless seizure on the accounts which are now tied to names that were forced to be revealed under KYC laws.
Manuel_D9 minutes ago
The government doesn't need a warrant to access bank records, as per the US's banking laws. They just need an administrative subpoena, which doesn't have to be signed off by a judge.
This is not and example of the government sidestepping laws through a third party. You just don't like the existing laws, and would prefer to make certain things illegal that are presently legal.
duped3 hours ago
This is why we should shun the people that build this stuff. If you take a paycheck to enable fascism, you're a bad person and should be unwelcome in polite society.
snarky1232 hours ago
"Tactical Targeting" - you just know someone's PowerPoint presentation used the word "synergy" in it too.
observationist4 hours ago
yababa_y4 hours ago
local laws forbidding facial recognition tech have never been wiser
[deleted]3 hours agocollapsed
grvdrman hour ago
I keep reading this as “CBS signs…” and can’t help thinking about that uncomfortable possible future moment.
quantified4 hours ago
225k USD per year sells us cheaply!
cyanydeez18 minutes ago
"Tactical Targetting": Whitewash stochastic terrorism to attack brown people before midterms.
givemeethekeys3 hours ago
How long before the bring the price down and local PD's start using it too?
nsriv3 hours ago
Not sure if you're joking but Clearview's primary customers are local or metro police departments.
mschuster914 hours ago
And this right here is why Clearview (and others) should have been torn apart back when they first appeared on stage.
I 'member people who warned about something like this having the potential to be abused for/by the government, we were ridiculed at best, and look where we are now, a couple of years later.
gostsamo4 hours ago
"This cannot happen here" should be classified as a logical fallacy.
dylan6044 hours ago
As stated in many of the comments in my code where some else branch claims this shouldn't be happening
comrade12344 hours ago
"You’ve read your last free article."
I don't think I've read a Wired article since 2002...
j454 hours ago
Wired still seems to write some good pieces.
laweijfmvo4 hours ago
are you using a vpn or something like that that might look like “you” have read wired articles?
toomuchtodo4 hours ago
I subscribe to keep the reporting going. Journalism costs money.
Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982633 - February 2026
(ProPublica, 404media, APM Marketplace, Associated Press, Vox, Block Club Chicago, Climate Town, Tampa Bay Times, etc get my journalism dollars as well)
skiman102 hours ago
Are we the same person?
I subbed to Wired last year during a sale and uh... I was never given a premium account linked to my email and support would never answer me. I signed up for the print edition as well and never received any of those. I was getting their newsletter though and that was new. Then I emailed to cancel when I got a billing notification to my email and they were able to cancel it just fine so apparently I did have an account? And then like two weeks ago I received the latest print edition.
Truly have no idea what that was about, but anyway glad to see someone else out here supporting almost all the same news orgs as me (404media is amazing!)
johnnyanmacan hour ago
>Journalism costs money.
They've sold out for years already, maybe decades. Why fund them now when the corruption is out in the open?
AP is really one of the few places I'd even consider donating to at this point.
jmyeet4 hours ago
There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
Well, if that's true then employees of the companies that build the tools for all this to happen can also be held responsible, no?
I'm actually an optimist and believe there will come a time whena whole lot of people will deny ever working for Palantir, for Clearview on this and so on.
What you, as a software engineer, help build has an impact on the world. These things couldn't exist if people didn't create and maintain them. I really hope people who work at these companies consider what they're helping to accomplish.
some_random2 hours ago
>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.
mikkupikkuan hour ago
Or heroes, if they win.
some_random37 minutes ago
No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.
the_gastropod3 hours ago
I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.
I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
throw-qqqqq3 hours ago
> I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.
Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil”. Many people think they are just following orders without reflecting on their actions.
OutOfHere4 hours ago
We need a Constitutional amendment that guarantees a complete right to anonymity at every level: financial, vehicular, travel, etc. This means the government must not take any steps to identify a person or link databases identifying people until there has been a documented crime where the person is a suspect.
Only if an anonymous person or their property is caught in a criminal act may the respective identity be investigated. This should be sufficient to ensure justice. Moreover, the evidence corresponding to the criminal act must be subject to a post-hoc judicial review for the justifiability of the conducted investigation.
Unfortunately for us, the day we stopped updating the Constitution is the day it all started going downhill.
_3u104 hours ago
That will be wildly unpopular with both parties and most importantly their constituents. I doubt even the libertarian party should they get the president, house and senate could pull it off
OutOfHere4 hours ago
Note that the Amendment would apply only to the government, not to private interests. Even so, i could be unpopular among advertisers and data resellers, e.g. Clearview, who sell to the government. I guess these are what qualify as constituents these days. The people themselves have long been forgotten as being constituents.
plagiarist3 hours ago
What do you mean "even" the libertarian party? Libertarians would remove whatever existing laws there are around facial recognition so that companies are free to do whatever they like with the data.
catlover764 hours ago
[dead]
quantified4 hours ago
Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play. Better to have better disclosure and de-anonymization in some cases. If some live in fear (e.g. of cartels), go after the cartels harder than they go after you.
GVIrishan hour ago
> Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play.
The problem is when the government changes the definition of 'bad actor'.
OutOfHere3 hours ago
> Anonymity is where bad actors play
That is a myth spread by control freaks and power seekers. Yes, bad actors prefer anonymity, but the quoted statement is intended to mislead and deceive because good actors can also prefer strong anonymity. These good actors probably even outnumber bad ones by 10:1. To turn it around, deanonymization is where the bad actors play.
Also, anonymity can be nuanced. For example, vehicles can still have license plates, but the government would be banned from tracking them in any way until a crime has been committed by a vehicle.
quantified2 hours ago
Not sure why you say that statement was intended to deceive?
Both good and bad actors benefit in the current system from anonymity. If bad actors had their identities revealed, they'd have a lot harder time being a bad actor. Good actors need anonymity because of those bad actors.
wat100002 hours ago
Anonymity is where little bad actors play. The big ones don't need to be anonymous because their nefariousness is legal, or they don't get prosecuted. See: waves vaguely in the direction of the US government.
That said, the recent waves vaguely in the direction of the US government has demonstrated the weakness of legal restrictions on the government. It's good to have something you can point to when they violate it, but it's too easily ignored. There's no substitute for good governance.
neuroelectron4 hours ago
Don't we already have facial recognition technology that isn't based on AI? why is throwing AI into the mix suddenly a reasonable product? Liability wavers?
dylan6044 hours ago
I think the facial rec systems you're thinking of will recognize faces, but not ID them. They need you to label a face, and then it recognizes that face with a name from there on. Clearview is different in that you can provide it an unknown face and it returns a name. Whether it's just some ML based AI vs an LLM, it's still under the AI umbrella technically.
lazide4 hours ago
Uh no? Facial recognition to names has been the bread and butter of facial recognition since the beginning. It’s literally the point.
dylan6044 hours ago
There are plenty of facial rec systems. Thinking of systems like in iOS Photos, or any of the other similar photo library systems. I think pretty much everyone would be freaked out if they started IDing people in your local libraries.
anigbrowl2 hours ago
Facebook was doing that 10 years ago
porridgeraisin3 hours ago
Note that there is no difference in the model or in the training. The only thing needed to convert ios photos into one that IDs people is access to a database mapping name to image. The IDing part is done after the "AI" part, it's just a dot product.
joering23 hours ago
unsure what you mean by starting IDing? Majority business in US does it already, all banks use facial recognition to know who comes through their door (friend who works in IT at Bank of America told me they implemented it cross all Florida branches sometime in 2009), most large chain gas stations as well, so does car rentals, most hotels, etc. I was recently booted out of Mazda Dealership in Florida because 11 years ago in Georgia I sued Toyota Dealership for a lemon sell, and now they both under same ownership and my name came up on "no business" alert when I entered their offices.
lazide3 hours ago
Huh? What relevance does that have with the discussion?
porridgeraisin4 hours ago
After the literal first one which just measured distance between nose and mouth and stuff like that from the 1960s, everything else has been based on AI.
If my memory serves me, we had a PCA and LDA based one in the 90s and then the 2000s we had a lot of hand-woven adaboosts and (non AI)SIFTs. This is where 3D sensors proved useful, and is the basis for all scifi potrayals of facial recognition(a surface depth map drawn on the face).
In the 2010s, when deep learning became feasible, facial recognition as well as all other AI started using an end to end neural network. This is what is used to this day. It is the first iteration pretty much to work flawlessly regardless of lighting, angle and what not. [1]
Note about the terms AI, ML, Signal processing:
In any given era:
- whatever data-fitting/function approximation method is the latest one is typically called AI.
- the previous generation one is called ML
- the really old now boring ones are called signal processing
Sometimes the calling-it-ML stage is skipped.
[1] All data fitting methods are only as good as the data. Most of these were trained on caucasian people initially so many of them were not as good for other people. These days the ones deployed by Google photos and stuff of course works for other races as well, but many models don't.
lenerdenator4 hours ago
Wear a face mask in public. Got it.
estebank4 hours ago
I think anything short of fully obscuring your face (a-la ICE-agent/stormtrooper) will be merely a mitigation and not 100% successful. I recall articles talking about face recognition being used "successfully" on people wearing surgical masks in China. In the US they ask you to remove face masks in places where face recognition is used (at the border, TSA checkpoints), but would be unsurprised if that isn't strictly needed in most cases (but asking people to remove it preemptively ends up being faster for throughput).
quantified4 hours ago
Probably room to add little cheek pads or other shape-shifters under the mask.
verdverm3 hours ago
You have to change how you walk and sounds as well
lotsofpulp3 hours ago
99.9% of people walk around with an electronic device that identifies them. If a particular person doesn’t, it should be trivial to filter out all the people that it couldn’t have been, leaving only a small list of possible people.
nullocator2 hours ago
Your gait I think is more useful than your face is anyways and my understanding is it's my difficult to disguise. So you'll need a wheel chair/scooter and a mask in public.
ajcpan hour ago
Putting a rock in your shoe instantly changes your gait signature.
mrguyorama37 minutes ago
Thank you Corey Doctorow and "Little Brother". That book was prescient. And free.
Frankly, I never imagined when I read that decades ago, that it could be underselling the horror.
dylan6044 hours ago
Aren't we back to where this is illegal again, unless you're an ICE agent.
lenerdenator4 hours ago
"Hey man, doctor's orders. Gotta wear it to get allergy relief. And no, can't ask about it... HIPAA stuff."
hackingonempty3 hours ago
It is not a good idea to lie to an employee of the USA.
lenerdenator2 hours ago
Who said it's a lie? It's also not a good idea to operate a police state.
FireBeyond3 hours ago
Sadly, I'm sure that will go over "not well" with ICE agents who will happily assault you for carrying a phone...
seanw4443 hours ago
I disagree with the shooting too, but this is such a massive oversimplification of the event.
dylan6043 hours ago
"I'll show you mine if you show me yours"
adi_kurian2 hours ago
If you have not yet heard of it, look into gait recognition. Any battle for anonymity is a losing one, it appears.
lenerdenator2 hours ago
In that case, guess it's time to start thinking of ways to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence they've gathered upon us.
farklenotabot3 hours ago
[flagged]
text04042 hours ago
[flagged]
Manuel_Dan hour ago
None of your links allege that Hoan Ton-That or Richard Schwartz is a white supremacist. What the Huffington Post piece does allege, is that for 3 weeks Smartcheckr (a different LLC that would later have its assets transferred to Clearview AI) hired one Douglass Mackey. Douglass Mackey had an online alias "Richard Vaughn" that was used to post white supremacist content. Ton-That states that he was unaware that Mackey was the real person behind Richard Vaughn.
There's a vast gulf between "Clearview AI was founeded by white supremacists" and "Smartcheckr, which later merged with Clearview AI, employed for 3 weeks someone who posted white supremacist content under a pseudonym, unbeknownst to the Clearview AI founders".
In fact, neither the Buzzfeed article nor the NYTimes piece accuse anyone of white supremacy.
text0404an hour ago
SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0].
Other notable white supremacists with material ties in the article:
Chuck Johnson [1] collaborated with Ton-That and "in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business." Ran a white supremacist site (GotNews) and white supremacist crowd funding sites.
Douglass Mackey [2] a white supremacist who consulted for the company.
Tyler Bass [3] an employee and member of multiple white supremacist groups and Unite the Right attendee.
Marko Jukic [4], employee and syndicated author in a publication by white supremacist Richard Spencer.
The article also goes into the much larger ecosystem of AI and facial recognition tech and its ties to white supremacists and the far-right. So there are not just direct ties to Clearview AI itself, but a network of surveillance companies who are ideologically and financially tied to the founders and associates.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Johnson
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey
[3] https://gizmodo.com/creepy-face-recognition-firm-clearview-a...
[4] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-im...
Manuel_Dan hour ago
Again, if you want to allege that these other people are white supremacists go right ahead.
But you wrote that "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists". Even after your new set of links, this remains unsubstantiated. None of your links allege that the Clearview founders are white supremacists, they make an attempt at guilt by association.
text0404an hour ago
You're right, my apologies. I've edited the original from "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists" to "Clearview AI was founded by people with close ties to white supremacy and even employed some." Thanks for the correction!
forshaper2 hours ago
Did you mean Vietnamese supremacist?
text04042 hours ago
Nope. I meant white supremacist [1]. Notice I didn't say smart white supremacist.
[1] https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5e8cc7922300005600169bd...
mothballed2 hours ago
They hired weev? Can you point out to where he founded or worked for the company?
text04042 hours ago
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[deleted]2 hours agocollapsed
josefritzishere4 hours ago
Skynet. "You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable."
charcircuit4 hours ago
Having AI assisted law enforcement will be a big force of making the law applied evenly. Law enforcement has limited resources so being able to give them a force multiplier will help clean up a lot of issues that were thought to be impossible to enforce before.
runako4 hours ago
This is exactly, precisely the opposite of what the impact will be.
For example:
- every technology has false positives. False positives here will mean 4th amendment violations and will add an undue burden on people who share physical characteristics with those in the training data. (This is the updated "fits the description."
- this technology will predictably be used to enable dragnets in particular areas. Those areas will not necessarily be chosen on any rational basis.
- this is all predictable because we have watched the War on Drugs for 3 generations. We have all seen how it was a tactical militaristic problem in cities and became a health concern/addiction issues problem when enforced in rural areas. There is approximately zero chance this technology becomes the first use of law enforcement that applies laws evenly.
rhcom24 hours ago
The targets for the AI are still set by humans, the data the AI was trained on is still created by humans. Involving a computer in the system doesn't magically make it less biased.
charcircuit4 hours ago
That is true for now, but eventually it should be possible for it to be more autonomous without needing humans to set its target.
throwway120385an hour ago
That's just what we need, an AI that was trained on biased data and then empowered to do whatever it wants autonomously. It's a pity we can't look to any examples of human intelligences that have been trained on biased data and then empowered to do whatever they want autonomously.
pixl973 hours ago
Ah yes, we'll call the system Skynet.
Refreeze52244 hours ago
Not only is this incredibly naive, it misses that whole "consent of the governed" thing. I don't want AI involved in policing. They are bad enough and have so little accountability without "computer says so" to fall back on, That's all AI will do, make a bad situation worse.
aunty_helen4 hours ago
Same could be said about the computer systems that have been developed in the last 20 years. But that hasn’t happened…
monknomo4 hours ago
are you sure it won't enabled targeted enforcement for people law enforcement finds irritating, more than evenly applied law? It's still people setting the priorities and exercising discretion about charging.
charcircuit4 hours ago
It should be easier to audit since you would have a list of who broke the law, but action had not been taken yet.
monknomo3 hours ago
do you think the records of the vast number of police departments and agencies would be combinable with the separate court records, as well as the facial recognition access data source (if it exists?)
I think that is pretty unlikely
HPsquared4 hours ago
I wonder how many laws and sentencing guidelines etc are formulated with an implicit assumption that most of the time, people aren't caught.
cucumber37328424 hours ago
In my estimation all of the criminal ones and at least half of the civil ones.
charcircuit4 hours ago
I think it will reveal unfair laws and as a society we will have to rebalance things that had such an assumption in place.
dupedan hour ago
We can't even make hand driers that don't discriminate on the basis of race. You think making complex law enforcement decisions based on data is going to be easier?
iLoveOncall4 hours ago
Meanwhile all AI face recognition software works poorely on non-caucasians.
dylan6044 hours ago
With this administration, I think that is a feature not a bug
mrguyorama4 hours ago
None of the destruction of your rights has lead to improvement in clearance rates.
Crimes aren't solved, despite having a literal panopticon. This view is just false.
Cops are choosing to not do their job. Giving them free access to all private information hasn't fixed that.
charcircuit4 hours ago
Then cops should be taken out of the core law enforcement agentic loop. There could be a new role of people who the AI dispatches instead to do law enforcement work in the real world.
Refreeze52244 hours ago
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what the role of the police is. They protect property, the owning class, and the status quo. Laws are just a tool for them to do that. Equal justice for all is not a goal for them, and AI will not provide more of it.
pixl973 hours ago
The thing is if you have a truly fair AI you start catching the Trumps and Musks of this world in their little underaged trists. How long do you think that system would actually stay running for?
The thing you're missing is our system is working exactly like it's supposed to for rich people.
preisschildan hour ago
Yeah its not like the "AI" manufacturers have their own biases that are reflected in the model.
For example, Deepseek won't give you critical information about the communist party and Grok won't criticise Elon Musk
mindslight4 hours ago
Why do you write so many low-effort, disingenuous, inflammatory comments? They're "not even wrong", yet they just suck energy right out of productive discussion as people inevitably respond to one part of your broken framing, and then they're off to the races arguing about nonsense.
The main problem with the law not being applied evenly is structural - how do you get the people tasked with enforcing the law to enforce the law against their own ingroup? "AI" and the surveillance society will not solve this, rather they are making it ten times worse.
charcircuit3 hours ago
I want to share my opinion even if I know that it may not be a popular one on HN. I am not trying to maximize my reputation by always posting what I believe will get the most upvotes, but instead I prioritize sharing my opinion.
>people inevitably respond to one part of your broken framing, and then they're off to the races arguing about nonsense.
I agree that this unproductive. When people have two very different viewpoints it is hard for that gap to be bridged. I don't want to lay out my entire world view and argument from fist principals because it would take too much time and I doubt anyone would read it. Call it low effort if you want, but at least discussions don't turn into a collection of a single belief.
>how do you get the people tasked with enforcing the law to enforce the law against their own ingroup?
Ultimately law enforcement is responsible to the people so if the people don't want it then it will be hard to change. In regards to avoiding ingroup preference it would be worth coming up with ways of auditing cases that are not being looked into and having AI try to find patterns in what is causing it. The summaries of these patterns could be made public to allow voters and other officals to react to such information and apply needed changes to the system.
throwway120385an hour ago
I think a good first step to policing the police is to have any use of violence by law enforcement be put to trial in court. They would have all of the same constitutional protections as any other defendant and "I was an officer of the law carrying out my duty" would be a reasonable mitigating factor. There would be no need to jail them or require bond or arraignment or any of that, but they would have to show up for the trial and demonstrate why use of force was necessary.
anigbrowl2 hours ago
They're "not even wrong", yet they just suck energy right out of productive discussion
You answered your own question - it's straight up bait.
Ar-Curunir4 hours ago
LE has been getting increasingly advanced technology over the years. The only thing that’s increased is their ability to repress and oppress.
Go lick boots elsewhere.
