Police around the United States are routinely using facial recognition technology to help identify suspects, but those departments rarely disclose they've done so - even to suspects and their lawyers.
Documents concerning the use and disclosure, of facial recognition technology were provided to the Washington Post as part of its ongoing investigation into use of the technology in the US, but only from around 40 departments in 15 states out of the "more than 100" departments who were asked. Most, WaPo noted, declined to answer anything.
Police records reportedly indicate that, aside from not disclosing that facial recognition technology, police also frequently obscured use of the technology by saying they identified suspects "through investigative means," while others have outright policy documents that tell officers to "not document this investigative lead."
In multiple cases documented in police reports and court filings, WaPo found those charged with crimes based on facial recognition often weren't aware that it had been used to identify them until after they were already in jail – several times incorrectly.
Emphasis added by me.
It seems that the Police sometimes don't even tell the DA's office about this. While I Am Not A Lawyer, this seems like a great argument to abolish Qualified Immunity. The secrecy itself is the best evidence that the process is being abused. I mean, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, right?
Disney said it is abandoning its motion to compel arbitration in a case filed by a man who alleges his wife died from anaphylaxis after a restaurant at a Disney complex failed to honor requests for allergen-free food.
Disney's motion to compel arbitration controversially cited the Disney+ streaming service's subscriber agreement, which includes a binding arbitration clause. The plaintiff's lawyer called the argument "absurd."
Disney confirmed this week that it will withdraw the motion, which it filed on May 31.
Good. It was a stupid argument anyway. Man, they generated a lot of ill will with that bone-headed move, though.
CrowdStrike says it is "highly disappointed" and rejects the claims made by Delta and its lawyers that the vendor exhibited gross negligence in the events that led to the global IT outage a little over two weeks ago.
That's according to a letter, seen by The Reg and sent to David Boies, partner at the law firm Delta hired to investigate the airline's legal options after it struggled more than most to bring its systems back online, leading to a sprawling list of flight cancellations.
The Falcon vendor reiterated its apology to Delta and the wider customer base. It then went on to remind Boies, known for his work as special counsel during the 1990s US antitrust trial against Microsoft, that it had been proactive in reaching out to Delta, offering support to the airline "within hours" of the incident unfolding.
...
CrowdStrike's lawyer, Michael B. Carlinsky, then poked the bear further. He said that among other things, in this hypothetical trial Delta would also need to explain why it took so much longer than competitors to recover from the same issue, why it refused the free on-site help CrowdStrike offered – the support that led to faster recovery times than Delta's, and the operational resiliency of its IT infrastructure.
This is hands down the biggest screw up - ever - by any security vendor. I guess that a screw up this big is a potential extinction-level event for Crowdstrike but this sure doesn't sound like it will calm down their customer base. OK, so they offered some help when they took down Delta, and Delta didn't jump on this. That sounds like it's 1% on Delta and 99% on Crowdstrike.
But that's not what's going on here - it's explicitly telling a customer that they will drag them through the mud if the customer sues them for their monumental screw up.
Adobe has promised to update its terms of service to make it "abundantly clear" that the company will "never" train generative AI on creators' content after days of customer backlash, with some saying they would cancel Adobe subscriptions over its vague terms.
Users got upset last week when an Adobe pop-up informed them of updates to terms of use that seemed to give Adobe broad permissions to access user content, take ownership of that content, or train AI on that content. The pop-up forced users to agree to these terms to access Adobe apps, disrupting access to creatives' projects unless they immediately accepted them.
...
On X (formerly Twitter), YouTuber Sasha Yanshin wrote that he canceled his Adobe license "after many years as a customer," arguing that "no creator in their right mind can accept" Adobe's terms that seemed to seize a "worldwide royalty-free license to reproduce, display, distribute" or "do whatever they want with any content" produced using their software.
...
Adobe's design leader Scott Belsky replied, telling Yanshin that Adobe had clarified the update in a blog post and noting that Adobe's terms for licensing content are typical for every cloud content company. But he acknowledged that those terms were written about 11 years ago and that the language could be plainer, writing that "modern terms of service in the current climate of customer concerns should evolve to address modern day concerns directly."
...
"You forced people to sign new Terms," Yanshin told Belsky on X. "Legally, they are the only thing that matters."
OldNFO points out a post at Lawrence's place about how Adobe has changed their terms of service. Basically, you have to agree that they own all the work you create with their software, in order to get access to your work that you created on their software.
Sweet.
Now IANAL, and so don't know how the (inevitable) Class Action lawsuit(s) will play out. However, I am an enthusiastic user of The GIMP, a free (as in speech) Open Source Photoshop-alike application.
Yes, it has a Photoshop-worthy learning curve, but it is full featured and powerful, cross platform, and free. No weird terms of service getting changed at midnight.
If you're looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I highly recommend this.
Lawrence has a good post up where Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons delves into the topic of just what an "Assault Rifle" is. Everyone thinks they know all this (I sure did), but they - and I - don't. For example: Assault Shotguns and Assault Pistols? Defined by statute. I did not know that.
There are only two things I have to add to the discussion of the Titan/Titanic disaster:
1. OceanGate seems not to have considered that their target customer had enough cash to sue them into oblivion if things went Tango Uniform.
2. OceanGate's investors did not consider what their liability would be if things went Tango Uniform.
The legal proceedings promise to be epic. And yeah, I don't care that the release that their customers signed mentioned the word "death" three times. Doesn't release them from liability for reckless endangerment and misrepresentation.
UPDATE 23 JUNE 2023 19:42: Big Country gets an honorable mention with this one:
He has more, so get over there. He's of a similar mind of the legal predicament that OceanGate is in.
I had missed that Denver prosecutors dropped all charges against Matthew Dolloff in the shooting death of Lee Keltner in October 2020. Who is Matthew Dolloff, I hear you ask? The dude holding the heater here:
This was a protest where two sides stood off against each other. Words led to shoving and Dolloff shot Keltner graveyard dead. You can see Dolloff's slide pushed back and smoke from the propellant making a bee-line towards Keltner's head. If you zoom way in there's a black dot that may or may not be the bullet right above Keltner's wrist.
So was this a good shoot or a bad shoot?
To answer this we need to put aside which "side" each was on. Keltner was Patriot Front, Dolloff may or may not have been Antifa but does seem to have been BLM. But quite frankly none of this matters. From the DA's statement:
As the case progressed - and a full analysis of the case details including materials provided by defense counsel was made - prosecutors realized that they would not be able to prove that Mr. Dolloff did not have the right to use deadly force to defend himself and others pursuant to Colorado law.
... without provocation, Mr. Keltner verbally threatened and physically assaulted Mr. Dolloff and was the initial aggressor before being shot. Under Colorado's law, Matthew Dolloff had no duty to retreat and was legally justified in his actions. While I do not agree with Mr. Dolloff's decision to use lethal force, the fact remains he had the right to do so under our law.
Just a face slap, right? Well, maybe - Keltner had a can of bear spray in his right hand here. Mace may or may not be considered Deadly Force (some places it is, some places it isn't). But here's the thing - look at the vertical chain link fence support right behind Keltner in the picture immediately above, then look at where that same fence support is in the first picture: clearly both men had stepped back. While Colorado law says you have no duty to retreat, both men backed up.
So bad shoot?
Maybe not. Look at the position of both men as Dolloff was drawing his pistol:
Kelter has taken a step back as he sees Dolloff drawing, but Dolloff has stepped way back. Kelter seems absolutely to have been the aggressor, physically assaulting Dolloff and holding what may (or may not) be considered a deadly weapon in Colorado, but which is definitely considered a deadly weapon elsewhere.
So good (justified) shoot? Remember, these pictures are from the video which means that the first and last are separated by a second, maybe two. When things go bad, they go bad all of a sudden.
I don't know whether this was a good shoot or a bad one, but the DA seems to think so. Maybe the DA in on the side of the "bad guys" but I don't think we should "flip the scrip" because Kelter was "on our side" and Dolloff wasn't. Rule of law is a street that runs both ways - or should, when the range goes hot.
From the comments over at Althouse, there's an assertion that the reason that the SCOTUS took ten years to take a Second Amendment case was that Roberts told everybody that if they took a case he would vote against it. Then Trump appointed Barrett and instead of a 5-4 court it was 6-3 and he lost his veto.
No citations are offered up, but it's an interesting idea. The implications are important if this is true - Thomas had his 75th birthday yesterday so we can expect maybe five more years from him. Given the questionable state of Presidential (at least) elections, that may be all the time we have.
Then again, maybe this is just another chemtrails theory.
Deputies with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office say a homeowner shot a man suspected of peeping and inappropriately touching himself outside of his 10-year-old daughter’s window.
[snip]
“She looks over at the window and this guy is at her window,” the girl’s mother, who does not want to be identified, told KPRC 2. “I can’t say that he tried to take my daughter’s innocence away -- he took my daughter’s innocence away.”
This mother heard her daughter scream and she and her husband rushed out of the house with guns to confront the man. They are both licensed handgun carriers.
[snip]
The couple followed the man to the Valero gas station across the street. As the 10-year-old’s father went inside to tell the clerk to call 911, his wife stayed outside with the suspect.
“He is wrestling with me, with my gun, and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to let you get my gun, you are not going to kill me or shoot me,’” she said. “My husband just said he heard a ‘ca, ca,’ but by that time the guy had already grabbed me, got my gun and pulled it on myself.”
That is when the woman said her husband shot the man.
Now IANAL, and think that justice was served here, even if it was rough justice. Actually rough justice might be exactly what this sort of situation calls for. But Miguel questions whether this is a deadly force situation. It seems to me (remember IANAL) that the parents escalated the situation that resulted in gunfire. Like Miguel, I hope that no charges will be brought.
But everyone should remember that a CCW permit is not a Justice League membership card.
Lawrence has a long but info-rich post about the Supreme Court's unanimous decision that the local Po-Po can't just grab your guns without a warrant. This seems a good summary:
In some ways this was a very narrowly tailored opinion, in that the Second Amendment was not invoked at all, only the Fourth. And indeed, Justice Samuel Alito’ concurring opinion specifically states that “Our decision today does not address those issues” in relation to the constitutionality of red flag laws. However, the decision was a blow for individual rights against warrentless police seizures in the home. Also, by explicitly including guns as property that is equally protected from such warrentless seizures, the Supreme Court has properly supported Second Amendment rights against the state’s overreach.
Now if they could do something about civil asset forfeitures…
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
With credible accusations of widespread fraud - more than enough to change the outcome of an election, and with the Courts seemingly unwilling to step in to guarantee a public and transparent audit and investigation, this seems to me to be more pertinent than ever.
Senate Bill 35 will destroy Virginia’s firearm preemption laws by allowing localities to create new “gun-free zones” in and around public buildings and parks. Criminals will ignore these restrictions, leaving law-abiding citizens unable to defend themselves and their loved ones.
Senate Bill 69, commonly referred to as “one-gun-a-month,” would impose an arbitrary one gun limit on an individual’s right to lawfully purchase a handgun within 30 days.
Senate Bill 70 would ban many sales and transfers between private individuals without first paying fees and obtaining government permission. Firearm sales between friends, neighbors, or fellow hunters, would not be exempted. Transfers between family members are also likely to be banned based on the vague wording of the proposed legislation. This proposal would have no impact on crime and is completely unenforceable.
Senate Bill 240 looks to create so-called “Red Flag” gun confiscation orders. This bill will take your constitutionally-guaranteed rights and throw them out the window with insufficient due process in place.
It looks like they can't agree on wording for an Assault Rifle ban, but they're still working on it.
The whole language argument boiled down into a nice, tasty (heh) serving:
The post has a great summary of how Heller vs. DC entirely blew away the whole "the Second Amendment only applies to the militia" argument. And since this avenue of attack has been closed down, the anti gun crowd has shifted to "let's explore just how far we can restrict this individual right" (i.e. what's happening in Virginia).
It's been a long time since Heller (or MacDonald), and there are new Justices on the SCOTUS. I'm quite frankly suspicious of Roberts who seems entirely squishy, and so we'll need an "insurance" Justice*. Maybe two. The implication is that it will be 2-3 years before the court can seriously assess strict construction (assuming they want to).
Court rules that Customs cannot search phones and laptops at the border without probable cause:
The seizure and search of phones and laptops at the US border is unconstitutional, a judge said Tuesday in a landmark ruling.
Massachusetts district court judge Denise Casper declared [PDF] that the practice breaks the Fourth Amendment on unreasonable search, and that border agents need to have a “reasonable suspicion” of illegal activity before they can search electronic devices.
“The CBP [Customs and Border Protection] and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] policies for ‘basic’ and ‘advanced’ searches, as presently defined, violate the Fourth Amendment to the extent that the policies do not require reasonable suspicion that the devices contain contraband for both such classes of non-cursory searches and/or seizure of electronic devices,” Casper declared.
It seems that the Government's primary argument was that they were searching for Child porn. Ooooooh kaaaaaay.
It looks like the Government is going to appeal (thanks for working hand in hand with the Deep State, Trump!), but the SCOTUS has recently ruled on something very similar:
Most integral to her argument is another landmark decision (Riley) by the Supreme Court where it found, unanimously, that the warrantless search and seizure of digital contents of a mobile phone during an arrest is unconstitutional.
But our Public Servants are going to rope-a-dope this in Court as long as they can.
Dr. Ball was sued because he said, of Dr. Mann's seminal "hockey stick" work, "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn State." While others came to the same conclusion about the hockey stick, Mann sued Ball for libel. After eight years, Mann refused to provide a single document under the court-ordered discovery.
Dr. Mann has been in the news for a long time. He was the lead author on a paper that turned climatology on its head. In the 1990s the consensus view was that climate changed over time, that the Medieval period was as warm or warmer than today and that it was followed by the Little Ice Age that was so cold that millions died. The Little Ice Age was followed by today's warming that dates back to around 1860 or so. The UN IPCC wrote this up as the best scientific understanding of climate in the first Assessment Report.
1998 saw the publication of a blockbuster scientific paper, one that showed that a climate that had been stable for a thousand years had suddenly begun to overheat. Dr. Mann was the lead author, and this is the famous image from the article:
This picture was not only used in Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth", it was sent to every household in Canada by the Canadian Government.
As my post from 2008 says, it was a fraud, and Mann knew it was a fraud. But he's done it twice more since then. I'd like to explain how so you see just how deep the rot goes.
Click through to get the background of Dr. Mann's repeated scientific shenanigans.
But that's not the end of the list of dodgy science for Dr. Mann, oh no. Remember the ClimateGate emails? One in particular became moderately famous because it has a memorable phrase ("hide the decline"):
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trickof adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
The email is from the head of the University department that suffered the Climategate data disclosures. "Mike" refers to Dr. Mann. "Nature" refers to Nature magazine, one of the 2 or 3 most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Specifically, this refers to a paper by Dr. Mann that was published there.
So what was Mike's "trick"? He was studying long term (1000+ year) climate, and so relied on non-thermometer data (we call these "proxies" because they are closely related to temperature but are not specific temperature measures; tree rings, ice cores from glaciers, etc). Dr. Mann removed the proxy temperature data after 1960 and replaced it with thermometer readings. It's not because he didn't have proxy data up to the present day - he had complete proxy data). So why replace some of it?
Hide the decline.
This is a short (the first 3 minutes from where this begins playing) and very accessible explanation of what the Climategate crowd did with Mike's trick. The speaker is Dr. Robert Mueller, a climate scientist and head of the Berkeley climate science team. Dr. Mueller is not one of those beastly Deniers like me, but he is really shocked at all this manipulation.
This is also a pretty interesting example of how Big Tech is trying to sweep this under the carpet. There used to be a short clip of just this segment from Mueller's talk, but Youtube has dissappeared it. So there's the whole hour (which gives a lot of background on climate science shenanigans) but we start at the Climategate bit.
So that's Dr. Mann - the only thing left to add is that he is notoriously thin skinned (he sued Dr. Ball, after all) and also a hypocrite - he sued Judy Curry, then a climatologist heading the Georgia Tech school of earth sciences.
But pride goeth before a fall. Dr. Mann lost his court case because he refused to release his data to the court. Even now he's hiding the decline, or whatever it is. He will be paying some of Dr. Ball's costs.
So what is it with climate scientists and this refusal to release data? I posted about this ten years ago on this day, but will hide all that below the jump. The thing to keep in mind is that things have not gotten better in a decade. Climate science is still diseased in how it is performed, by the lead scientists in the field.
Wilson, through a tentative plea agreement his lawyers reached with Travis County prosecutors, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of injury to a child in exchange for a recommended sentence that will keep him out of prison but require him to register as a sex offender for seven years while he serves deferred adjudication probation. Wilson, who forfeited his firearms last year when he was released from jail on bond, will not be able to own a gun while he’s on probation.
So it looks like this was not a felony, and presumably after the seven year period he's in the clear. Or not - who knows?
It also looks like this is unlikely to have been a government setup - he was trolling Internet boards on his own.
I'm uncomfortable with Capital Punishment, because the Law is a blunt instrument and innocent people ride the lightening because of lazy, incompetent, or corrupt officials. But the other side of that coin is that sometimes the Old Yeller solution is the only solution to a rabid animal:
Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, murdered a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl. After robbing and shooting the victims with a stun gun, Lee covered their heads with plastic bags, sealed the bags with duct tape, weighed down each victim with rocks, and threw the family of three into the Illinois bayou. On May 4, 1999, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas found Lee guilty of numerous offenses, including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering, and he was sentenced to death. Lee’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 9, 2019.
The story of the five men now scheduled for Federal execution is at that link. I'm not uncomfortable at all with their fate - it's hard to see how violent repeat offenders can ever be rehabilitated so that they reenter society safely. There's actually some good evidence that they can't:
Sometimes the drugs have a more indirect effect:
I asked him if he ever tried to get off the heroin. He said:
“No. I don’t want to get off of it. The drugs don’t even get me that high any more. I inject the heroin just to keep from getting sick. It doesn’t make me happy like it used to.”
“What I like is the adrenaline high from stealing things. I also like the adrenaline high I get from buying the dope without getting caught by the police. Those are my motivations; the drugs just keep me from getting sick. I just really like the thrill I get when I’m stealing things and the heroin ensures that I keep stealing. You can put me in jail, but I’ll start stealing and using again the first day I get out. I’ll never stop. I don’t want to stop”
There are multiple examples at that link of suddenly violent, unpredictable behavior.
Quite frankly, I don't see a way to square this circle. If the death penalty is allowed at all then the innocent will be executed. If it's not allowed at all then some Old Yellers will get out of jail and continue where they left off.
So you used your heater - and didn't even pull the trigger - in a self defense situation. Now what?
A lawyer and shooter explains what happens next. It doesn't sound fun, but there are things you can do (starting now) to make it less unpleasant. Proper prior planning prevents poor performance, and all that.
Ousmane Bah, 18, filed suit against Cook & Co this week after he was falsely identified as a shoplifter by, it is claimed, a facial recognition system Apple is apparently using in its stores.
Bah was wrongly accused by the cops of nicking gear from Apple's posh shops across the US East Coast, even in cities he claims never to have visited, due to Apple's technology incorrectly fingering him as the culprit, we're told.
The teen's legal complaint [PDF] states that last year the college student received a letter out of the blue summoning him to a Boston court on an allegation of theft. He was accused of stealing multiple Apple Pencils – a $99 tool used for the iPad Pro – from an Apple Store in the Massachusetts city, adding up to over $1,200 in swag.
At the time of the alleged crime, on May 31, 2018, Bah was attending his senior prom in Manhattan, and had never even been to Boston before.
Worse, the photo included in his arrest warrant doesn't look like him. Facial recognition has been plagued with errors, particularly with non-caucasians. I don't know exactly why this is, but it has been a persistent complaint for several years. Apple is said to use facial recognition in its stores to detect shoplifting. When Bah had been (incorrectly) identified as a shoplifter in one store, the store personnel took his driver's permit and used his name and address information to update their database. His permit did not have a photo on it, and so now someone else's picture is associated with him.
And now Bah has an arrest record and Apple is defending itself against an enormous lawsuit. Hey, at least their software didn't kill anyone.
This is why I won't get into a self-driving car. The code was written by snotty programmers who think they know way more than they actually do about how the world works.
