Researcher in the U.S. trying to stay informed and help others stay informed. I write a blog that focuses on public information, public health, and policy: https://pimento-mori.ghost.io/
I only recently began using ghost, and am slowly figuring things out. Apologies for any formatting issues.
I feel like somebody did that when they first came out and they created some kind of ridiculous over the top penalty for doing it.
Its a bigger risk than I’m willing to take, but I would suggest if you’re going to go that route, try to get a wealthy and well connected friend to do it for you or have a good lawyer on retainer
Yeah, I am not sure but hopefully somebody has the numbers. That is usually the argument for trampling the constitution.
Hard to say how much has been actually documented bc they’ve been doing a lot of this stuff off record.
They potentially saved 30000 lives locking up 100 people for crimes committed by somebody else in a states they’ve never been to and we might not even know about it
Every time I hear that, I picture some guy stopping somebody else mid sentence when it comes on to be like “Wait, wait… you hear that? That’s me!” And then blasting it at full volume while he sings along. I feel like that’s had to have happened at least once or twice.
TBF it is a very catchy song
Somehow I missed that New Orleans had a secret partnership with Palantir for predictive policing starting around 2012 that was kind of revealed as a big scandal in 2018.
Allegedly this has nothing to do with that… Allegedly… Absolutely nothing.
That’s what they’re saying now, but apparently, an app was developed that allowed police to create a watch list of suspects, upload their picture, and use the cameras to constantly scan for the images. When they got a hit, police received a direct notification via the app
Apparently much of this wasn’t documented, but for whatever reason, the police captain decided in April to end it for the time being, so now it’s back to the company notifying police, but they want city council to pass an ordinance so they can go back to police being directly notified
https://wp.api.aclu.org/press-releases/208236
After the Washington Post began investigating this time around, city officials acknowledged the program and said they had “paused” it and that they “are in discussions with the city council” to change the city’s facial recognition technology law to permit this pervasive monitoring.
The ACLU is now urging the New Orleans City Council to launch a full investigation and reimpose a moratorium on facial recognition use until robust privacy protections, due process safeguards, and accountability measures are in place.
“Until now, no American police department has been willing to risk the massive public blowback from using such a brazen face recognition surveillance system,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “By adopting this system–in secret, without safeguards, and at tremendous threat to our privacy and security–the City of New Orleans has crossed a thick red line. This is the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing.”
Yeah there’s already at least one well known case. This article mentions it https://wp.api.aclu.org/press-releases/208236
The use of facial recognition technology by Project NOLA and New Orleans police raises serious concerns regarding misidentifications and the targeting of marginalized communities. Consider Randal Reid, for example. He was wrongfully arrested based on faulty Louisiana facial recognition technology, despite never having set foot in the state. The false match cost him his freedom, his dignity, and thousands of dollars in legal fees. That misidentification happened based on a still image run through a facial recognition search in an investigation; the Project NOLA real-time surveillance system supercharges the risks.
“We cannot ignore the real possibility of this tool being weaponized against marginalized communities, especially immigrants, activists, and others whose only crime is speaking out or challenging government policies. These individuals could be added to Project NOLA’s watchlist without the public’s knowledge, and with no accountability or transparency on the part of the police departments
Police use to justify stops and arrests: Alerts are sent directly to a phone app used by officers, enabling immediate stops and detentions based on unverified purported facial recognition matches.
My immediate thought was that I’m sure they would just start weaponizing them to fight back so cameras could stand their ground.
The WaPo article goes into a lot more detail: https://archive.ph/2fmW1
It seems that the cops were basically uploading images of suspects so that the cameras in the city were constantly scanning for people who were wanted (like a mug shot or an image of somebody stealing something) and then if a camera picked up a match it would send police the location of the suspect on a map.
Apparently Palantir was working with NOPD to secretly test predictive policing since 2012
The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago that purports to predict which people are likely drivers or victims of violence.
The partnership has been extended three times, with the third extension scheduled to expire on February 21st, 2018. The city of New Orleans and Palantir have not responded to questions about the program’s current status.
Not sure that it actually did ever expire
Or just wear a mask, saw a dude ride by me on a bike yesterday at like 11am in a skeleton zip up mask covering his whole head. Smart man.
It’s no picture standing next to seashells that spell out a common slang term to indicate harmlessly cutting or getting rid of something.
However, in the context of it following a terrorist attack in the same state a few months earlier where a truck was used to do the same thing, and in combination with the other comments in the post, and the user’s account history, it was definitely out of line. It says a lot it took that long for the mods or reddit to do anything, considering Reddit’s overreaction to so many other comments and posts that are clearly non-threatening.
It looks like they finally deleted the comment as of today, after I made the report on 4/29. Funny given how quick the mods are to remove content they don’t like from that subreddit.
Here are screenshots of the response from Reddit today, as well as the mod response and removal of the comment as of late yesterday/early today.
Idk about the account, and haven’t checked as of today, but last time I did, liberals_suc was still spreading his joy. Not sure why Reddit would tell me to block the account this morning if Reddit was also planning on deleting it
I think it could be life changing, but true progress will take time, like any tech. There’s a reason most scientists know you can’t just throw money at something and just make it work. That’s why technocracy and the idea of chosen elite is so fucking dumb.
Imagine if in the 80s we had just said ok, Steve Jobs did it. We’re done here. We don’t give any outside voices or ideas in tech a chance unless Jobs gives it the ok first. Imagine how much cool shit we would have missed out on if people hadn’t just said fuck it I don’t need all that money, I’ll just make my own shit and make it work with what I have.
Innovation and progress does not flourish in a neatly controlled box, and most people that don’t just buy other people’s work know that. That’s the real reason people started pushing for DEI. Not just bc it was the “PC” thing to do. It helps bring new perspectives which then leads to new ways of thinking and problem solving.
If you completely isolate AI you may get some cool shit but eventually if you just buy out the entire market to fit your singular vision you get repeating/boring and stale.
I’m pretty sure they think they’re at a point where if they just keep throwing money at it, it will just start getting creative and update itself, but when it’s as unreliable as it is, I don’t see that happening anytime soon
I’m not saying I believe its important, the president believes it’s important bc Thiel has been funding him and making policy decisions since his first term, most people (myself included) just didn’t notice it until the second one.
The first time, he tried to promote AI deregulation while insisting we would retain American values that helped us be better than China’s surveillance state, but then Trump lost power and Thiel lost 4 years of progress at the global AI table because of those values (democracy and the constitution). Now that he’s gotten his seat back he’s not going to risk ever letting it go. IF he ever intended to try to maintain or respect those values before, he certainly doesn’t now.
That is why the truth behind Trump/JD Vance/Adrian Vermeule’s argument for a constitutional interpretation of strong executive authority needs to be made loud and clear.
I cannot comprehend how anyone who is not already a billionaire could be dumb enough to support this, but let’s just be honest about what you’re supporting.
Bc you’re paying attention and not sticking your head in the sand.
It feels like it bc they definitely are. I’m in Louisiana and just woke up to find out news my corrupt Governor is being accused of scheming to install a new senator so that he can then have them resign and take both Senate and governor seats for himself.
One of several examples of how Landry and Trump seem to be scheming together to be as corrupt as possible
Even for Louisiana that’s a whole other level of corruption…not even the first Louisiana governor to do it, but the last one was in the 30s.
The last governor that was this blatant about corruption also had a personal vendetta against my city and tried to take it under siege using the national guard
Guess what else the current governor and his doge inspired task force are scheming
I agree, and as I keep trying to point out to people in the U.S., I’m pretty sure the reason Trump is not even giving GOP loyalists emergency disaster money when something happens in their state, is because there’s nothing left.
He literally put all of America’s eggs in one basket because he (and Peter Thiel) thought/think if they just deregulate everything and keep throwing money at it as fast as possible they will win, and other countries will be coming to us to buy our AI.
Tbf they are definitely planning to use it for evil, not to make humanity better, but I still don’t see why anybody would buy AI tech from the U.S.
I am wondering what happened in Brussels though, that made them say they’re considering some deregulation.
Trump was also very pissy at all of the EU but apparently Brussels in particular really hurt his ego
Yeah that is kind of a given, I just wish more people would wake up to that fact.
I use proton VPN, but no I always just get my phones from Amazon bc it’s cheap. Never was a real problem in the past, but now that the U.S. is (officially) a giant Oligopoly, probably not a wise idea.
I don’t really know any tech friends that are super in the know about that kind of thing. I have a paid Norton 360 subscription that does frequent scans for malware and says it never finds anything, but honestly wouldn’t even be surprised to learn I’m paying for a useless subscription.
The only reason I even bring that up is bc our current Governor who has always been a power hungry authoritarian boot licker renewed the Executive Order for a state of emergency for a cyber incident that our previous governor first created when the data breach happened several years ago.
When he “renewed” the order, he also slipped in a new section that granted authority to the director of one of his cabinet’s agencies, Governor’s office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), to handle the emergency as he sees fit.
What’s even more concerning is that on the same day he renewed this order, he restructured GOHSEP so that it is now under the control of the state’s National Guard, gave the former director of GOHSEP a new title, and then named a member of the Guard “acting director.”
He’s been very vague about what the renewal was about, but it allegedly had something to do with updating the OMV/DMV data base for the state. Since then he has also created a hiring freeze for the state, which would seem to indicate that whoever was acting director is now indefinitely the director named in the executive order until the governor decides to lift the hiring freeze.
Even for someone not already paranoid, and without everything happening at a national level, that would all be a bit concerning right? I’m not a journalist, but I’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to it.
For some reason, no actual local journalists seem to be willing to point this out, but it’s all publicly available information.
I know I’m usually on the more paranoid side, but I’ve always assumed everything I do on a smartphone is potentially being monitored via camera or mics.
If the apps are just taking screenshots, or recording a few seconds of data via mic, it would be almost guaranteed that certain corrupt (and also paranoid) governments that are dismissive of privacy rights could force or bribe those apps to allow them to also access screens, mics, and cameras anyway, right?
I’m in the U.S., and especially with how glitchy my phone has suddenly become over the last few months, I’m just at the point where I just assume that’s what’s going on.
I had the same android for like 4 years without many issues, then suddenly around February it just became almost impossible to use. Weird glitchy things with the size of the tool bar at the bottom of my screen and the popup keyboard. Redirect notifications all the time for certain websites, and my VPN connection is just constantly interrupted and having to be reset.
I finally was like fuck it, this is an old phone so maybe that’s it. Brand new phone, but most of the same issues.
I use signal instead of text most of the time, and switched a lot of things to proton mail, but if someone is potentially recording your screen, does it really matter if what you’re doing is encrypted?
No it’s not clickbait, he really is a fucking moron.
Ok, I think you found a loophole