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Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to distributed/local technologies, does a ban really accomplish anything? I'm dubious that facial recognition technology will disappear because some random governments passed laws against it. Especially because it's nearly impossible to punish when police can just use parallel construction. "We received an anonymous tip and followed it up."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

The solution instead might be the same with deepfakes: fill everything with junk data.

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Enforcement on these issues is trivial, given that the local authority actually desires to enforce the ban. Facial Recognition software is not free.

The basic steps to stop these issues are

1. (The local authority) mandates that all contracts with vendors indicate that they do not perform facial recognition services for the police 2. (The local authority's) lawyers sign off on vendor contracts ( already happens ) 3. The auditors verify that no one is paying/expensing a facial recognition vendor.

Generally, working around your employers legal/audit mechanisms is grounds for termination. If the problem is data sharing with partner agencies... then the local authority needs a privacy law on criminal evidence that could be used for facial recognition.

> Facial Recognition software is not free.

Open source versions will be here before long.

How does that change any of what the comment you are responding to says?

Parallel construction sounds an awful lot like lying

They’re allowed to do that too

They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens. A defense attorney can't get evidence stricken when it came from dubious sources when they lie in court about the source.

> They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens.

That's only true in theory. In practice, police lies are one of the pillars of the US "justice" system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-polic...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilyin...

That is exactly the problem

> The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

https://web.archive.org/web/20130809014315/https://www.reute...

A lot of the comments in this discussion should be tagged with the country to which they apply.

You could require the software to have a warrant number entered in order to do FR. This means you need probable cause first and you need to be able to convince a judge it is warranted.

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