Journalist Spots Fugitive Terrorist Using Facial Recognition Software (theguardian.com) 80
Slashdot reader Bruce66423 writes: A German court this week sentenced a member of the Red Army Faction — a far-left terrorist organisation that operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s — to jail. [67-year-old Daniela Klettewas was sentenced to 13 years for armed robberies, according to the Guardian, and "she also faces trial for alleged involvement in three attacks in 1990 and 1994: a failed bombing in front of a bank, a shooting at the US embassy in Bonn and a 1993 bombing at a prison.".] She had remained hidden for decades, and the German police hadn't deployed facial recognition software to catch her. But according to the article a journalist did, to good effect.
Is the ban on the police using it a good thing? Is it good that a journalist was able to track her down using it?
Is the ban on the police using it a good thing? Is it good that a journalist was able to track her down using it?
Yes, the ban on police using it is a good thing (Score:1, Informative)
Next question.
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Is it good that a journalist was able to track her down using it?
On the one hand, it is good that justice was finally served.
On the other:
-Vigilante Justice: taking the law into ones own hands when the police/government can't deliver justice is a cool trope in film, but harmful to society in reality.
-Outsourcing actions that the police/government are forbidden from taking to private citizens/corporations is the wrong solution. If a thing is important to do, we should re-examine why we forbid the government/police from doing it -not simply find a workaround where someone
It depends on whether she was still active (Score:2)
Is it good that a journalist was able to track her down using it?
It depends. Was she repentant, inactive, and not causing trouble these days?
Or was she active in recruiting and training of today's radical provocateurs or operatives, other otherwise involved in their direct actions?
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No, worse than the police, because the police at least have some avenues you can pursue to clear yourself.
Re: Yes, the ban on police using it is a good thin (Score:1)
Did the journalist have her arrested by journalists, taken to journalist prison, and tried in journalist court? No. The journalist said "I think she's someone you are looking for" and the police, using all the legal means at their disposal investigated, arrested, tried her and secured a conviction.
If the tip was wrong, if the police turned up no connection/evidence, what would be the problem?
Did the journalist go to police first and not publish until confirmed, or did the journalist publish first, then go t
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Next question.
What multiple of that 13 year sentence should the journalist get for violating the privacy of that poor terrorist?
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Also funny that the alpha males always go straight to the police and government when they feel harmed or at risk. And they fall over themselves to give government and police limitless power at the slightest provocation. Curious!
I'm not sure if that's true, but it would make sense if it was. Alpha males (ignoring there is no such thing) are the most restricted by laws, because they are the most likely to get their way if there was no enforcement of laws (through the natural law of might makes right). So it shouldn't be surprising that they'd be the least likely to let something slide without getting the police involved to get the same outcome they could have done themselves if the laws allowed them to use their own physical force.
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I'm not sure it's alpha vs. non-alpha here.
I think alpha males are bold. They are inclined to action, and to being assertive. Whether the law can help them or not (and possibly whether the law is even on their side) is less of a concern than driving the action forward.
On the other hand, men who go to the police when they feel they are wronged could be one of two kinds, neither of which seem exclusively "alpha" to me. They could simply be civilized, wishing to avail themselves of peaceful means of addressing
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I am not a bot. I meant what I wrote sincerely, without a desire to display satire.
And I'm almost always on your side, rsilvergun. Not this time, apparently.
Even one's friends disagee with one sometimes. Nothing to be embarrassed about.
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for a 67 year old woman living in hiding
Suspected terrorist. Yes.
Also funny that the alpha males always go straight to the police and government
With great power comes great responsibility. I don't think you'd like living in a society where might equals right.
Oh noes a terrorist! (Score:2)
Again you're trading a 67 year old woman who hasn't committed any crimes in decades for literally
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for literally all of your civil rights.
Including the right not to see the word "literally" misused in such a fashion?
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Might DOES make right; that's how government works. One definition is a monopoly on "legal" violence within their territory, although they aren't very good at it, considering how many riots there were in 2020 and the two autonomous zones where city governments surrendered their monopoly for a spell.
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One definition is a monopoly on "legal" violence within their territory,
Right. But a part of monopoly power includes the right to use it selectively. Or not at all, if that suits their agenda.
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There is something decidedly amiss when the monopolist defines its own limits.
One vote every 2 or 4 years, for which insider controls the monopoly, is a pathetic outsider limitation on government.
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I don't recall any mention of sacrificing all of anyone's privacy or freedom. Why are you going to such lengths to defend a violent terrorist? And bringing up "alpha males" as if that weren't some twisted right-wing fantasy based on a misunderstanding of wolf behavior.
Yeah what you want is irrelevant (Score:2)
I could care less about a dying old woman. I have elementary critical thinking skills. Would you evidently lack. Every time you see a story like this this is the authorities telling you that it's okay to give up your civil rights because look at this scary scary ter
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If she's been in hiding for 40 years, she's not exactly violent any more. Her capture has nothing to do with public safety at this point, more for revenge and closing the record with some HooRah We Got Her theatrics.
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I don't know what she's been doing. But from the fact that it took 40 years to track her down, and that only because a non-cop found her, I'd say the evidence is strong I know what she *hasn't* been doing -- terrorism, or training terrorists.
Seriously, if she's been living for 40 years training terrorists who haven't done anything to draw attention to themselves or her, she's either been running a false flag terrorist school with the government's connivance, or she hasn't been running a terrorism school.
If
Re: Yes, the ban on police using it is a good thin (Score:1)
What multiple of that 13 year sentence should the journalist get for violating the privacy of that poor terrorist?
Please explain, specifically, how the "poor terrorist" had her privacy "violated"?
Did the terrorist place cameras in her home, or rely on existing footage from security cameras or deploy their own cameras IN PUBLIC SPACES?
Is there some right not to be recognized in public? In Germany? By a private citizen?
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And no, it's not good that a journalist was able to track her down using it. Or at least, regulations that prevent police from using it should also prevent them from using it by proxy via some third party. The facial recognition should be thrown out as inadmissible in court.
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The facial recognition should be thrown out as inadmissible in court.
Lucky we got an anonymous tipoff
- the police.
Re: Yes, the ban on police using it is a good thin (Score:1)
What if it was? Are you assuming facial recognition was the sole evidence used against her? I suspect the German authorities had her fingerprints and other compelling evidence, the Facial Recognition by the journalist merely gave them something to investigate.
Re:Yes, the ban on police using it is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Yes, the ban on police using it is a good thin (Score:1)
But when Iran takes over. They'll have a list of people to go after.
They already do, and they do go after them. (Hello, "largest state sponsor of terrorism"?)
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The ban on private individuals is a bad idea...
Private individuals, PI's, Skip Tracers and reporters SHOULD be able to use such software freely. Police, and the Government NEED to provide reasonable suspicion to a court and get a writ.
This kind of tool can be incredibly useful, or incredibly invasive. The real question is who(m?) do you trust as the gate keeper. I'd nominate the EU data protection people but there is no agency or entity in
the US I'd trust not to monetize the data regardless of law.
"Is the ban on the police using it a good thing?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, just ask Angela Lipps [cnn.com]. And there are other, similar examples of law enforcement misusing facial recognition software.
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. And there are other, similar examples of law enforcement misusing facial recognition software.
What is the logic there? How do you get from "police have misused it" to "police should be banned from using it"? I feel a few steps are missing.
Are you going to ban everything that has ever been misused? I'm looking to see somebody make a better argument that that. Or is "truthiness" enough?
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"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." --William Blackstone, 1760s
Re: "Is the ban on the police using it a good thin (Score:2)
Since when did Donald Trump become the woke left?
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Well, the difference is that ICE releases guilty people to other countries, and that is exactly the same as imprisoning them. (Somehow.)
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We're talking about the January 6th Traitors that trump released to commit more crimes. Do try to keep up.
https://www.citizensforethics.... [citizensforethics.org]
At least 33 January 6th insurrectionists pardoned by President Trump have been rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes since January 6, 2021, according to new analysis by CREW. Four pardoned insurrectionists have allegedly reoffended since receiving their pardons. Several have argued that the pardon should cover unrelated criminal convictions, and in one case l
Re: "Is the ban on the police using it a good thi (Score:1)
33 out of how many people? I think you'll find the percentage is quite small.
Being pardoned for an illegal parading conviction does not make someone more inclined to commit other, non-parading related offenses.
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Bleeding heart liberals may be idiots, but they do believe in the rule of law. Their sin is in believing that everyone is redeemable. Christ might approve, but most voters don't.
However, at this point in the USA, MAGAs and Republicans are actually responsible for the destruction of the rule of law. We have the president breaking the law, repeatedly, daily, whenever he's not enriching himself by trading stocks using insider information, while a
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Your response will be, police have more rights: To be precise, police have the right to be negligent or incompetent. My response is, that's why we need to ban tools that protect their negligence. It's difficult to hide a
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Seriously: who tf needs a gun capable of spitting out X number of bullets per second?
Hunting? Pfft. Yeah, let's eat whatever's left of Bambi after being riddled with bullets.
Home security? First, are you associated with drug mobs? Who's coming after you that you don't feel safe without a personal armory? More realistically, you need one
Re: "Is the ban on the police using it a good thin (Score:1)
It's reasonable to ban assault rifles because they serve no real purpose. Well, aside from making little boys with penis envy feel a little better about themselves.
The term assault rifle is a useless term and has no meaningful definition anymore.
Many people think the definition is you can bolt a scope to the barrel, or the gun is black, scary, whatever.
It is, and has been for for almost a century, illegal for an average citizen to own a weapon that is capable of firing more than one round per trigger pull. That is the true definition of assault rifle. What people talk about now is banning weapons that resemble assault weapons, but are only capable of firing one round
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Easy - the justice system isn't doing the proper checks. Police use it, and it returns a list of names of people WHO LOOK NOTHING LIKE the person of interest. And police do not even perform a preliminary check of whether or not the person could have committed the crime (they may have an alibi). And the judges do not even take 5 seconds to look at the photos of the
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That whole rant makes not the slightest bit of sense.
Nice story, but why would any of that be true? Truth aside, it does not make a logical argument.
What are you trying to say? It happened once? Every police force is the same?
You could use an incoherent rant like that to argue against anything. You'd ban the use of paper.
Insufficient and misleading data (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to make the case that government should use facial recognition, you'll need some real data.
* One success ... how many false positives -- how many people were wrongly tagged? How many false negatives -- how many times was this woman seen but not tagged? Was she a hermit and this was her first public appearance in 40 years?
* How recent were the pictures of her which were the basis of her being tagged? Do you really want us to believe the only success story you have is based on artificially aging her photograph by 40 years?
UK police false positives on facial recognition (Score:2)
Here's a response to an FOI
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com... [whatdotheyknow.com]
It claims '1 false confirmed from over 641,533 face'
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Thanks, that is very interesting. But something smells fishy.
1. 1 false positive from "over 641,533 faces" seems too good to be true. Very few systems of any kind are that good, and facial recognition? I don't buy it. And that's an oddly specific number to be "over". It does not pass the smell test.
2. "Shows no bias" is similarly too good to be true and doesn't pass the smell test. Didn't Apple have some problem in the last year or two with trying to spiff up faces, where black skin didn't work as w
Some good comments (Score:2)
I suspect the joker is the word 'confirmed' in 'false confirmed'. If the person stopped is immediately able to demonstrate they aren't who the system says they are, are they going to bother to make sure the false stop is recorded. Similarly if the person is able to prove they weren't the person when they get to the police station, they may just get released without it being recorded on the system as a false positive for the facial recognition system. I entirely agree the figure is miraculous; I'm merely rep
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I spent four years in the navy as a supply clerk dealing with paper work and petty bureaucrats. I learned an outrageous number of ways to not cooperate while seeming to cooperate.
I appreciate digging up the response. I have long since lost the patience to deal with bureaucrats.
No, this is not a good thing (Score:1)
Facial recognition will get abused if legal. What that journalist does is highly problematic and probably illegal as well. Or it may just be legal because Klette is a "public figure". But allow this for general use and they will start doing profiles on everybody. A large part of a free society is that it is hard to find out what individual people do.
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You realize a large part of a journalists job is to investigate, don't you? It's not illegal to track someone down, no matter how long it's been.
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GDPR.
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GDPR.
Could fall under the significant public interest exemption, and relevant EU/German law.
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As I already mentioned.
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You realize a large part of a journalists job is to investigate, don't you?
This is true. But the police are restricted from using some of the tools that journalists (at least this one) used. That's backwards. I voted for the local sheriff. I didn't vote for some journalist who may be working with an agenda*. We have a principle of equal protection under the law. Not equal protection at the hands of the press.
*In this case, it appears not to be so.
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No such thing as sheriffs in Germany.
Screw Pokémon Go (Score:4, Interesting)
Place public bounties on fugitives. Create a private app that constantly scans faces. Profit.
Why do Leftists always lose? (Score:2)
Re: Why do Leftists always lose? (Score:2)
If leftists always lose then why does political power so frequently oscillate between liberals and conservatives?
Oh, I see, you are describing the world as you want it to be, not as it is. You have decoupled from reality. Intellectually, that makes you indistinguishable from an idiot or an insane person.
Whats wrong with living in a small town? (Score:3)
The fundamental argument for visible, public facial recognition is not about creating a dystopian surveillance state; it is about recreating the high-trust environment of a small town on a larger scale.
In a traditional small town, people leave their front doors unlocked, shops don’t have security screens, and bus drivers don’t sit behind bulletproof glass. This layout thrives not because small towns are magically free of people with criminal intent, but because of a simple psychological reality: any potential criminal knows they will be immediately recognised, identified, and caught.
Anonymity is the lifeblood of public crime. By pairing visible security cameras with facial recognition in spaces where there is already no legal expectation of privacy, we strip away that anonymity, replacing it with a digital version of the "watchful neighbour."
We are currently forcing our cities to choose between two types of security: physical barriers or digital accountability:
We don't lock our doors because we want to live in a fortress; we lock them because anonymity protects the wrongdoer. By using visible, clearly marked facial recognition in public spaces, we eliminate that anonymity. We aren't destroying privacy - since no privacy exists on a public street - we are restoring the accountability of the small town, where the community is safe precisely because everyone is seen.
Postscript: above is putting the pro side. I know some here are unfamiliar with civilised debate, and will get angry, so I'll append that I'm not unaware of the dangers of this technology, and the need to mitigate them. I recognise the legitimate concerns people in different cultures, such as the civil rights history in the US. But Americans already have widespread facial recognition, its just outsourced to private companies like Meta, Palantir and Clearview. Is that better than regulated police use?
Perhaps the issue in the US is the fragmented nature of the policing system, with many small local forces acting without accountability. Would it be any better if facial recognition was limited to state and Federal police, where there would be better oversight? But now I remember the history of the FBI, so Americans' fear is understandable.
For different reasons, Germans may fear such tech is a single step away from a surveillance state.
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The neighbour has the same power I have, which is limited by the time she can spend enforcing her rules onto me: Corporations and police have much more power by means of money and employees. They can divide the task of watching and oppressing me, among multiple employees.
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They can divide the task of watching and oppressing me, among multiple employees.
So the Lets Get NotEmmanuelGoldstein Corporation? Somehow, I don't see this as a very profitable venture.
Seriously, law enforcement operates on a one detective to many cases/suspects ratio. And they aren't a for profit venture.
Small towns, getting down to populations approaching Dunbar's Number [wikipedia.org] might have a shot at such surveillance. But even in towns of several thousand, it's entirely possible to maintain relative anonymity in most aspects of one's life. Like boinking the wrong woman, for example.
Unless
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There are obvious differences.
1. People's memories are not perfect, they forget things. Computers don't forget.
2. If things got really bad, you could move to another town and start over. Not so when all the towns are connected to the same database.
3. Facial recognition is not very reliable, and the reliability gets worse as skin tones darken.
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3. Facial recognition is not very reliable, and the reliability gets worse as skin tones darken.
Human witnesses are even less reliable. I'll avoid the toxic race politics there, but when there was a basis of truth to the "dark skin" thing, it also applied to pale skin. White people had to wear brown makeup on camera. But modern cameras are much better at picking contrast over a wide brightness range. Do you think black people still can't be photographed clearly? They aren't vampires.
Distinction without a difference here (Score:2)
Whether the police use facial recognition, or a private member of the public uses facial recognition and hands that data to the police is a distinction without a difference. While it's great that a fugitive was caught, what really needs to happen now is the journalist or rather the facial recognition data source the journalist used need to be dragged through the courts for breaching of privacy laws.
Did the journalist get clear and explicit warning to the guy for the use of facial recognition as required by
I think it should be allowed (Score:2)
However, there should be proper oversight and verification of what is flagged by the machine. If the machine makes a mistake, and an innocent suffers because of that mistake, they should be compensated in proportion to the amount of damage they suffered.
Journalist? How? (Score:2)
The Guardian article is light on details. What facial recognition system/database did this journalist use? What image source(cameras, facebook,...) did they use?
I suppose the question is how did this journalist manage to get a hold of data that is usually reserved (affordable only) to government?
Yes, the ban on Police using it is good.
The lying fuckers are going to use and abuse it anyway.
Solutionism (Score:2)
The journalist was able to retrofind her using undisclosed facial recognition software after she had been found.
It would not surprise me if that was simply a use of semantic tagging of the Google image search engine of fotos found after her whereabouts were revealed.
Also, Germans strongly politically oppose surveillance software as does their legal system. If there is a national able to generate a movement to break free from BigTech, Germany is a good candidate.
Anyway, if you want to put such software to go
No such thing as a match (Score:2)
Systems like facial scanners, fingerprint scanners, DNA, etc. do not and cannot tell you that a scan matches one person out of many.
What they do tell you is at what confidence level you can reject the null hypothesis that a random persons' random scan matches a specific persons data.
So in a scenario where you have a identity specified separately from the scan, like fingerprint unlock the account on a computer or the electronic passport gate line at an airport, it is at least statistically plausible