Across the country , law enforcement agencies are team up up with data firms to convey facial recognition to public spaces , includingairports , shoal , and evenprotests . Most of these campaign remain clouded in concealment , butnewly released documentsfrom Oregon official using Amazon ’s facial recognition offer our clearest look yet into how cops and their tech partners are massaging the slimy verity of facial recognition , include frequent mismatches , its utilisation on the great unwashed not suspect of crimes , and how to trade the public on something so obviously creepy — a task even police are n’t sure they ’re up to .
Rekognition , Amazon ’s own face acknowledgment feat , is n’t a secret . It has itsown landing place pagewhere Amazon touts its partnerships with both secret companies and police force departments . The innocent - seeming applications programme promote by Amazon , however , become far more troubling when applied to regime surveillance . Consider this example show how Rekognition can be used for run down employee badge . Boring , but functionally the same as using surveillance camera to match people against a government database : a real - time image is compared to a stored one .
When betray the same technology for surveillance purposes , Amazonadvertises howRekognition can use AI to compare the great unwashed captured in resilient or immortalise footage against huge database , making “ investigation and monitoring of somebody well-situated and exact . ” One government partner that has explore this program is Oregon ’s Washington County , whose sheriff ’s agency has been using Rekognition to twin surveillance picture and videos to a database of almost 300,000 mugshots . Through public records petition , the ACLU was able to obtainrevealing internal documentsrelated to the county ’s use of Amazon ’s technical school .
While Amazon ’s marketing materials focus on how law enforcement can employ Rekognition to find “ persons of interest , ” intimate e-mail reveal Washington County police have used Rekognition to key “ unconscious or asleep individual , ” as well as “ potential attestator and accomplishes in images . ” According to the ACLU , it is not illegalto refuse to offer ID to a police officer in Oregon . With Rekognition , of course , police need not ask .
Other document show the potential for mismatch by Amazon ’s applied science . In one screenshot , Rekognition identifies an mental image of O.J. Simpson as a 93.53 percentage mates with a ( notably white ) arrestee . It ’s unclear if the matched man was even convicted of a criminal offence — mugshots are taken when citizenry are arrested , not when they ’re find guilty . If suspects are clear of charges , there ’s no guaranteetheir photo will be deleted from a mugshot database .
electronic mail exchanges also attest that political science officials understand how unsettling Rekognition ’s power is . In one email , a Washington County official explain how the county sheriff is cautious about bare his office ’s partnership with Amazon , writing the sheriff is “ hesitant about appearing to be ‘ in bed ’ with self-aggrandising data . ” In another , an official link how the county ’s executive staff is likewise concerned about eye .
“ Even though our software is being used to discover persons of interest from range of a function provided to the [ sheriff ’s office ] , ” the e-mail reads , “ the perception might be that we are constantly mark faces from everything , kind of a Big Brother vibe . ”
Perhaps most troubling of all , a series of email show two Amazon representatives setting up a call between a Washington County police official and a vice president at Federal Signal , a body camera manufacturer . The topic was how to persuade public opinion on the function of cheek recognition with camera footage , denote to in a later electronic mail as “ citizenry challenges . ”
“ My colleague has a client that make up police organic structure cameras , ” reads the intial email , “ he was a number unbelieving that acknowledgment of individuals in telecasting feeds would be adopted at the moment because of all the issues surround it . That being said , he also believes that this technology will finally be used generally . He would get it on to realise how you subdue stakeholder immunity to get this cutting‐edge technology go through . ”
Face recognition in consistency cameras has long been regard aterrifying turning pointin law enforcement . While surveillance cameras are limited by their physical placement , real - time expression realisation with dead body camera would sour police force officer into roving surveillance platform . There ’s no indicant Rekognition is being used in body camera — as an prescribed notes in one email , doing so is illegal in Oregon , “ So that would be one immense barrier”—but the courtship of Federal Signal testify at least some Amazon employee are eager about the possibleness .
In conjunction with the ACLU ’s release of the documents , more than 40 civil rights establishment joined together to call for Amazon to terminate sales of Rekognition to legal philosophy enforcement . The letter of the alphabet is addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos . Fromthe overt letter :
Amazon Rekognition is prime for abuse in the deal of politics . This product pose a grievous threat to communities , including people of colour and immigrants , and to the trust and respect Amazon has work to progress . Amazon must act swiftly to stick out up for civil right and civil liberties , including those of its own client , and take Rekognition off the table for governments .
Update 6:18pm : In a argument to Gizmodo , Amazon said that it “ requires that customers comply with the law and be creditworthy ” and if its servicing are abuse , “ we debar that customer ’s right wing to use our religious service ” :
Amazon Rekognition is a technology that aid automatize recognise people , object , and activities in video and photo based on stimulation provided by the client . For example , if the client provided images of a professorship , Rekognition could help feel other electric chair images in a library of photos upload by the customer . As a engineering , Amazon Rekognition has many useful applications in the material world ( for instance various agencies have used Rekognition to find abducted people , entertainment car park employ Rekognition to find lost children , the Royal Wedding that just pass off this retiring weekend used Rekognition to identify wedding attendee , etc . ) . And , the public-service corporation of AI services like this will only increase as more fellowship start using forward-looking technology like Amazon Rekognition . Our quality of life would be much bad today if we outlawed new technology because some hoi polloi could choose to mistreat the engineering . Imagine if client could n’t purchase a computing machine because it was possible to use that reckoner for illegal purposes ? Like any of our AWS services , we require our customers to comply with the law and be responsible for when using Amazon Rekognition .
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