Oh, the irony…Amazon’s new facial recognition software identified 28 members of Congress as criminals. This is pretty upsetting for statists everywhere as their precious masters are being “mislabeled.”
In a recent test, the ACLU scanned every Congress member’s official photo and found that 28 of them, including Republicans and Democrats and men and women, were incorrectly matched to 28 mugshots. Hold your laughter, it gets better. This is the same ACLU that recently wrote an article saying that our liberty is making us unfree. The ACLU then goes on to argue that the government abuses people because we keep angering it. Fun word swap: the master abuses the slaves because they keep angering him. It’s like the ACLU is justifying abuse by the government and then gets upset that their masters get labeled as criminals.
Since this is Congress we’re talking about, we should be clear: The lawmakers aren’t criminals (hold the ‘lols’). The pictures that Amazon’s “Rekognition” software matched to them were of different people
“Mass shootings create a pervasive sense of insecurity and anxiety that politicians and policymakers will inevitably seek to address,” senior policy analyst Jay Stanley insists on the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project blog. As a result, he argues, “those who support expansive gun rights as a protection against excessive government power should strongly consider how much government intrusion and expanded power they’re willing to trade for those rights.”
Reason put it quite nicely writing, “This is the old ‘why do you make him hit you?’ argument applied to civil liberties. It excuses the actions of the abuser—the state in this case—as reactions to the missteps of the abused. But it’s actually a step further removed because most gun owners fly entirely below the state’s radar. They’re among the general population getting slapped by policies that politicians justify as responses to the crimes of a tiny minority.”
At least the ACLU is warning about the dangers of this obviously flawed Amazon software. They could also attempt to define civil liberties because they seem to only be on the side of the liberties they like.
A representative for Amazon told The New York Times that the ACLU used the tools differently than how they expect law enforcement will. The ACLU used the default mode of 80 percent confidence in the match; Amazon recommends that police use a 95 percent threshold. “It is worth noting that in real-world scenarios, Amazon Rekognition is almost exclusively used to help narrow the field and allow humans to expeditiously review and consider options using their judgment,” Amazon’s rep said in a statement.
I can’t imagine how anybody would find that reassuring. Not only do law enforcement officers have a lengthy history of stubbornly arresting and imprisoning people over cases of mistaken identity, Zuri Davis noted recently how one police chief was just flat-out arresting random innocent men in order to clear burglaries. Imagine being able to blame it on technology.-Reason
None of this is reassuring and it pretty much makes the ACLU look like major hypocrites. They want people to have the liberty of privacy and better facial recognition tools, but they reject the notion of self-defense because some people have done some bad things. Welcome to 2018.
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