An Indiana police department has been using Clearview AI for a year

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/13/an-indiana-police-department-has-been-using-clearview-ai-for-a-year-much-to-the-surprise-of-its-oversight/

by rntn • 3 years ago

56 43 3 years ago

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sixothree2• 3 years ago

This country was founded on checks and balances. Without adversarial checks on the police, our country is literally done for.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

This country was founded without police.

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

xhkkffbf2• 3 years ago

That's not exactly what the article says. It just says that the police forces were largely privatized and part-time. Naturally that changed as the country grew.

This feeds a strange notion that society was just fine without police. It wasn't.

marak8302• 3 years ago

I'm sorry my man, but from the outside? That's just a thing that is said and never acted upon.

sixothree2• 3 years ago

That's kind of my point.

greggsy• 3 years ago

Shadow IT basically

vuln• 3 years ago

Heh. I was thinking the same dang thing.

Simulacra• 3 years ago

Does anyone have information on if it actually is working? Privacy and civil rights violations aside for a moment, how did it do?

rasz• 3 years ago

This is what you can do with it https://www.police1.com/investigations/articles/judge-blocks...

kbos872• 3 years ago

The focus on police & government use of this sort of technology strikes me as misguided when there are an increasing number of publicly available tools that do the same thing.

I’m sure that Clearview has depth that other tools don’t, but Pimeyes does a pretty damned good job of identifying almost any face you feed into it - it’s also free and publicly available!

I’m all for restricting the use of this sort of technology by police departments and government, but this becomes a moot point if we only focus on government sanctioned software purchases. If I were a detective I’d just be feeding a suspects’ picture into Pimeyes on my personal device. I’m also equally if not more afraid of a future where these tools are available to private companies and the general public.

Eisenstein7• 3 years ago

Nothing in recent years about the culpability of local US police departments in constitutional violations, crimes, corruption, and their lack of accountability and tendency to hire bullies who have been 'fired' from other departments for blatantly illegal actions has led you to question giving them access to more surveillance tools with no oversight?

a moot point if we only focus on government sanctioned software purchases.

As far as I know, the public doesn't legally have the ability to bust your door down, shoot your dog, and put you in a room you can't leave until you pay them a bunch of money so you can wait for someone to tell you didn't do anything wrong.

kbos872• 3 years ago

I don’t disagree with anything you said - I just think it’s a case of missing the forest for the trees if we single out government purchases when many of these tools are well on their way to broad availability anyway. It feels like suspicion of and focus on government is occluding the larger problem here. The public may not have the legal authority to break down doors and generally take matters into their own hands, but that certainly doesn’t stop people from doing so.

xhkkffbf2• 3 years ago

It's kind of funny to watch Masnick wiggle around on this one. He wants to love web scraping. He's spent his entire career defending it to please the big tech firms that support him. But now he wants to play angry anti-police activist on this one particular use of the approach.

I'm sure he's perfectly happy with Google continuing to maintain their image database scraped from the web. So I really can't see why he's bothering to weigh in on this one.

daniel-cussen2• 3 years ago

So i'm in favor of police going back to the basics, good old-fashioned detective work. The forensics are not what they're cracked up to be, there's very little verifiability n verification, too easy for the forensics lab to lie through their teeth or contaminate the scene of the crime. Like when the Duke Lacross players had to hire a very expensive lawyer to do the messy work of proving evidence actually traced back to three other men that same day, that was noted as very difficult forensic work because OF COURSE the DA didn't want verification. Local DA Dan Nifong wanted to tamper w it, anything to pull off the lynching, mostly out of sadism n participating in the culture. Three equals three, easy to see it was three men's evidence left behind in Candice Mangum's evidence place, figured it would be a slam dunk requiring only a little bit of finesse. This lawyer got commended in front of all America by the legal profession, n proved Candice Mangum was pretty much correct it would be a slam dunk. It was only when these young men scraped together huge money for the hardcore IDEALISTIC civil rights lawyer (unicorn basically) to counter the momentum of the shakedown w perfect lawyering against Nifong's zero shame of screwing up on purpose w all the evidence--an uphill battle all the way...in 2006 iirc, like now in 2023 again.

Eisenstein7• 3 years ago

You would be more persuasive if you didn't obviously have some kind of fixation with one court case.

marak8302• 3 years ago

Also formatting, references and not reducing are to r.

I'm sorry man, it's so difficult to parse all that you said and I really want to. Not enough to research on a Friday evening after a hell week though - and that part is on me.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

It's not enough for the police to discover (to their own satisfaction) who committed a crime. The point is to prosecute the offender or otherwise resolve it in a way that protects the public.

"Old-fashioned detective work" doesn't help with that at all. What does it turn up? Eyewitnesses? About the worst evidence possible, on par with dreams and reading tea leaves. Sometimes it bullies someone into perjury. That's not even evidence at all.

Forensics are about the only thing that counts as real evidence outside of capturing crimes on video. And if they seem to cause bad results, it's probably because we're not doing it enough. Hell, we have the technology to prove to anyone's satisfaction that chain of custody hasn't been broken... no one's bothered to build the product.

mrguyorama• 3 years ago

Absolutely, a significant portion of "old timey police work" was to blame it on the least liked guy you could find. A large percentage of people ON DEATH ROW are later proved innocent by actual evidence, including people who were convicted by those "old timey" methods.

Forensics are about the only thing that counts as real evidence outside of capturing crimes on video

One huge problem is what courts accept as "forensics" is closer to CSI bullshit than actual science. Most forensic methods have no basis in science, come from a single ex cop who goes around the country speaking to other cops for a hundred grand a pop, and a network of "experts" who are willing to tell a jury that it is "scientifically sound" for a few thousand dollars. Things like handwriting analysis, micro-expressions, all the nancy drew types who pour over a ten second 911 call to overanalyze every tick and stammer in the stressed callers voice to paint them as the perp (THIS IS A REAL THING THAT HAPPENS)

If it wasn't outright illegal, American police would 100% be using lie detectors as evidence

ROTMetro• 3 years ago

The courts routinely allow the chain of custody to be a mess and when you challenge they respond with 'good faith'. Go search Lexus/Nexus for 'good faith' and find that 'chain of custody' really isn't a requirement because really who needs anything more than 'good faith'?

Lots of 'forensic science' has been found to either be garbage or complete subjective and results dependant on the person doing the 'science'. Some of that is still allowed in court because our court is based on precedent and if it was allowed before you as the accused have to fight precedent and prove why it should not longer be allowed (even though everyone accepts it has been disproven outside of court). Lie detector tests while not allowed to be a lone factor for conviction are still routinely used and required by the courts, especially as conditions of supervised release(parole/probation) and are administered at the supervised persons expense (court mandated and $280 a pop for pseudoscience that can get you hemmed up).

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

Other things that are easy to forget about Duke Lacrosse:

1) The "Gang of 88" never apologized.

2) The failure to prosecute Mangum and put her away led to a man's death; she's in jail for that now.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

I have come to believe that the "Sherlock Holmes" tales were a massive copaganda campaign designed to prime the general public for advanced forensic investigation techniques.

I mean, Sherlock could "deduce" anything with his magnifying glass just by looking at a clump of mud on a shoe, or a thread of fabric on a lady's dress. But meanwhile, the actual police were developing actual scientifically-based theories of evidentiary examination that would revolutionize the jobs of detectives everywhere.

Sherlock Holmes's powers of deduction were, of course, exaggerated and improbable. Nevertheless, the author was probably privy to scientific developments that held promise. Fingermarks, for example, were emerging in law enforcement contemporary with Conan Doyle's writings.

If you want an amusing modern take on this, and you love to watch copaganda shows, I recommend the Canadian Murdoch Mysteries. They combine emerging science of the late 19th century with some really outlandish steampunk stuff ("The Tesla Effect") and it's a rollicking homage to Sherlock Holmes.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present day. I feel like police are way too reliant on technology instead of doing their job. I feel like the general public watches way too much CSI and NCIS and they expect to see an Abby Sciuto in every precint. I believe that if LEOs weren't shelving all those rape kits for 20 years, and spending $millions on bogus "gunshot detection" networks, and not purchasing literal urban assault vehicles and a stockpile of ammunition to rival Ruby Ridge, I think that they might focus their efforts on something more productive. Anything more productive.

Izkata• 3 years ago

I mean, Sherlock could "deduce" anything with his magnifying glass just by looking at a clump of mud on a shoe, or a thread of fabric on a lady's dress. But meanwhile, the actual police were developing actual scientifically-based theories of evidentiary examination that would revolutionize the jobs of detectives everywhere.

This is a pop culture bastardization/modern reimagining of the original stories. Sherlock Holmes spent an absurd amount of his time memorizing things he could apply to his work, for example where certain trees grew and what their seeds look like, which he'd recognize in the clump of mud. Basic forensic techniques combined with things he memorized that the rest of us would have to look up.

hnburnsy• 3 years ago

All these tools and murder clearance rates are still historical low.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

willcipriano5• 3 years ago

NPR a few years ago: "Defund the police, all cops are bastards, snitches get stitches!"

NPR Today: "Why are murders going unsolved?"

CPLX2• 3 years ago

The answer, clearly, is because of NPR.

jmknoll• 3 years ago

Two questions:

1. Can you point me to where NPR said “snitches get stitches”

2. Which police departments precisely were defunded?

comrh• 3 years ago

As discussed throughout, the above results provide no evidence that greater police budgets lead to increases in homicide clearance rates (or equivalently, lower police budgets decrease homicide clearance rates).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jels.12325

tehwebguy2• 3 years ago

I don’t believe there’s any proof of any police departments in the US being defunded.

It’s likely that one or two had their budgets drop by a marginal percent for a single year only and then got a substantial increase in budget the next year.

The murder clearance rate has been in the toilet for decades, maybe forever, everywhere in the US.

It’s also likely that you knew this already!

An Indiana police department has been using Clearview AI for a year

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