It's better that the alternative which is humans. Unless you think enforcing laws or ever having the need to establish identity should never take place
As a computer vision engineer, I wouldn’t trust any vision system for important decisions. We have plenty of established process for verification via personal documents such as ID, birth certificate, etc and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is for standard ids that he would want these things as they are part of the standard id set.
He said he was against computer vision identifying people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer vision engineer implying that they know what they are talking about. Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.
Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them, which they never claimed to do either, they discussed established processes, which a process may or may not be more involved than being handed a piece of paper, depending on context and security needs.
>You can't be serious.
I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.
> Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.
Good point. Computer vision systems are very fickle wrt pixel changes and from my experience trying to make them robust to changes in lighting, shadows or adversarial inputs, very hard to deploy in production systems. Essentially, you need tight control over the environment so that you can minimize out of distribution images and even then it’s good to have a supervising human.
If you’re interesting in reading more about this, I recommend looking up: domain adaptation, open set recognition, adversarial machine learning.
The discussion is missing the point of the original snarky comment
So you don't trust the computer vision algorithm...
But you do trust the meatbags?
Reminds me of the whole discussion around self driving cars. About how people wanted perfection, both in executing how cars move and ethics. While they drove around humans every day just fine
somehow it seems not as magic as setting the mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria that fails 99% of the time. (percentage chosen to show absurdity of claiming that mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria is inherently superior)
no I don't think humans are trustworthy, I think the procedures discussed are more secure than the alternative on offer which an expert in that technology described as being untrustworthy, implying that it was less trustworthy than the processes it was offered as an alternative to, and then gave technical reasons why which basically boiled down to the reasons why I expected that alternative would be untrustworthy
I love how you're contrasting the credibility of demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have been the basis for establishing identity for more than a century.
Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.
> So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?
We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.
If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.
That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.
> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports
To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).
We'll still need a layer for replacement and revocation though. It'd be nice if nobody ever had their private key lost/destroyed/stolen but it's going to happen.
> allows users to regain access to their funds without a traditional seed phrase by leveraging trusted contacts (guardians) and a predefined recovery protocol. If a user loses access, they coordinate with a quorum of these guardians, who each provide a piece of the necessary information to restore
It’s possible to lose one’s irises. Most identical twins have almost identical DNA. Then there’s the “right to be forgotten”, people on witness protection, refugees and immigrants who enter the system as adults, etc. I don’t think there’s an easy technical solution.
Blind twins* will need to carry an alternative. /s
Of course the technical solution isn’t easy, (or necessarily all good),
but that doesn’t make it any less likely, or intriguing to discuss the roadmap.
(You combine the scanned data together from both of those scans, regardless of value, as your recovery mechanism, by the way - accounting for abnormal anatomy in a defined, reproducible way is a challenge, not a barrier)
Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical document with their name and likeness on it already makes up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.
>So the model is verifying faces against ... A database of zero faces? Surely there's 200M faces in there, or else how does it work?
No. The model is, "Hey! this guy is being a pain in the ass. He even claimed that The President wasn't blessed with superintelligence and doesn't actually smell really good!
We need to get this terrorist off the streets! He sure looks a whole lot like that illegal on the FBI most wanted list, doesn't he? Off to CECOT with him!
What's that? He's a twelfth generation citizen? No way! Look, the app I used to claim this guy matches an illegal who's also a child rapist!
Your papers are all fake (if, as a citizen he's even carrying them). Onto the plane with you Senor.
That's the model. Feel free to disagree, but come back and reread this comment in 18 months. I hope you read it then and think "what a paranoid guy! Nothing like that could ever happen here!" But I'm not holding my breath. :(
In 18 months the discussion will have moved on to make excuses for the conentration camps. Alligator Auschwitz and such camps must be much larger to hold everyone.
Are you saying that a computer should be trusted without human intervention? If so, I have a computer right now that says you should be banned on the Internet.
Please don't spread unscientific misinformation. You can say ICE bad, or you don't believe in borders, but saying computer facial recognition is inaccurate compared to humans is just factually incorrect.
Looks like GP is using ChatGPT (see the utm_source in their link) to find the first result that supports their viewpoint rather than doing a broad discovery and analysis
The horror! Someone using an LLM for basic information gathering like "is AI facial recognition accurate compared to humans?" rather than going off vibes or one off sensationalized articles.
People are exceptionally good at facial recognition because of the Fusiform face area, which is a specialized portion of the temporal lobe optimized for it.
Your subsequent comments like 'If you deny the need to know anything about anyone at any time, you're just so far gone that there is no discussion that could be had' indicate that you're sarcastically trolling people, and I suggest you do that somewhere else in future.
This sort of thinking is kind of a retcon, no? The people who wrote the line you’re referencing also decided that none of the people ICE is involved with were even eligible for citizenship. If their rules held out, this wouldn’t even be a thing. I’m not arguing that their rules were correct, just that picking and choosing things they said feels intellectually dishonest.
It’s more complex than that- initial drafts of the declaration of independence were more explicit about literally covering all people, and even had a rant about how slavery was unethical, and they compromised by cutting these in order to get enough consensus to make it happen at all. Thomas Jefferson himself was a hypocrite- he wrote a lot about how slavery was wrong and should be ended, all the while owning slaves himself.
Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.
Sorry is ICE going around enslaving Africans? I thought the topic was people being targeted for removal based on looking like a Native American. What does Jefferson’s view on slavery have to do with anything?
Those are your personal abstraction boundaries. It is a perfectly coherent set of positions to oppose enslaving humans while at the same time being selective about which humans you allow into your nation. The “founding fathers” factually prohibited non-whites from being citizens of America. So what if they were opposed to slavery or not? Those are entirely different matters, and a position on slavery does not imply anything about a position on “any person on earth can be an American”.
This is not an issue of who is allowed into the country. It is an issue of who has the right to due process to determine whether they are allowed in the country or not.
The first point should not apply to everyone, but the second absolutely must. Trusting an un-auditable black box over all other evidence to determine who is allowed in the country is a violation of everyone's human rights.
What due process is being skipped? People are arrested all the time when they are innocent, and that is not widely considered to be skipping due process. If they are jailed for a crime without appearing before a judge for example then due process has been skipped, but whether someone has committed a crime requires a judge to check, whereas I imagine whether someone is in the country legally just requires checking some databases. Have citizens been deported by accident? I haven’t seen any reports of that.
You seem to be unaware of what is happening right now on the streets- there are thousands of videos all over social media you should spend a few hours watching. Peaceful citizens minding their own business are being terrorized and beaten by unprofessional and violent masked goons at a massive scale. The perpetrators are hiding their identities and often refusing to even look at documents proving someone is a citizen. In the detention centers people are being brutalized- left to sit for days in human shit, diabetics denied insulin, bright lights on 24/7, and food and water provided only as rewards for desires behaviors. Congress is denied their legal right and responsibility to tour the facilities, allowing them to hide human rights abuses. The cruelty and sadism of the tactics used is ratcheting up every week, and any agents that try to act lawfully are purged. Victims have no recourse- the DOJ and legal system are blocking victims from being able to even press charges, allowing these abuses to continue with no recourse.
I'm not sure about citizens being deported other than children of non-citizens together with their parents, but they are deporting huge numbers of people here legally on visas, green cards, and valid asylum claims. They revoked visas of some 6,000 college students - mostly for political "wrongthink" and then sent ICE agents after them, when it's actually legal in the USA for them to remain with a revoked student visa as long as they arrived legally, and illegal to detain or deport. They've also arrested and detained hundreds of citizens, that they absolutely knew were citizens, for peaceful protesting and video taping their illegal activities.
I’ve seen some videos, but I haven’t noticed anything beyond what I’ve previously seen in standard USA law enforcement bodycam footage. Resisting, fleeing, obstructing arrest are met with force, and sometimes too much force. Too much force is bad, but it doesn’t seem new or qualitatively different to me in the way many are acting like it is. I do see the media going hysterical about it, but I’ve seen them do that about a lot of things and I can’t say it really affects me at this point other than making me extremely skeptical that whatever they’re going hysterical about is actually like they say it is.
Are you saying you’ve seen videos where ICE is like going to bus stops and just beating up random people? Everything I’ve seen is like, ICE rolls up, guys start running, ICE gets rough with them. Or ICE rolls up, people are heckling them, ICE gets rough with them. I think that would happen with any drug bust, for example. If people start heckling a swat team, does the swat team respond with kindness? Well, we don’t see many videos of that, because nobody heckles swat teams. Why are people fleeing, resisting or obstructing? They are law enforcement officers, and if you do that to them, you are going to have a bad time. Law enforcement in America has been like that for my entire life, at least.
Am I in some kind of filter bubble where I’ve only seen ICE videos of the sort I’ve described, and you’ve seen videos of ICE tackling a grandma getting the mail? I’m seriously asking, I just gave up watching videos like this because they were all like I described.
ICE refusing to look at documents seems not unreasonable, have all of those club bouncer tier men had training on how to spot fake government documents? Like can they know what every birth certificate from every state looks like from every year and then verify it on the spot? That doesn’t seem reasonable to expect once I thought about what it would entail.
> and any agents that try to act lawfully are purged
I was replying in a serious manner but comon this is flat earth tier foaming at the mouth stuff. You are seriously telling me that they are firing people who don’t break the law? That is like comic book tier villainy. How would we possibly even know that, did their policy book leak?
My theory is that this is triggering the mental programming everyone had as children about WW2 despite being a completely different situation. If you tell literally all children that X is the most evil thing ever, you might end up with adults who are so sensitive to recognizing X that they see it when it isn’t there.
"Heckling" ICE is protected first amendment speech. It is absolutely unacceptable for them to take any negative action whatsoever against someone for that. Law enforcement officers need to have some fucking professionalism and not be thin-skinned babies. Anyone who can't handle that needs to be fired immediately.
Distinguishing who is legally allowed to be in the country from who isn't is literally ICE's entire job. If they aren't capable of recognizing official government documentation that definitively proves someone is allowed to be in the country, get them some fucking training before they go around arresting people.
The people who are entrusted with the enormous power of enacting violence on behalf of the state must be held to a higher standard than the people who are entrusted with protecting nightclubs from 20 year olds trying to get booze.
I personally don’t agree with the interpretation of the first amendment that places heckling, i.e. intentionally making it difficult for a person to perform a task using verbal distraction tactics, as free speech.
To me, free speech protections prevent rulers from closing off regions of ideology space, because they usually do so in their own self interest so we can’t trust them to do it even in cases when it is clearly for the true long term benefit of the group, which is why it is forbidden for them to forbid “speech”.
I also don’t believe in pornography as protected speech. I’m an atheist, I’m not a conservative, and I’m not against pornography. I don’t support pornography being made illegal. The protected speech argument for it is just stupid. And when you base reasonable practices on stupid legal arguments, you end up having… well, for example, abortion rights getting randomly rolled back by the court.
Yes, in a perfect utopia world, I agree with you that the hiding-foreigner purge guys would also be good at clerical type work. However, from what I’ve seen of humans, they can usually do one kind of thing or the other, not both. Like, guys who like to chase people and knock them down usually don’t like to perform detailed forgery analysis. To expect this is to expect ICE to be staffed by people with an uncommon trait combination. Have you had different experiences? If we had the FBI doing this, then yes the FBI can hire guys who can do both. If a massive org is spun up rapidly, then there is no way to apply the same kinds of hiring practices. I just don’t get the outrage here? Picture that happening in a movie, they hire a ton of guys who are beefy and like to throw people around, and then they rapidly train every one of them to spot fake passports and birth certificates from every state/year. That could make for an entertaining comedy plot, but would you find it realistic in a gritty drama?
Tangentially, I wonder why we haven’t seen more comparisons between ICE and the Spanish Inquisition, it feels much more accurate than the comparisons we do see (e.g. the other N word).
You need to look deeper, what is actually happening is much more egregious than what you are labeling "comic book tier villainy." Ideological purges of competent people following the law, being replaced with incompetent sycophants willing to follow illegal orders have been completed at almost every level of government. Check out this podcast on the purge of immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum cases from brown skinned people, as they are required to by law: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/868/the-hand-that-rocks-the...
In the last week there were massive purges of regional ICE leadership all around the country, replacing them with more militarized border patrol people, because they have been reluctant to use excessive force. In a 60 minutes interview in the last week, Trump openly stated that he thinks ICE still isn't being violent enough. These purges are not just happening in the government- private universities and companies have been extorted, or attempted to be extorted into performing ideological purges. Take a look at the outrageous letter Trump sent Harvard, demanding that they replace half of their faculty with those in personal political ideological alignment with him, subject to external review by someone he appoints.
Yes, ICE is entering communities and just violently beating up people unprovoked- there are literally hundreds of videos of it that I have seen, on Instagram in particular- including from the ACLU. Look at what happened in Wilder Idaho, where they detained every man, women, and child at a massive public horse racing event, and shot rubber bullets, zip tied, and handcuffed children while sadistically beating their parents in front of them- long high res videos of it are all over.
People absolutely have a legal right to 'heckle' or protest government sponsored violence in their communities, and are being brutalized or detained for exercising their 1st amendment rights, by masked agents refusing to identify so they cannot be held accountable, regardless of their crimes. No, it is not unreasonable to expect federal agents tasked with enforcing immigration law to be mentally capable of reading passports or birth certificates proving citizenship- border agents do this for a million people entering the USA legally every single day.
People are arrested all the time when they have official government paperwork stating that they definitively did not do the thing they are being arrested for?
Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.
HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven
Humans are great at identifying each other. As the internet matures (and ease of long-distance communication obviates the need for massive nation states), we can constrain state authority to geographic batches small enough that people are known to one another.
Bullshit! The alternative is mentioned in the article, trust the official documents presented by the 'suspect', as that's the purpose of the documents. As in OP's quote:
“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”
"Trust the word of the black box" is pure technocratic dystopian nonsense.
