Swordsmyth
11-03-2018, 07:55 PM
Orlando, Florida, law enforcement is testing technology developed by Amazon, Inc. to keep the cities residents under constant surveillance, according to a story broken by Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed’s exclusive report details the police department’s potential deployment of Amazon’s Rekognition, the Seattle, Washington-based behemoth’s facial recognition software.
The documents obtained by Buzzfeed reveal:
Amazon marketed its facial recognition tools to Orlando’s police department, providing tens of thousands of dollars of technology to the city at no cost, and shielding the Rekognition pilot with a mutual nondisclosure agreement that kept its details out of the public eye. More broadly, they reveal the accelerated pace at which law enforcement is embracing facial recognition tools with limited training and little to no oversight from regulators or the public.
"Providing customers with an opportunity to test technology with free credits is a common practice in the industry and something we offer to many of our customers with various AWS services," an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement.
"Talking to organizations about products and new features under a non-disclosure agreement is also something we do frequently with many of our customers for the purposes of protecting intellectual property and competitive information. We continue to support our customers in the responsible use of the technology which includes providing publicly available best practices and documentation as well as ongoing guidance from our machine learning experts, all of which is standard for customer engagements.”
In other words, using Amazon’s facial recognition technology allows police and other law enforcement agencies to conduct dragnet surveillance in real-time without submitting the use of those surveillance apparatuses to the demands of the law, state or federal.
With the freedom (watch out for that puddle of irony) that the public-private partnership with Amazon provides police, there are many questions critical to the protection of civil liberties that will go unanswered. Buzzfeed mentions several:
whether the system learns or otherwise improves from the video it ingests; whether Amazon provided Orlando law enforcement with hands-on training to help them understand how to use and interpret Rekognition (apart from emailed guidance and publicly available documentation); and how, exactly, the system processes and disregards faces that are not those of “persons of interest.”
While Orlando has not yet installed the Rekognition software, the city’s testing of the technology makes it clear that the manner that such a surveillance system would be used is being explored.
First, the cameras equipped with Rekognition could record faces in real-time and notify local police of any “persons of interest” that the cameras have spotted and that, after cross-reference with national databases of images captured by other facial recognition systems in use across the country, should be detained by police.
Next, the cameras potentially would locate and upload the faces of millions of Americans who’ve done nothing to merit the recording and storing of their biometric data to any database, much less one maintained by law enforcement.
On that subject, it’s instructive to remember the danger of local law enforcement becoming increasingly financially dependent on the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security through the latter’s Fusion Center program.
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/30531-orlando-testing-facial-recognition-technology-provided-free-by-amazon
Buzzfeed’s exclusive report details the police department’s potential deployment of Amazon’s Rekognition, the Seattle, Washington-based behemoth’s facial recognition software.
The documents obtained by Buzzfeed reveal:
Amazon marketed its facial recognition tools to Orlando’s police department, providing tens of thousands of dollars of technology to the city at no cost, and shielding the Rekognition pilot with a mutual nondisclosure agreement that kept its details out of the public eye. More broadly, they reveal the accelerated pace at which law enforcement is embracing facial recognition tools with limited training and little to no oversight from regulators or the public.
"Providing customers with an opportunity to test technology with free credits is a common practice in the industry and something we offer to many of our customers with various AWS services," an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement.
"Talking to organizations about products and new features under a non-disclosure agreement is also something we do frequently with many of our customers for the purposes of protecting intellectual property and competitive information. We continue to support our customers in the responsible use of the technology which includes providing publicly available best practices and documentation as well as ongoing guidance from our machine learning experts, all of which is standard for customer engagements.”
In other words, using Amazon’s facial recognition technology allows police and other law enforcement agencies to conduct dragnet surveillance in real-time without submitting the use of those surveillance apparatuses to the demands of the law, state or federal.
With the freedom (watch out for that puddle of irony) that the public-private partnership with Amazon provides police, there are many questions critical to the protection of civil liberties that will go unanswered. Buzzfeed mentions several:
whether the system learns or otherwise improves from the video it ingests; whether Amazon provided Orlando law enforcement with hands-on training to help them understand how to use and interpret Rekognition (apart from emailed guidance and publicly available documentation); and how, exactly, the system processes and disregards faces that are not those of “persons of interest.”
While Orlando has not yet installed the Rekognition software, the city’s testing of the technology makes it clear that the manner that such a surveillance system would be used is being explored.
First, the cameras equipped with Rekognition could record faces in real-time and notify local police of any “persons of interest” that the cameras have spotted and that, after cross-reference with national databases of images captured by other facial recognition systems in use across the country, should be detained by police.
Next, the cameras potentially would locate and upload the faces of millions of Americans who’ve done nothing to merit the recording and storing of their biometric data to any database, much less one maintained by law enforcement.
On that subject, it’s instructive to remember the danger of local law enforcement becoming increasingly financially dependent on the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security through the latter’s Fusion Center program.
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/30531-orlando-testing-facial-recognition-technology-provided-free-by-amazon