Chinese police use facial recognition tech to arrest suspect at a pop concert
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\
The cheat will be caught far sooner, and the PI will be out of a job.
Of course those who aren't cheating will also be caught, as the cameras identify people who look very similar, and the courts listen to how the camera has a 1 in a million chance of being wrong (therefore will identify 350 people in the US as being the same person).
It's DNA evidence problems all over again.
It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation.
What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.
> He tells me he’s most familiar with the low tech ways
FTFY. Interesting story though, always neat to see how people like that operate.
> It's common on the Internet.
FTFY :^)
Fixed that for you.
But they don't scale up with numbers or across geographically. The scary thing about automated processes of facial recognition is precisely the ability to scale to everyone and everywhere.
And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.
In addition, moving was even more devastating then than it can be now. Mutual aid and social networks were everything, outsiders not trusted.
Wouldn't surprise me if China essentially made privacy illegal some time in the future.
You would have to suspect that the Chinese government aren’t missing this aspect.
If you're even a halfway decent data scientist or cyber security professional you'd be 10x more effective at actually munging through data and finding people. Even simple things like munging through millions of records with regexes are hard for them.
It's not surprising to me that they think low tech ways are the most effective. The tools they use are really horrible and pale in comparison to basic shell scripting, let alone scipy.
Isn't this something that the insurance company would be able to confirm by forcing the person to undergo a medical exam? Seems hard to imagine that such a disability can be faked well enough to fool a doctor.
1) Was the man actually caught by someone acting undercover and they want to protect the agent's identity with plausable deniability
2) Does the system not actually work very well (say a 1 in 100k hit rate), but they want people to think that if they are wanted, they can't hide, so they'll either turn themselves in, or be less likely to do the (unspecified) crime in the first place
3) Is there pressure that this project is overrunning/overbudget and they need a PR win to keep those higher up in the government happy
There's also the possibility that they want to show (fake) the supposed power of this system even to their own citizens to elevate the apparent reach of the government.
Say what you want about rights, but Chinese government is ruthlessly efficient about what it wants done, and it rarely loses (except for the recent trade relations fiasco)
Assuming it was a fiasco, which is not very clearly the case (if you speak about the tarrifs thing).
And for the humans in charge of the AI there is no such distinction so the AI is working as intended.
1. Maybe wanted criminals would change their appearance or hide their faces. Even that outcome might be a significant deterrent to committing crimes, going forward.
2. Public discontent about the system. This is unlikely to be much of a problem in China.
They have a lot more to gain (deterrence) than they do to lose.
Also, the more China gets other countries to enable the same kind of censorship and surveillance it does, too, the more it won't stand-out as a sore thumb and the less it will be called out by "principled" leaders in the future.
Striking fear into citizens; literally state terrorism.
I think the USA is a bit behind China and the UK in applying surveillance technology to target individuals for petty things. Sure , it's technologically viable, but it seems there's no will yet to punish the evil jay walker with the full force of law.
State DMVs in the US get press hits all of the time when they upgrade facial recognition systems and catch people with multiple driver licenses.
On a side note: Now I had to research who Jacky Cheung (the artist in said concert) is and was not disappointed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrfp1DKyhKw
Three hours of Broadway style pop concert. Fascinating.
But wearing large sunglasses in the evening, or a hat that covers part of your face, can be used as a signal that you're hiding something.
Amongst some other projects by Adam Harvey centered on facial recognition: https://ahprojects.com/projects/
Addition: and our best and brightest are working at Google and Facebook to develop the necessary infrastructure.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
Of course governments and bussiness don't want this to change because they can take advantage of this with the new technology.
But it doesn't mean that the previous laws are appropriate for today, nor imo should any legal precedents apply any more because the situation has significantly changed.
That is true in a legal sense. That's why I put "legally" at the beginning.
The point is there are no legal hurdles to overcome for the government. These are the most difficult and this is absolutely true. Legally we have very little if any privacy in public. The only hurdles are technological ones, which automate the inspection of people in public areas. (i.e. facial recognition cameras).
Police can spy on your in your own home legally, if you leave a window open, because you just made that part of your home public. They'll setup across your yard and watch you with telescopic lenses. Police also spy on people in their own homes using IR and thermal cameras, which cannot be defeated easily, and this crosses (leaps) the boundary of your home being private. Apparently the thermal radiation emitted is now public space. I remember this in court, but don't remember the outcome.
I suspect though that when these laws were made, lawmakers didn't anticipate the ease and scope of which automation could make spying. Maybe they'll reconsider, but the police departments have a lot of sway over lawmakers, so I seriously doubt it.
Have no doubt though, police aren't interested in your privacy, they are interested in arrest counts. Privacy laws are an inconvenient burden to their jobs and they will use any methods they can think of to circumvent your privacy rights and argue technicalities in court. They will usually win.
Of course, all of this was enabled with the War on Drugs.
The legal ability of police to spy that we have today is such circumvention.
But to your point, if the government of the last 5 decades is willing to skirt the constitution as written, I'm not sure how much a new one with stronger verbiage will fair.
Note that if you completely change everything about you, a system could detect that something is fishy because it can't match you with anyone. A work-around would then be to instead mimic someone (and make sure that the someone is not being seen by any camera at the same time as you, and that they could realistically be in the same place as you).
I don't think you would last long, though. And horses are probably not allowed at most concerts.
This is already happening btw, with bans on facial covering clothing (e.g. the niqab, but it's automatically extended to balaclavas and full helmets when worn off of a motorcycle) in e.g. France.
If you have a surveillance state, it will not "will up the game by referencing other data". It will simply make the gears illegal, and the price to pay harsh. Now you won't dare wearing them and if you do, you are guilty even if you are not a criminal, and tagging yourself as such, making it easier for the police to find you.
Most people will just accept the new surveillance reality and then act according to the state's wishes, exactly as most drivers slow down when they see a cop by the side of the road.
A large railway station can have 15 to 100 million passenger entries per year [1]. That means if 0.1% of people hide from facial recognition, cops at such stations could arrest 40-270 people per day. And with a suspect arrested, a photo showing them in disguise, and a police witness, it's an open-and-shut case.
That's way more cases closed per cop-hour than investigating complex crimes like burglary, murder or rape. Just what you want, if your police chief is judged on their clean-up/arrest rates.
And if order of fewer people than that are avoiding facial recognition? Then you've got a surveillance state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
You need to make one mistake, just one. Plus, these people stick like sore thumbs
Most of the time people contact me by instant message or comments for social stuff, and emails for work stuff. It's rare that I get a call that wasn't pre-arranged.
Actually I'd feel rude phoning someone without arranging it first. Not terribly rude, but a little uncomfortable. What if they are driving or in an important meeting?
So maybe phones are there to let me check messages and alerts when convenient. A huge proportion of the money you paid for that phone went on the data modem after all. It isn't really a phone means voice, or sound. But folders on a computer are not made of paper. It's just a word.
Not that I'd suggest putting your phone in a bag.
Then they don't answer it. It's called self control!
LOL
Literally as I typed that above my phone started ringing, I didn't recognize the number, answered it, and it was a spam call. Lasted 12 second. That's the only one in my "recent" calls, which go back to March 27th. What are the chances.
Things have evolved to this? How do you arrange the phone call? Call them to ask if you can call them :) ? If you have to think about it or are unsure, then don't call them.
I'm happy to say that my problem is different, I'm not fond of phone calls, but when I call them, they're thrilled.
Lots of crime being recorded on camera and data saved but we do not yet have the ability to process that information. Soon though, a lot of people are going to be arrested 10-20 years later for crimes that they never imagined they could be caught for.
This is happening already in a lot of countries.
For example in The Netherlands we have facial recognition in street cars so they can detect people who have a public transport ban. Since 2013.
The source was Chinese police. So, in essence, this is propaganda, not news.
Propaganda: information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/05/met-police-f...
I would suspect if there has already been one public announcement then it will actually have been used covertly for quite a while.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-33132199
The real question to ask yourself is of all the groups you belong to (HN readers, people in their 20s, etc, etc) will any of them fall out to the point that the system flags you as deserving of "driving while black" treatment at any point in the future.
I ask because I'm wondering how much China's announcement here is a stunt that goes well beyond the state of the art.
Facebook's FR is nowhere but FB, forget it. There is a range of false positive rates, depending upon how an FR system is employed. The best resource for the state of the art is probably this: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8173.pdf (FYI, my work is vendor "L")
I say all this as a happy Google User and a developer of Face Recognition Technology. Those in the know realized privacy has been dead for awhile now. Generally computers can do most anything we can do in say 200 ms or less with the proper training data, and they generally do it better than humans. The giants have all the data they need, they just need to spend time annotating training sets and running analysis over larger and larger sets until they reach super human performance.
Look at current surveillance cameras in the US as an example. There are a lot of them now, but data is held by a wide variety of people and institutions, and most of them just don't care about it unless something criminal happened.
If an individual school or workplace adds FR to their cameras such that they alerted to strangers in restricted areas, I wouldn't worry about that at all. If they own the data and have their own FR profiles, that's cool by me.
But that's very different than China's effort, where they're clearly working toward complete coverage of 1.4 billion people, with strongly centralized control. Now that they have president-for-life Xi, that's a lot of authoritarian potential.
And we already know how hard it can be, at times, to explain a moment of strange-looking but innocent behavior to police.
All the more so if you are an unfavored, targeted minority (of whatever form: Race, class, intellect, psychology...).
It's not just the recording. It's what people in power (of various sorts) may do with it.
You know how you don't like it when a stranger in your vicinity seems to take an unusual interest in you?
This. All the time.
Discretion gets driven out of the equation, when there's a permanent record that anyone might use, at any time, rather than a momentary decision that passes, by those in one's presence.
Is there any methods out there which would let me fry surveillance cameras? EMP is a thing, but I have no idea of how that works. Can I fit an EMP into my pocket or do I need to drive a Truck worth of equipment? Is there some laser I could use to damage the lens or digital "eye" in the camera for good?
I am not a criminal, my life isn't that exciting, but I was wondering what tools are out there to combat surveillance cameras?
We Brits are quite capable of removing cameras
https://www.crewechronicle.co.uk/news/local-news/speed-camer...
https://www.expressandstar.com/news/2018/04/13/police-appeal...
Electric jamming won't work if they are wired.
Present an unremarkable, expected pattern, and the brain will forget you just as easily as it forgets an individual fern in the forest. In that sense, the lowest 10 feet of the climb is the most risky, as most people don't look up that often.
It was discussed on Bruce Schneier's blog, on which the topic of camera detection comes back regularly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100611052640/http://nexgadget.... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/detecting_bei...
I mean, this is the kind of stuff you would have found on phrak, 2600 and the likes back in the day.
(no snark, just an observation)
When a technology becomes powerful enough, the only real solutions available to you are political, or in other words the so-called "four boxes of liberty". Or you can drop out of society, which unfortunately most often requires joining a tiny niche community full of weird social dropouts. Or you can just accept it. None of these are ideal, but hey, at least you have options...
http://www.ilda.com/camera-sensor-damage.htm
I have a few crappy old cameras laying around, if I can find my purple laser pointer, I'll test and see what happens.
Civilization's about to get a whoooole lot more sci-fi!
Word had passed that there was a small Rx drug ring in the barracks. Why search only the accused rooms when you can search the entirety of the barracks all at once. I didn't have any contraband in my room. I don't think I ever had any contraband. Did that matter? Nope.
Sometime between 5 and 6 AM, we were all made to unlock all of our drawers and cabinets, exit our rooms immediately, and wait. If you didn't unlock something, they'd cut the locks with bolt cutters. You'd return to a room that was absolutely ransacked. Seriously - it looked like a thief was quickly sprinting from room to room tossing everything in sight while hoping to find a hidden stash of jewels.
Sounds a bit far-fetched for the general public right? Hardly! This is the same thing as a summary no-knock warrant.
The bad here is scope creep of the surveillance network, particularly in a totalitarian regime. But once you've acquiesced to the "good" parts of it, you will rationalize the bad parts unless you think critically.
This sort of automated policing forces people to live in fear. Having to live by the letter of the law makes society paranoid, and that's distinctly unhealthy. It makes it very easy for a corrupt government to extend their control over the people too. And lastly, everyone breaks the law in minor ways. You might speed in your car by a couple of mph, or jaywalk once in the wrong place, or drop some litter in a controlled area. Just imagine living in the knowledge that a mistake like that will be caught, and you will be arrested for it (and maybe lose your job and livelihood because of that). This is definitely a bad thing.
Honest question as the first is just a capacity problem and the second (I guess) a moral argument.
No. No one goes a day without breaking, at least, a minor law, especially in places where many laws are straight up crazy. Perfect surveillance, the power to make up laws, and the power to enforce them is too much for any one entity to have.
So long as you're laying low enough to not draw any attention, it seems like in many cases this would be a better thing than the cost of the criminal justice system and incarceration, plus the way incarceration seems to ruin any life that had any value beforehand.
This isn't to say that this option should be encouraged, or even allowed to work a lot of the time. But the fact that there's some flexibility there, keeping the system from complete bureaucratic ossification, has some value to society.
Sometimes the rules are not just. Perhaps you like Falun Gong. Perhaps you're a member of a disliked race/religion/hair color/etc.
In addition to making it much harder to avoid getting caught without going full Ann Frank, this makes it much harder for individuals who recognize that the law is unjust and are in a position to let it slide actually let it slide. After all, the cameras will get you eventually.
Surveillance Capitalism Will Continue til Morale Improves (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5VN72ZjDE)
We use *man for all kinds of ethnicities, Chinaman or China man is no different.
'China man' seems like a good way to suggest both the nationality and gender of the person, and the location of the incident, towards the beginning of the headline.
The Language Log describes them here:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1206
And lots more examples:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=277
Choice examples:
“China Ferrari sex orgy death crash”
“Brighton photo studio jobs misery”
What's better to the ear or shorter often prevails over consistency.
In other words, BS creating an issue when there's none. Chinaman is fine.
Actually we're not all US-based here, and we don't have any historical baggage with our black people like that.
Plus, instead of worrying about words, maybe people should focus on stopping cop shootings, mass incarcerations, red-lining and other, non-trivial matters, affecting black people?
And yes, one does preclude the other. One is hypocritical theater, the other is actual change -- opportunity costs and all.
>What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?
There was no "respecting another's preferences". It was mostly due to people having insignificant lives (sic) and compensating by being worried about words on behalf of another. Nobody actually asked the Chinese...
And there are 3 billion people that speak English. Not all carry the same baggage the US have with respect to racial slurs.
Even if it's the same language, in other places Chinaman just means "a man from China", no slur intended or transmitted.
Or can you imagine if they just used "Jew man" to mean a "Jewish man?"
Is it really that hard to use Chinese man?
This has spawned the amusing FloridaMan meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/FloridaMan/
> The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature.
Florida man does not carry this cultural baggage.
Thank you for bringing it up. I also don't understand why some people get so offended when they are told that certain words can cause harm to others.
I always try to be respectful and if someone tells me that a word or a name hurts them, then I just won't use it around them.
I still miss some humor, but maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe its civilization ou barbarie, seriousness or eternal september.