Congress Members Want Answers After Amazon's Facial Recognition Software Says 28 Of Them Are Criminals

from the but-they're-all-crooks-amirite dept

Hey, American citizens! Several of your Congressional representatives are criminals! Unfortunately, this will come as a completely expected news to many constituents. The cynic in all of us knows the only difference between a criminal and a Congressperson is a secured conviction.

We may not have the evidence we need to prove this, but we have something even better: facial recognition technology. This new way of separating the good and bad through the application of AI and algorithms is known for two things: being pushed towards ubiquity by government agencies and being really, really bad at making positive identifications.

At this point it's unclear how much Prime members will save on legal fees and bail expenditures, but Amazon is making its facial recognition tech ("Rekognition") available to law enforcement. It's also making it available to the public for testing. ACLU took it up on its offer, spending $12.33 to obtain a couple dozen false hits using shots of Congressional mugs.

In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime.

The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country.

The bad news gets worse.

The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.).

And here's the chilling lineup of usual suspects according to Amazon's Rekognition:

Using 25,000 publicly-available mugshots and Rekognition's default settings, the ACLU picked up a bunch of false hits in very little time. This is only a small portion of what's available to law enforcement using this system. Agencies have access to databases full of personal info and biometric data for hundreds of thousands of people, including people who've never been charged with a crime in their lives.

The obvious downside to a false hit is, at minimum, the unjustified distribution of identifying info to law enforcement officers to confirm/deny the search results. At most, it will be the loss of freedom for someone wrongly identified as someone else. Recourse takes the form of lawsuits with a high bar for entry and slim likelihood of success, thanks to several built-in protections for law enforcement officers.

Amazon continues to market this system to law enforcement agencies despite its apparent shortcomings. Very little has been written about the successes of facial recognition technology. There's a good reason for this: there aren't that many. There certainly haven't been enough to justify the speedy rollout of this tech by a number of government agencies.

This little experiment has already provoked a response from Congressional members who are demanding answers from Amazon about the ACLU's test results. Amazon, for its part, claims the ACLU's test was "unfair" because it used the default 80% "confidence" setting, rather than the 95% recommended for law enforcement. The ACLU has responded, noting this is the default setting on Rekognition and nothing prompts the user -- which could be a law enforcement officer -- to change this setting to eliminate more false positives. In any event, at least Congress is talking about it, rather than nodding along appreciatively as federal agencies deploy the tech without public consultation or mandated privacy impact reports turned in.

Filed Under: congress, face recognition, john lewis, rekognition
Companies: aclu, amazon

Tying Rights To Useless 'Terrorist Watchlists' Is A Terrible Idea

from the the-right-to-remain-rightless dept

No matter how you may feel about the Second Amendment or firearms themselves, there's no way you can feel comfortable with access to Constitutional rights being predicated on something as worthless as the government's ever-expanding "you might be a terrorist" lists.

But that's what's being sought by legislators. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, politicians are searching for answers to unpredictable violent acts, and have seized on the FBI's multiple investigations of the shooter as a potential terrorist for deciding who can or can't obtain a gun. A "dramatic" sit-in by Congressional reps hoped to force the issue, even though it ended up pushing nothing forward at all.

Some legislators want gun ownership tied to terrorist watchlists -- the same watchlists that have turned 4-year-olds into suspected terrorists and designated entire families as suspicious simply because a single member somewhere in the branches of the family tree is under investigation.

This kneejerk reaction not only would eliminate rights but also any form of due process. As it stands now, there's very little chance anyone wrongly designated as a suspected terrorist by the US government will be able to remove themselves from these lists. A recent court decision about the TSA's "no fly" list has at least raised the redress procedure to "extremely difficult" from its previous status as "nonexistent."

But that's only one of the government's terrorist watchlists. Another watchlist contains thousands of Americans with no known ties to any terrorist group. The fact that these known unknowns comprise 40% of the watchlist is only part of the problem.

As we've seen from the FBI's neverending series of terrorist investigations, the government is more than happy to create all the "terrorists" it needs to ensure a steady flow of income to certain agencies and a steady decline in civil liberties for the rest of us.

Even if the list used to deny gun purchases is limited to those deemed too dangerous to board an aircraft (but not dangerous enough to arrest), rights will be denied to thousands who've never done anything wrong. The no fly list is a debacle as anyone but the TSA (and those pushing this legislation) will admit. The no fly list has, in the past, contained both people no one would normally consider unfit for gun ownership (Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. John Lewis), as well as an 18-month-old toddler. Accurate, it is not, and yet, legislators are more than willing to strip a right away from citizens based on an incredibly flawed database. Logic has no place in gun control arguments, though, as Rep. John Lewis is one of the legislators leading the charge, even though he should know personally how worthless and inaccurate the no fly list is.

What's even more disconcerting is the number of politicians who believe multiple rights should be stripped from those on watchlists. Senator Joe Manchin actually let these words tumble out of his mouth during an interview with MSNBC.

Really, the firewall we have right now is due process. It’s all due process. So we can all say we want the same thing, but how do we get there? If a person is on a terrorist watch list, like the gentleman, the shooter in Orlando? He was twice by the FBI — we were briefed yesterday about what happened — but that young man was brought in twice. They did everything they could. The FBI did everything they were supposed to do. But there was no way to keep him on the nix list or keep him off the gun-buy list, there was no way to do that.

So can’t we say that if a person’s under suspicion there should be a five-year period of time that we have to see if good behavior, if this person continues the same traits? Maybe we can come to that type of an agreement, but due process is what’s killing us right now.

Due process is "killing" Americans. And he's not the only one who feels this way. Senator Dianne Feinstein believes Americans are born with only one inalienable right: the right to earn their other rights by "proving their innocence."

Dems now expect Americans to "prove your innocence" before taking advantage of Constitutional rights.

All the while, legislators are tossing out catchy slogans like, "No Fly, No Buy" with zero awareness of the implications of that action. Others claim such a law would have prevented the Orlando shooting, similarly unaware of the fact that the shooter wasn't on a terrorist watchlist when he purchased his guns.

If lawmakers want to prevent suspected terrorists from purchasing guns, they need to base this on something far better maintained and narrowly defined than our current terrorist watchlists. The ones we have operate as dragnets -- bulk surveillance but for human beings. These lists already eliminate due process. They shouldn't be used to further diminish citizens' rights just because the perpetrator in the latest mass shooting was the subject of a terrorism investigation.

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, due process, guns, john lewis, no fly, terrorism, watch list

Civil Rights Leader And Congressman John Lewis Says Ed Snowden Latest In The Line From Thoreau To Gandhi To King

from the nsa-defenders-losing-the-battle dept

Civil rights leader, and current Congressman John Lewis, is now speaking out strongly in support of Ed Snowden:

Asked in interview with the Guardian whether Snowden was engaged in an act of civil disobedience, Lewis nodded and replied: "In keeping with the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence, in keeping with the teaching of Henry David Thoreau and people like Gandhi and others, if you believe something that is not right, something is unjust, and you are willing to defy customs, traditions, bad laws, then you have a conscience. You have a right to defy those laws and be willing to pay the price."

"That is what we did," he added. "I got arrested 40 times during the sixties. Since I've been in Congress I've been arrested four times. Sometimes you have to act by the dictates of your conscience. You have to do it."

Later in the conversation, he notes how worrisome the surveillance program is, and relates it back to how the government treated Martin Luther King Jr. (with whom Lewis worked closely), using overly aggressive surveillance techniques to try to destroy activists and protest groups. As public perception seems to keep growing in support of Snowden, the defenders of the NSA program who are attacking Snowden are going to look increasingly isolated and out of touch.

Filed Under: civil liberties, civil rights, ed snowden, gandhi, john lewis, martin luther king jr.