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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a technology story. This is a police made up evidence story. They claimed a source told them that this guy did it. Which seems impossible according to the facts the NYTimes laid out.

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There is more to it than that if indeed he was flagged by a facial recognition pass triggered on a toll booth integrated into some warrant database and one policeman clicking "good enough" too easily. How deeply have these systems integrated themselves into the day to day of police investigations? Are any digital warrant requests ever denied? What sorts of protections are there to make certain that the person on the other side of the warrant request is actually even a police officer?

A hundred years ago there was a real cost in time and effort and interpersonal relationships to get a judge to sign off on a warrant at a weird hour. Are the reductions of those costs brought about by using technology in this way a net win for society?

The policeman in this actual case did something wrong. Did he, out of a motivation to increase his arrest record, find a random black man across state lines to try and arrest? Did he, out of malice, choose to target this person? Did he, out of laziness, not look too closely at two pictures side-by-side and click a "Request Warrant" button? How easy, exactly, is this mistake to make? That question only makes sense because of the technology in the story.

How is a story about a misuse of technology not a "technology story"?

The "evidence" would not exist if Clearview AI (or any similar vendor) did not purport to offer a reliable matching algorithm and expansive dataset. It's not as if the police randomly picked out someone to frame, and then used software to fabricate evidence for the warrant.

But they did randomly pick someone out and framed them. That's the story. Not that they randomly picked someone using ClearAI rather than doing so using mug shots, or yearbooks, or by driving down the street.

> Mr. Calogero went to the store and talked to the owner, who showed him a still from a surveillance camera. He realized that one of the alleged fraudsters looked like Mr. Reid, but the man was heavier...

> “The guy had big arms, and my client doesn’t,” Mr. Calogero said. A Jefferson Parish sheriff’s officer insisted it was a “positive match,” language that made Mr. Calogero believe that facial recognition technology had been used, and he spoke to the New Orleans news outlet NOLA.com about what he believed had happened.

The man's lawyer says he (the client) looks like the suspected thief in surveillance footage. How is that "random"? How would the wrongly suspected man have even been known to the police without the use of Clearview's database and matching algorithm?

Technology launders abuse from police. You can see for instance breathalyzer technology which is closed-source, rife with bugs which misclassify, and provide an obfuscating cover for piggy action.

The friggin thing shows positive if one just ate Boston Cream doughnut.

I know this outside of the scope of the article, but I've seen this a bunch of times when HN commenters claim that a given topic is not relevant for HN. The gist of the claim is basically "$badaction was already illegal, this new tech did not enable $badaction, therefore we don't need to discuss this further". The claim always seems disingenuous, because it ignores a crucial fact: prior to the tech, the friction opposing a bad action was sufficient all by itself to keep the rate of the bad action within acceptable limits. Its a "nothing wrong with nuclear weapons, if sharp rocks are still allowed too" sort of argument.

Fine, yes, this is a police-made-up-evidence story. But its also a technology-enabled-a-psuedo-scientific-confidence-interval-to-make-the-made-up-evidence-more-convincing story. Dismissing it out of hand really downplays why facial recognition (or algorithmically generated feeds or the banning of human content moderation or...) is so fraught. There may well be a solution to the problems appearing, but we're not going to arrive at those solutions without discussing those problems as, well, problems.

A police made up evidence story wouldn't get as many clicks. A lot of people get arrested for the crime of "driving while black".

I thought it was because the officer "smelled weed". You can't just pull someone over for being a minority you know right?

You might want to ask some minorities about that ...

Any cop will tell you that they can come up with a "valid" pretext to make a traffic stop, after following a vehicle for a short time. The officer knows that their subjective claims will be treated as factual by the courts.

So, yeah, a bigoted cop can pull over minorities and trivially manufacture some rational reason that will justify their actions. There's always a "reason".

The subject of this story wasn't arrested for "driving while black". His arrest warrants, based on AI-face recognition as a source, was signed on July 18. His car was pulled over in November after an officer learned of the warrants when running his plates.

"People get arrested on false pretenses since the invention of police" feels like an overly reductionist response to stories scrutinizing technology

Officers don't run plates any more, it's all done with ALPR. All the various constitution-violating "tools" over the past few years have been successfully combined to create a fully automated, computerized police state.

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