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This is great. More sharing between departments will help catch criminals faster.
by sadris 7y ago
This is great. More sharing between departments will help catch criminals faster.
- elliekelly 7y agoAnd help catch innocent people faster, which is not so great.
- sodosopa 7y agoThey’ve shared fingerprint data as soon as AFIS went online in 84. This is an advancement of the same process. How many innocent people are caught with fingerprint data?
- knd775 7y agoBasic facial structure (the kind that can be captured from CCTV) is an order of magnitudes less unique than fingerprint data.
- sodosopa 7y agoThe tech will improve. Fingerprint data from cards use to be high tech. Also the William & Will West case was an older example of misidentifying by photography. Modern tech has improved dramatically and will get more and more precise. Why apply early 2000’s tech issues to the advancements made in the past 15-20 years?
- ziddoap 7y agoIt should not be massively adopted and utilized, for real arrests with real people, on the basis that "the tech will improve".
- opencl 7y agoMaybe it will get better at some point in the future but the systems available and in use today have a very alarmingly high false positive rate. https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-tech-has-81-error-rate-independent-report-says-11755941 https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-te...
- spaceribs 7y agoThe same things were probably said when they rolled out the polygraph machine, and that's still notoriously ineffective.
- mtgx 7y agoEvery single one of "most advanced face auth technologies" have been hacked within weeks at most, including Apple's faceid.
- saagarjha 7y agoWhen was Face ID hacked?
- colejohnson66 7y agoIt wasn’t; It was tricked. But it required a 3D model of a face with a lot of effort put in. Though that’s probably what GP meant
- 420codebro 7y agoIn this thread people forget that nothing is truly perfect or secure. But it does not make it worthless. A threat model exists for a reason. A risk reduction model exists for a reason. Using a tool (computer/ML) to do 95% of the pattern matching is called one thing: not being a dumbass. I sincerely wonder if any of these super-hostile anti-facial ID activists have truly had someone close to them impacted by a crime, and had said crime go unsolved. Or are they merely idealistic loafers, clutching their pearls, to signal how "woke" they are?
- arkades 7y agoLie detectors are woefully unreliable, but PDs use them. Forensic “matching” of bullets to guns is basically pseudoscience, but continues to be used in court to convict people. Roadside drug analysis kits are less useful than dowsing rods, but get people arrested on a daily basis. People that can’t afford bail, and plead guilty just to get back to their lives, despite the fact that an actual defense attorney would have had the case tossed in the trash. Previous experience suggests that police tech does not just “get better.” They can’t even progress past “disproven pseudoscience.” And the innocent people that have their lives messed with while waiting for the tech to catch up might not be indifferent to the process.
- colejohnson66 7y agoI’ve never heard of ballistics being pseudoscience. Not that I don’t believe it, but where can I read about that?
- logfromblammo 7y agoI have heard of it being bunkum, but not quite of the same ~caliber~ as fiber matching and bite-mark matching. It can, at best, match ammo from the same machine-manufactured batch to a factory-stock model of gun. It automatically fails on hand-load cartridges, or ammo that the analyst cannot readily source. When there is a match, the prosecutor might say "this bullet was fired from this gun", but the science says "a bullet similar to the one in evidence was marked and deformed in a similar fashion, when fired by the weapon in evidence (just as it would with every other factory-stock copy of this model of gun)". It's like matching a nail to the hammer that drove it. If the test nail is already different from the reference nail, you cannot match it. If you have two or more identical hammers, you can't tell which one drove the nail. The hammer factory made thousands of identical hammers. In most cases, the tests are likely saying "the most commonly sold type of ammunition was fired from the most popular model of gun of that caliber". It's the sort of thing that should probably be used exclusively as exculpatory evidence. I.e. this model of gun always leaves distinctive markings, such as from an off-center diamond-shaped firing pin, or from an uncommon rifling twist, that were not found on the bullets in evidence, so the gun in evidence could not have fired them. Otherwise, a gun substantially similar, with all the same machine-made parts, could leave the same marks, so you could never know for sure which one fired the bullets. The only time it would be useful to convict is if someone used a unique, hand-made, gunsmithed gun to fire factory-made ammunition. And the number of (violent) crimes committed with that type of display-piece gun approaches zero, because they tend to be both expensive and less fit for use as a weapon than cheaper factory-built guns.
- rhacker 7y agoIf that data can lead to suspects that's a start. Then you have 4 suspects to put a subpoena to google for tracking data. Go from there.
- knd775 7y agoGreat! So now the police can go through my personal information because I happen to look slightly like a criminal from a certain angle.
- harry8 7y agoand you don't come to the attention of the police by being innocent so it's safe to assume you're guilty and watch the evidence appear. And this is why the advice is to say nothing whatsoever to police. Don't help them get the falsehoods out of their case anywhere but in front of a judge in a court. And the police may not be bad people or involved in organised crime. All this tech makes a turnkey police state right there waiting. Who is going to turn that key before we dismantle it? Think of the children.
- refurb 7y agoHow would it be any different than if they showed a witness your mug shot and the witness said "yup, that's him!".
- RHSeeger 7y agoSearching for your exact question indicates it does happen. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27233798/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/review-lapd-fingerprint-unit-sought/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27233798/ns/us_news-crime_and_cour... > Commission President Anthony Pacheco said Friday that he was highly concerned after learning police have arrested at least two innocent people because of faulty fingerprint analysis.
- sadris 7y agoAnd how many innocent people were convicted based on false positives? How many guilty people were convicted based on true positives?
- Jill_the_Pill 7y agoThese are not comparable. The first must be zero, and the second should be "as many as possible while keeping the first at zero."
- sadris 7y agoIt must be zero? What if that resulted in 50% of murderers getting away?
- UncleEntity 7y agoThen the justice system is relying on faulty technology.
- sodosopa 7y agoThe justice system relies on human memory all the time. That’s the most unreliable thing we currently use.
- ericns 7y agoWhat happened to "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." As expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s. Seems you're willing to punish an innocent man and a guilty man just to make sure a committed crime is followed up with a conviction. Why have such a low bar in 2019?
- lightbyte 7y agoConsidering fingerprint analysis is pseudoscience and almost entirely made up (along with most other "forensic science") [1] [2] we can assume LOTS AND LOTS of innocent people are caught with "fingerprint data" [1] http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?recordid=12589 http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?rec... [2] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12589/strengthening-forensic-science-in-the-united-states-a-path-forward https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12589/strengthening-forensic-sci... >"There is some evidence that fingerprints are unique to each person, and it is plausible that careful analysis could accurately discern whether two prints have a common source, the report says. However, claims that these analyses have zero-error rates are not plausible; uniqueness does not guarantee that two individuals' prints are always sufficiently different that they could not be confused, for example. Studies should accumulate data on how much a person's fingerprints vary from impression to impression, as well as the degree to which fingerprints vary across a population. With this kind of research, examiners could begin to attach confidence limits to conclusions about whether a print is linked to a particular person."
- sodosopa 7y agoI would still want to look at the rate. Is it 1 of 10 or 1 in a million? At what number are we comfortable for our safety?
- navigatesol 7y ago>Considering fingerprint analysis is pseudoscience and almost entirely made up Quite the stretch to go from "non-zero-error rates" to "made up pseudoscience" isn't it? It's a problem if people are being convicted on fingerprint analysis alone. But as a piece of the puzzle, when combined with other evidence, what is the issue?
- mtgx 7y agoHow about the fact that those fingerprints Haven long been stolen and likely abused by all sorts of undergeound criminals? Even federal workers fingerprints were stolen in the OPM hack.
- 420codebro 7y agoI love HN. Comments like this get downvoted, but everyone knows it is true.
- homonculus1 7y agoThat is essentially the problem to those of us who oppose it. When you say "criminals" you are probably thinking of strictly people who harm others, but the state is thinking of anybody who breaks its laws. Currently many of those laws exist solely to keep certain groups in power, and there is no guarantee it won't get even worse in the future. Human law enforcement ensures layers of decisionmakers who are at least theoretically capable of empathy, and limited manpower makes them prioritize the worst or most flagrant crimes. Automated law enforcement gives a smaller group of people horrifyingly granular levels of control over all of society.