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Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by markkanof on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:15PM (#24428576)
I live in Portland. While I’m somewhat proud that my city is leading the way in protecting individuals privacy, it’s also hard given current events not to be a bit cynical about the actual intent of this legislation. There are people that are out everyday legitimately protesting. There are also people out every night setting things on fire, smashing windows, spraying graffiti, attacking other people, etc. It seems that our city government is essentially giving the ok for this crime to continue. If facial recognition could be used to identify the people committing crimes, that seems like a good thing.
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by alexbanks on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:33PM (#24428653)
> It seems that our city government is essentially giving the ok for this crime to continue

I don't know how you possibly came to this conclusion from the ordinances, but I would rethink this take.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by thatcat on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:22PM (#24428593)
Criminals will easily adapt and protect themselves while data will still be collected on everyone else.
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by Kednicma on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:26PM (#24428612)
I live in Portland. This legislation is an obvious no-brainer; we've known since Philip K. Dick that this sort of technology is primarily meant to harm and control the populace.

As a nice side benefit, the sort of neoliberal surveillance-advertising monolith that we see in "Minority Report" is also banned.

Edit: So many downvotes! Do y'all want to use your words? It's starting to seem like HN users want to build panopticons and they're upset that we legislated that possibility away.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by zo1 on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:15AM (#24430048)
I've advocated for mass-surveillance and facial recognition for policing on here so many times, and every time I voice my opinion on it I get downvoted. The HN crowd is most certainly pro-privacy when it comes to this topic.
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by Kednicma on Thursday September 10, 2020 @09:33AM (#24432192)
Sure. Do you want to explain why you believe that we need more police? Right now our nation is in the middle of a massive consideration: Maybe we have had too many police. This comes on the heels of police evolving from slave patrols [0], police torturing the populace [1], etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by zo1 on Thursday September 10, 2020 @11:04AM (#24432977)
I guess you could say I'm wanting more enforcement/prosecution, not necessarily more physical police presence. One could make the case that the reason more policing was advocated/promoted in the first place and grew to this level was because we had a problem of enforcement and conviction.

Better and more automated enforcement might reduce the amount of police we want/need and the amount of police interactions we have as well. The quicker we get there, the quicker we can actually decide which laws are non-sense and perhaps just require fines instead of physical jail time.

Imagine a hypothetical perfect scenario whereby we have a non-corruptible AI that watches security-camera footage that is next to ubiquitous in public areas. Suppose it has really good facial recognition capabilities too and can clearly detect + see who committed an assault/rape/murder. Have a bit of "manual" vetting by prosecutors (add double-blind + other steps to prevent bias) before proceeding, and voila you have N-amount less need of having police patrolling around to "deal" with this specific crime that can be automatically picked up.

Even being able to automatically pick up on a murder/assault/rape happening and automatically and immediately dispatching police can save lives, so many lives. Just this simple scenario is one that should be so powerful to convince people of the benefits, yet hypothetical "big brother", "privacy" and "potential abuse" counter-arguments are somehow more important than peoples' lives.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by amadeuspagel on Thursday September 10, 2020 @09:35AM (#24432204)
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by nl on Thursday September 10, 2020 @12:19AM (#24428853)
> As a nice side benefit, the sort of neoliberal surveillance-advertising monolith that we see in "Minority Report" is also banned.

No it's not.

> 4.10.040 Exceptions

> ...

> C.In automatic face detection services in social media applications.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5967c18bff7c50a0244ff...

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by kortex on Thursday September 10, 2020 @12:32AM (#24428914)
Face detection != face recognition. They don't really spell out if face detection without recognition is kosher, but face ID by advertisers is explicitly verboten.
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by nl on Thursday September 10, 2020 @05:04AM (#24430297)
I should have included more of the quote: "Exceptions. The prohibition in this Chapter does not apply to use of Face Recognition Technologies:..."

I'm not seeing your claimed explicit ban on advertising. Could you quote it please?

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by kortex on Thursday September 10, 2020 @07:52AM (#24431373)
It doesn't call out advertisers directly but it does call out the Minority Report style ad serving.

IANAL but sec. A: defines FRT as "comparing the facial features of a probe image with the features of images contained in an image repository (one-to-many search)."

"Private Entity shall not use Face Recognition Technologies in Places of Public Accommodation"

"John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now!" style targeted advertising requires matching features of the face (eyes) to a repository to get the name.

https://youtu.be/uiDMlFycNrw

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by nl on Thursday September 10, 2020 @09:01AM (#24431914)
Right, but if that was part of a social media app (say a hypothetical "Instagram display advertising" product) then it is explicitly included in the language: "Exceptions. The prohibition in this Chapter does not apply to use of Face Recognition Technologies:... In automatic face detection services in social media applications."

While I understand the difference between detection and recognition I think an exception naming both recognition and detection is likely to be viewed by a court as permissive.

Otherwise what does that exception mean? I'm not aware of any detection functionality in any social media application that isn't tied to recognition.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by throwawaysea on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:24PM (#24428601)
I’m not sure why you’re trying to trivialize my comment. I don’t see what this has to do with Fox News, but even if it did, they often do cover stories and angles that other media with different biases do not. It doesn’t make sense to dismiss them as a source outright, given virtually all news media carry biases and virtually all have examples of misinformation.

Getting back to Portland - if you haven’t kept an eye on what’s happening there, and are denying that there are disruptive riots virtually every night in one part of the city, then you are gaslighting. There is a mountain of evidence that a group of antifa/BLM participants willfully partake in criminal activity under the guise of racial justice with regularity (example https://www.cbsnews.com/news/portland-protests-police-declar...). One of them even murdered another citizen recently (see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/michael-reinoehl-arres...).

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by anigbrowl on Thursday September 10, 2020 @01:12AM (#24429091)
One of them even murdered another citizen recently

It's widely agreed that an Antifa-supporting protester killed someone. whether it was murder we'll never know as he was killed by US Marshals prior to trial (and whether or not that was murder, we may not know any time soon either). there was a strong self-defense argument to be made - and yes I read the criminal complaint that was used to swear out the warrant, and don't think it would have stood up to close scrutiny.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by asguy on Thursday September 10, 2020 @09:49AM (#24432318)
> there was a strong self-defense argument to be made

How do you figure? From the evidence collected it appeared to me (and others) to be premeditated. [0] Particularly interesting to me were images from the garage security camera showing Reinoehl lying in wait.

[0] - https://www.mcda.us/index.php/documents/state-of-oregon-vs-m...

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by anigbrowl on Thursday September 10, 2020 @03:22PM (#24435618)
The complainant contradicted the statements of several witnesses as well as the early versions of the video I saw about the order of events of the shooting itself (although I don't have a full copy of the video file submitted to the court with the warrant application, so that determination is tentative).

Reinoehl's presence in the garage does not seem to me to meet any definition of 'lying in wait', since he had no prior knowledge of anyone coming that way, and indeed Danielson (the shooting victim) and Pappas (his buddy) did not go in that direction. As documented, Reinoehl looked over his shoulder, appeared to notice the two men walking behind him, and entered the garage where he paused briefly and seemed to draw his weapon. It is just as easily argued that he took cover out of anxiety that he was being followed, and then exited the garage after assuring himself that he had access to the weapon. You will recall that the same photographs you cite seem to show Danielson holding a large canister of pepper spray and a baton in his hands (documented on p17).

Lying in wait is an aggravating factor demonstrating a murder's prior intent to assail an unwary victim. Ducking out of sight and readying a weapon might be a very reasonable thing to do if you discovered you were being followed by a person bearing two weapons.

A trial would have looked into what interactions those parties had earlier in the day, and the exact sequence of events around the shooting, ie who approached who and whether Reinoehl shot Danielson first or whether the shooting was a response to Danielson spraying Reinoehl. I don't know the answer to the first two questions and while it appeared to me that the use of pepper spray preceded both gunshots, being sure would require access to the original video and testimony from the multiple witnesses.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by scribbles99 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:55PM (#24428744)
"they often do cover stories and angles that other media with different biases do not"

Lying is technically a different angle, yeah.

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by Pfhreak on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @11:28PM (#24428624)
Your framing here is astoundingly biased and doesn't reflect what most reasonable people have understood to be the case. (That the vast majority of the violence comes from police.)

The protests aren't peaceful, but that's deliberate. "No Justice; No Peace" means something. The protesters have been non-violent, but non-peaceful on purpose. The police have consistently escalated (just like they did in Seattle.)

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by gwright on Thursday September 10, 2020 @02:03AM (#24429341)
Here is what I can't figure out. What would have to happen in Portland for the protestors to stop protesting? What would represent success? I honestly don't know. Am I wrong to think that most residents of Portland would like their community to go back to some sort of "normal" peaceful routine? How can that happen if there is a minority of residents who have a perpetual veto on returning to "normal"? And even if the demonstrations stopped and therefore the police reaction to demonstrations stopped, doesn't "normal" policing have to happen? What type of policing would be accepted by those who are protesting?
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by Kednicma on Thursday September 10, 2020 @09:42AM (#24432262)
We're looking for one of:

* Defunding. There was a moderate budget cut already, but we want more, and we want the city to not just remove budget from PPB but actually put money into social welfare programs.

* Non-violence. The city council and mayor theoretically have the power to order the police to stop using tear gas right now, and similarly they could order the police to be less violent in all of their activities.

* Justice. The police are failing to arrest fascist street thugs, and instead send them text messages letting them know not to show up [0]. Meanwhile they do nothing to prevent federal officers from using unmarked vans to yank people off the streets.

* Polis. The police mostly live in Vancouver or its suburbs, over in Washington State. This is absurd; police ought to live in their respective precincts, just like how city councillors must live in their district. Even my credit union requires me to live in my county!

* Reform. There are many popular initiatives [1] which would force police work to be more humane and considerate, if only they were adopted.

I would consider any of those to be a victory. We got some defunding earlier, and protestors agreed that it was a good token effort but not enough.

Nobody wants the old routine of police violence and abuse. Nobody particularly wants to be tear-gassed, I think.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disturbing-texts-betwee...

[1] https://8cantwait.org/

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by gwright on Thursday September 10, 2020 @12:25PM (#24433794)
Thank you for responding.

I am too far away from the details and the history of the Portland police department to pretend to know what the right course of action is, but it seems to me that the "non-peaceful" part of the protest is actually making any resolution that much more difficult. That is to say it is a tactic that makes the problem worse not better.

I'm also pretty mystified as to why the normal political process was not able to resolve concerns about police activities/methodologies. As far as I can tell from afar, all the Portland elected officials are ideologically aligned with those initiatives. What prevented them from responding and if there really isn't the political will to make those changes through normal peaceful means, by what right to the protesters get to force their will on the entire community?

Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by Pfhreak on Thursday September 10, 2020 @02:18PM (#24435046)
This is a tough question. When minorities are being targeted, don't have sufficient access to resources, can't engage in political processes, etc, how do they advocate for themselves? The routes you suggest are great, but aren't available to everyone or have been set up to specifically exclude people.
Re:Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances by gwright on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:38PM (#24436345)
I feel like that it is necessary to be more specific in order to justify using force and abandoning the system. In Portland, who is targeting minorities? What does "targeting" mean? If the elected officials are sympathetic to those problems (what ever the details), what prevents them from addressing those problems? What resources are required to "participate" that aren't available? In a small city doesn't that just mean going to meetings? voting? etc. How are people being "excluded"? Is there a problem with the DAs office that they aren't prosecuting the unlawful actions against minorities?

If there is really a story about elected officials ignoring or contributing to violations of individual rights, failure to ensure due process, failure to manage the police force, and so on then why isn't that story being told or reported on? If that is really the back story then the protestors have utterly failed to communicate that in an environment where it should be almost trivial to gain public visibility for those problems.

Portland is even more puzzling because I believe the Mayor is also the police commissioner so there shouldn't be any problem with control of police policy as there can be in other jurisdictions where there is less direct oversight of the police.