Seeing, in the press, actual technologists' opinions on what is and isn't a good use for their technologies is extremely refreshing, and something that that many on HN have grumbled about for a long time.
Along with the similar actions at Google and Microsoft[0,1], I hope that this represents a bit more of the decision-making power of tech companies coming back towards technologists, and away from the money-men.
I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.
The fight isn't whether or not ICE should have facial recognition software. The fight is to make ICE act in accordance with our values. Some agency (ICE or whatever replaces it) will still need to protect the borders, and that protection will require facial recognition software.
If you hate ICE, you should also probably hate defense contractors more, because they have very little moral qualms about accepting contracts from the government, even ones that may violate human rights. And that's where that money is going to go now.
First of all, I am an immigrant. I am not sure why you think that ICE criminalize anybody? How is this even possible? People violate the law are criminals. Trying to enter the US illegally is a crime. Pretty plain simple. I do not like the ICE but I had pleasant experience with them even when I tried to enter the US (unknowingly) illegally once. They helped me through the process, fined me (following the law) and I was pretty ok with that.
ICE does not "criminalize immigrants" and can't do that. ICE ignores legal immigrants, as it should, and prosecutes illegal immigrants, according to laws passed by Congress. ICE is executive branch, it has no legislative powers and can't "criminalize" anything.
ICE is removing illegal immigrants from the US. If it was removing legal citizens or legal immigrants for some arbitrary reason then people would be much more sympathetic to your position.
In reality however, because ICE is not rounding up "immigrants" as you say in an intentional effort to obscure the truth by avoiding the necessary word "illegal", most people in the US are in support of ICE's mission.
ICE will continue to carry out that just and necessary mission with or without the assistance of some naive and privileged ideaologues that work at tech companies.
Your position on this issue is rooted firmly on the wrong side of history.
If ICE has to get worse software that just means you and everyone else need to pay more in taxes. The government has the means to get what it wants usually
Illegal immigration costs US federal and state governments close to 135 billion annually. Free college education for every American would cost 50-60. Why should I value criminals more than my fellow Americans. What legal obligation do I have to have the money I work for used to pay for illegal immigrants?
We could educate every american and have another 60 billion to spare to help the African-American community.
Don't they understand their own platform? AWS is self service. Anyone with a credit card can set up an account and consume Rekognition or any other service. It's not as if it has to be sold to the police by a sales person under some licensed/contract. No special software is being developed for ICE or the Orlando police.Forbes recently put together a face recognition system using AWS components under 30 dollars. WTF are these employees on about. Anyone is free to build on AWS. What's next? Ban police from purchasing stuff on Amazon retail? If you disagree with your govt, go tell your congressman instead of irritating everyone at work
But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy.
Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen on AWS.
Mass surveillance of the population via facial recognition is an offensive proposition to a great many million Amazon Prime members!
If you don't like what Amazon is building, just wait until all those contracts start going to Raytheon and Northrop! I appreciate the moral quandary these engineers are faced with, but there is something to be said for being a responsible steward of technology. I've met quite a few MIT Ph.D.s who nonchalantly mention their roles as, what sounds like to me like "Program manager for raining fire and destruction on third-world countries systems." Someone is going to write the code, I kind of hope it's done at companies like Amazon where there is some ability to publicly pressure management vs. defense contractors who are largely unaccountable to the masses.
This really aligns with my thoughts too. I was sad to see Google pull out, because I know that with the ideology of many of the people there, the whistle is far more likely to be blown when things go too far. Having worked for big defense contractors, that whistle is not likely to get used there.
I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments, but it's gonna happen anyway. I'd rather it be Google than Northrop.
You guys understand that Amazon and Google do not necessarily get access to these DOD projects, right? As in: if these protests keep recurring, these companies will simply not be invited to participate –– the classic defense contractors will. The large tech companies don't have as much agency as some of us seem to be assuming.
The pressure at Amazon, Google, etc. will be to not provide those tools to law-enforcement or government entities, though, which means that the contracts will wind up at defense contractors who don't operate with the same ethical beliefs. It's a Catch-22.
Ethical use doesn't matter once the government has their hands on it - government doesn't have ethics, it has politics.
Exactly. I don't understand the rationale behind these kinds of "protests". It's not like the buyer can't go elsewhere to get the tech. To potentially far less scrupulous suppliers at that.
I love the sentiment, but seriously... who did you think you were building this for? It's absurd to believe you were helping anything other than the big brother character from 1984. Who else would this help? Foreign secret services? Maybe you believed it would help stream line the automation process? Thereby making humans irrelevant? I'd love to hear a legitimate - non-big brother implementation of this. And please don't be so coy as to say this helps automate person to person sales. I can already review all purchases made through big box hardware stores thanks to them identifying me through my credit card number and the email address I associated with it.
There are myriad positive applications of facial recognition. My iPhone uses it to categorize people by faces and can make me a video just of my daughter. An app I have can actually make a time lapse where all the photos have been registered to the center of her face so I can get a video of her growing up.
This bring up an unrelated question. Where is Las Vegas in facial recognition? Before the big players like AMZ, GOOG et al got into it, they had the best civilian systems. Have they all migrated to the GOOGs and AMZs of the world?
Given that tech earned millions of dollars vs this tech earning billions, I'm gonna guess the old tech is now underwhelming.
Retailers. I've seen multiple working demos of retailers using facial recognition to flag repeat customers, allowing the retailer to streamline the experience for their repeat customer -- show them something new they might like based on previous purchases, start cooking their usual order before they get to the front of the line so it's ready right when they order, etc.
Streamlining the criminal / judicial process would be a plus for me. Use webcam feeds to record filesharer, illegal activites passively. Capture known criminals anywhere because you have a real time facial recognition. Cross reference the evidence, and avoid long drawn out court time.
Amazon is about to effectively receive a sole source DOD contract for 10 billion for "cloud services". They have been supplying AWS to intelligence agencies for years. Why outrage over this and not that?
Because a data center for the DOD is largely invisible.
The suggestion that facial recognition cameras are pointed in the faces of ordinary Americans, just in case they do something the cops don’t like, is a pretty extraordinary proposition for a US consumer company to make.
The Rekognition pitch is encouraging the use of a specific controversial practice, rather than abstractly aiding the general compute capabilities of a large (if controversial to some) government department.
Because politics. It’s an election year and people are manoeuvering for position. Obama had children in these detention camps, Feinstein and just about any democrat in government more than ten years has had tough stances on illegal immigration, but, now of course with Trump it’s different.
Snowden, Assange both shed light on massive surveillance and the outrage lasted a week. Now Assange and Snowden are seen in a less positive light as well by the same people who hailed them as defenders of freedom and transparency.
Amazon built it to recognize staff as they walk in and customers at their physical stores so they wouldn't have to carry a wallet. It's like GPS. Many legitimate civilian uses, but also very useful to use in orchestrating government force.
How is selling to law enforcement any worse than selling facial recognition tech to companies that are also use it to invade my privacy and use the technology to try and squeeze money out of me?
Where do you draw the line on ethical usage?
In my mind, if you're concerned about the ethics of facial recognition tech, you shouldn't be working in that field at all. It's fundamentally anti-privacy.
"How is selling to law enforcement any worse than selling facial recognition tech to...?" is the template of whataboutism. Start somewhere. Go ahead and criticize where they started, but do so by telling us what you think will be more effective start.
Otherwise the message is "don't oppose the surveillance state."
I really don't think the DRPA needs Amazon/Google to militarize AI.
It already happened, years ago it is a random forests/SVM, now it is a neural network. Weapons are machines, should we just go and ban research machine learning as a whole?
I have a feeling that one of these cloud companies is going to have a mass firing of employees that are protesting against government contracts. People underestimate just how much money the US government spends. Just DoD spending is more than 600 Billion per year. Microsoft and Google have annual revenue of 100 Billion. The $10 Billion Pentagon cloud contract immediately gives a huge boost to any cloud provider. As can be seen by most of these companies dealings with very repressive governments (China, Saudi Arabia, etc), they will talk a good game, but when serious money is on the line, they will do what they need to do to get the money.
I bet that in back rooms, high level cloud execs at Hear companies are hearing an earful about how they need to control their employees and part of getting the big contracts requires controlling your employees. Just look at how the NFL caved in when Trump accused them of not supporting soldiers. Will these companies stay the line when Trump starts saying that these companies are hurting American soldiers and police officers? I am not confident they will.
I imagine many very large companies internally view themselves as above politics. Most peoples' political views wax and wane as a reflection of whatever is happening at a given moment in time and especially whatever is trending in the media and social media. By contrast consider individuals like Jeff Bezos. He wants to advance humanity into a commercial space age and is working extensively and at great cost to do just that. And that change will radically shift society in ways that would make many of our current issues seem quite trite, and even render others completely obsolete.
So what various political leaders or even nations are doing is not necessarily material to his goal. I wouldn't see it as a double-faced 'talking a good game', but rather understanding that what companies say in any region is little more than a product of their public relations teams, if not only because of apathy.
I also don't think they would ever fire individuals in large quantities over anything like this. There's a much easier solution. Turnover in tech companies is huge. All they need to do is change their hiring preferences and in a decade the company could have almost entirely shifted the ethos of their workforce without having had to fire a single person.
I doubt that will happen or if it does it will end poorly for them. DOD contracts are very diffuse and Lockheed Martin made only $36B in revenue and they are the top with expenses from "the game" like offices in every district they need for political support.
The fact that the hot areas have absurd cost of living and companies keep paying it instead of moving to cheaper locales and attempts to do so have failed is quite telling.
If people do not want a public organization to use facial recognition software, then energy should be directed towards that action of the public organization - not towards the vendors supplying the technology. They will get the technology whether or not Amazon or Google or whoever else provide it. The one and only thing that might stop this from happening is if our political representatives chose to take action against facial recognition. And as opposed to mass surveillance of digital communications, I think this is something that would have pull with the masses as well. People's faces being automatically processed and scanned is something much more visibly dystopic than the NSA archiving your digital communications.
Seriously? All the proclaimed freedom in country is built on the backs of soldiers/police. And we are worried about helping them? If we cant trust the govt then boot them. I am more worried about big companies which are accountable to small set of shareholders more than big govt accountable to najority.
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
Along with the similar actions at Google and Microsoft[0,1], I hope that this represents a bit more of the decision-making power of tech companies coming back towards technologists, and away from the money-men.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/tech-companies...
[+] [-] gasull|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb88|7 years ago|reply
The fight isn't whether or not ICE should have facial recognition software. The fight is to make ICE act in accordance with our values. Some agency (ICE or whatever replaces it) will still need to protect the borders, and that protection will require facial recognition software.
If you hate ICE, you should also probably hate defense contractors more, because they have very little moral qualms about accepting contracts from the government, even ones that may violate human rights. And that's where that money is going to go now.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] StreamBright|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troubador55|7 years ago|reply
ICE is removing illegal immigrants from the US. If it was removing legal citizens or legal immigrants for some arbitrary reason then people would be much more sympathetic to your position.
In reality however, because ICE is not rounding up "immigrants" as you say in an intentional effort to obscure the truth by avoiding the necessary word "illegal", most people in the US are in support of ICE's mission.
ICE will continue to carry out that just and necessary mission with or without the assistance of some naive and privileged ideaologues that work at tech companies.
Your position on this issue is rooted firmly on the wrong side of history.
[+] [-] pandem|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derping_hacker|7 years ago|reply
We could educate every american and have another 60 billion to spare to help the African-American community.
https://www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-b...
[+] [-] pravinva|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy.
Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen on AWS.
Mass surveillance of the population via facial recognition is an offensive proposition to a great many million Amazon Prime members!
[0]: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/
[+] [-] replicatorblog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freedomben|7 years ago|reply
I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments, but it's gonna happen anyway. I'd rather it be Google than Northrop.
[+] [-] malchow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|7 years ago|reply
Ethical use doesn't matter once the government has their hands on it - government doesn't have ethics, it has politics.
[+] [-] maroonblazer|7 years ago|reply
The whole thing seems like virtue signaling.
[+] [-] makewavesnotwar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggg9990|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
Given that tech earned millions of dollars vs this tech earning billions, I'm gonna guess the old tech is now underwhelming.
[+] [-] jedberg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|7 years ago|reply
FaceID users. Just because something has downsides doesn’t mean it has no upsides.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] maimeowmeow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] us0r|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
The suggestion that facial recognition cameras are pointed in the faces of ordinary Americans, just in case they do something the cops don’t like, is a pretty extraordinary proposition for a US consumer company to make.
The Rekognition pitch is encouraging the use of a specific controversial practice, rather than abstractly aiding the general compute capabilities of a large (if controversial to some) government department.
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
Snowden, Assange both shed light on massive surveillance and the outrage lasted a week. Now Assange and Snowden are seen in a less positive light as well by the same people who hailed them as defenders of freedom and transparency.
People are fickle.
[+] [-] mrep|7 years ago|reply
If those employees were really against this type of work, they should have come out against it years ago.
[+] [-] crb002|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
It's not like GPS, because GPS doesn't invade my privacy. I'm not sure that being identified everywhere I go is "legitimate", though it is common.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
Where do you draw the line on ethical usage?
In my mind, if you're concerned about the ethics of facial recognition tech, you shouldn't be working in that field at all. It's fundamentally anti-privacy.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|7 years ago|reply
One can put me in a box. The other one can’t.
[+] [-] odbol|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|7 years ago|reply
Otherwise the message is "don't oppose the surveillance state."
[+] [-] keeptrying|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanilama|7 years ago|reply
It already happened, years ago it is a random forests/SVM, now it is a neural network. Weapons are machines, should we just go and ban research machine learning as a whole?
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|7 years ago|reply
I bet that in back rooms, high level cloud execs at Hear companies are hearing an earful about how they need to control their employees and part of getting the big contracts requires controlling your employees. Just look at how the NFL caved in when Trump accused them of not supporting soldiers. Will these companies stay the line when Trump starts saying that these companies are hurting American soldiers and police officers? I am not confident they will.
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
They’re a pretty famous name in US labor history!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
So what various political leaders or even nations are doing is not necessarily material to his goal. I wouldn't see it as a double-faced 'talking a good game', but rather understanding that what companies say in any region is little more than a product of their public relations teams, if not only because of apathy.
I also don't think they would ever fire individuals in large quantities over anything like this. There's a much easier solution. Turnover in tech companies is huge. All they need to do is change their hiring preferences and in a decade the company could have almost entirely shifted the ethos of their workforce without having had to fire a single person.
[+] [-] Nasrudith|7 years ago|reply
The fact that the hot areas have absurd cost of living and companies keep paying it instead of moving to cheaper locales and attempts to do so have failed is quite telling.
[+] [-] kevin_b_er|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] toasterlovin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17341742
[+] [-] newest_user_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pressurefree|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lord_ring_11|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] int_19h|7 years ago|reply
Well then, how do you feel when the two cooperate, one enabling the other to screw us more efficiently?