POLICE STATE: Amazon provides Police with scary facial recognition system that some deem as “recipe for authoritarianism and disaster,”

POLICE STATE: Amazon provides Police with scary facial recognition system that some deem as “recipe for authoritarianism and disaster,”

In what’s been called a “recipe for authoritarianism and disaster,” Amazon has reportedly been selling a facial recognition software called “Rekognition” to law enforcement agencies in the United States since last fall.  Civil-rights groups are crying foul while citing concerns about the potential misuse of such a tool, which can be utilized on a police officer’s body camera.  Dozens of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, submitted a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, asking the company to stop the distribution of their new tool.



The statement read: “Rekognition is a powerful surveillance system readily available to violate rights and target communities of color. … With Rekognition, Amazon delivers these dangerous surveillance powers directly to the government.” But Amazon pushed back in an emailed statement about the program, saying that it had “many useful applications in the real world” and that the firm “requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use” its products.  READ MORE

Facial recognition can now identify liars

Surveillance cameras at airports could be used to identify passengers who are not telling the truth, helping better identify terrorists and drug-smugglers while minimizing instances of racial profiling.  The artificial-intelligence programme was developed by a team of computer scientists at the University of Rochester, New York, using crowdsourcing technology to build the largest public data
resource of liars’ facial expressions. Researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to analyze over 1.3 million frames of one-to-one interactions. Among the most common traits associated with lying identified by the programme was a high-intensity version of the so-called Duchenne smile, in which people effectively smile with their eyes. READ MORE