>A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology.
Why does the fire department need access to run facial recognition?
It is not so important that the fire marshal has facial recognition, because the office chose that option because access was then free of charge and a mere handshake to them. If not the fire marshal, some independent 3rd party. This is a known trivial loophole to facial recognition bans. (Former lead dev of globally leading FR system.)
Fire marshals are investigative, and under less scrutiny. That specific one probably just wanted it. If one wants Clearview FR, there is very little beyond ethics and the state of mind to understand the ethics preventing anyone from running Clearview FR.
It is not so important that the fire marshal has facial recognition, because the police department chose to ask the fire department because access was then free of charge and a mere handshake to them. If not the fire marshal, the police department would have chosen some independent 3rd party. This is a known trivial loophole to facial recognition bans. (Former lead dev of globally leading facial recognition system.)
Same operating model of law enforcement laundering their data requests on the Flock Safety/Group ALPR platform through adjacent agencies who have access. My hot take is this should be a termination and criminal offense in public employment (as a cybersecurity/risk mgmt practitioner).
Yes, and in some cases, I was the person who had to sign off on the termination after providing a packet from the incident response case (which feels about as terrible as having to lay someone off, having had to do that before too).
I really don't understand what the face of a person has to do with understanding whether something is arson or not. Just as I see no reason why my local grocery store's security guard needs to be able to look up my face in a database directly. If they need to gather more data, then they can ask law enforcement to identify any relevant people and gather relevant information (potentially bringing witnesses in for questioning if there's a legitimate need), then do their investigation based on the evidence to analyze the circumstances of the fire.
Wouldn't the fire department's role in an arson investigation be limited to consulting about the fire itself? (eg. identifying if accelerant was used, etc). I can't imagine they'd be identifying a suspect.
The job of the fire department should be to fight fires, not to investigate crimes.
The police should be the ones investigating crimes, under extremely strict and limited guidelines (eg. 4th amendment) which in this case include not being allowed to use facial recognition software.
The job of the fire department should be to fight fires, not to investigate crimes.
Part of the investigation is determining whether the event is actually a crime. I'd much rather have subject matter experts make the determination of arson vs. act-of-god rather than "every nail needs a hammer" police force.
Determining if it was an arson vs act-of-god should be mostly lab work, analyzing how the fire spread, whether there are any traces of flammable substances that should not be there, etc. That's what fire department should do, because they have expertise here. Analyzing security footage for potential suspects should be done by police.
Analyzing security footage for potential suspects should be done by police.
Again, it's not just "potential suspects" it's potential witnesses, or identification of potential casualties. I don't feel great about state actors of any type using facial ID, but I can think of any number of reasons why a FD might use it in the course of their duties, and I would much prefer they have it over the PD.
So adding more responsibilities to police to now also get expert level training in determining causes of fires and finding clues in a fire incident. That's kind of how we got here. Where the police are a panacea making them less effective and more corrupt since they are an even bigger keystone.
Separating out duties to experts is more effective. Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system. Same with mental health emergency cases. More social workers and experts dealing with a variety of mental disorders will be better to work people in crisis since they are trained for that.
The fire department is bigger than the guys riding the truck. Those same guys aren't doing the investigation either. It's like saying cops can't investigate crimes because all they do is sit in medians and check for speeders.
> So adding more responsibilities to police to now also get expert level training in determining causes of fires and finding clues in a fire incident.
In Germany, we have the same separation. We have solved the issue by having dedicated units for stuff like political crimes, online crimes, fire/arson investigators, organized crime, property crimes, violent crimes, drug units, you name it.
They're all policemen and -women, but at the very least they stay on the unit for many years and learn on the job, or they get additional education, or they get actual professionals (aka, the police officers do the police/bureaucracy side of things, the expert does the forensics).
> Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system.
Bad idea, there are lots of things to take care about when collecting and securing evidence.
The US has similar department separation (just look at how many versions of Law and Order there are), but it's less diverse. So the number of departments is smaller.
Not a bad idea at all. The people from the fire department investigating arson are highly specialized. The only difference between the two systems is which head organization it falls under. So it would be like your fire/arson investigators working under the fire department instead of the police.
US policing has regularly been used to commit abuse and harassment as well as straight crimes. So having that consolidation of power is not good. This store is a perfect example of why they need to be separated because the police cannot be trusted to use facial ID tech responsibly.
I think it's better to have a specific expert non-police organization in charge of investigating specific crimes like this, in fact we could probably do more of this. The issue here is that the NYPD wasn't banned because of 4th amendment reasons but based on a local law that didn't consider this loophole.
Just because it was written does not make it true. Cops have come up with all sorts of excuses to justify their criminal behavior including just plain old “I’m a cop” defense.
> He hit (or at least was accused of hitting) a counter-protester with a rock. It's in the 3rd paragraph of the article.
And? Do you think the authorities would go to such extremes over a rock throwing incident if it didn't involve israel? Better yet, if it was the pro-israel counter-protestor throwing the rock, do you think the authorities would have wasted a second investigating the matter? Let alone breaking the law to get the suspect?
Self defense isn't "you killed 1,200 people of our people so we're going to kill 60,000+ of your people (majority of which are children), destroy any all your hospitals and educational centers and prevent basics like food, water and medical supplies from getting to you."
At what point do you listen to humanitarian organizations and the UN? Amazing that you think 24 people is a genocide but not 60,000+.
If you want to frame it like this it's out of the definition of virtually any legal definition of self defense.
Self defense usually implies a "reasonable" use of force, what's happening there hasn't been reasonable for more than a year now.
If someone points a gun at you you can kill them, that's self defense, if you burn their entire village down, track and kill their family members 3 generations up it's not self defense anymore
You are conflating civil law with international law. In a civil context, my right to self defense is very weak. If my neighbor is stockpiling weapons, and announcing his intention to kill me, I am obligated to trust the deterrent of the state. The state has the monopoly on force. I could easily be killed by this person, but they would be prosecuted by the state, and this system defends me quite well. It is only when my life is in active danger that I am allowed to take proactive measures. If the person shoots me in the leg and drops his gun and starts running away. I'm not allowed to pick it up and kill him in response. That's the state's job (There's no chance I would vote to convict this man if I was on a jury to be frank, but that's the principle).
This is very different from the interstate case. If a state shoots another state in the leg and runs away, the only way to establish a deterrent is to shoot back. There is no police force to do it for me. This is the main diffference between civil law and international law.
Again, this isn't self defense. Maybe you're just not familiar with what self defense is. Self defense is not going to another country and murdering civilians en masse. Calling 60,000 deaths collateral damage is pure insanity. If China nuked HK and claimed self defense would you have the same sympathy?
It's comically to talk about International Law when Israel has so many violations that Netanyahu has a warrant for his arrest by the ICC. It's also incredibly convenient that the IDF indiscriminately bombs and shoots civilians and civilian structures and claims they were Hamas. Including journalists. The cherry on top is preventing anyone else from confirming it. The IDF has continually done this. Claimed all houses are secret ICBM sites and that all civilians in other countries are terrorists. With zero evidence and when they are proven factually wrong they say some captain screwed up and that they will investigate. Yet it keeps happening.
Every civilian in Gaza is starving and cannot get any aid at all because Israel is denying all foreign aid or distribution. These are text book conditions of genocide. I look forward to the future when these atrocities are finally acknowledged. But I have no doubt that will be after the people responsible are long gone sadly.
Considering our government’s practices that most people are not even aware of leading up to WWI and WWI, in addition to the ones people are a bit more aware of regarding the anti-war, pro-peace movements leading up to Vietnam, not to mention what we were forced and willingly gave up following 9/11; most likely the government will abuse us and destroy the very few rights we have in theory.
I am 100% sure of this because the government has been 100% consistent and 100% abusive about this, 100% of the time.
Even the Civil War was clearly orchestrated and the people were abused and not just rights, but the very core Constitution was essentially destroyed and nullified, and what we’ve had since is nothing more than an abusive invalidated social contract upheld my sheer force, delusion, and bribing. The delusion and bribery part being what keeps people from realizing that.
What point of mine do you think you are attacking? The parent comment said that these rights were being given up "in order to squash anti-war sentiment". This was wrong on two counts.
a) The rights were preserved, the assaulter walks free on account of the NYPD's misconduct. The rock throwers have zero cause to be upset, the law protected them from the police overreach successfully.
b) The student was not charged with "anti-war sentiment". He was charged with assault, for throwing rocks at people.
The US actively supports Israel financially and militaristically. That's the difference. Those are my tax dollars killing innocent children over there in Gaza.
Do you genuinely not see the difference to society between cops putting in footwork to find someone, and being able to instantly find anyone they want for any reason with nearly zero effort?
It’s the same basic thing as a spear being the same as a nuclear weapon. “They both kill people!”
Walking around with a photo versus walking around with a hundred million photos and asking everyone simultaneously should not be considered about the basic same thing.
Yes, but throwing a spear and detonating a nuclear weapon are not equal levels of violating. They're both on the spectrum, but there is still a big difference
In the context of criminal prosecution/litigation, there's an enormous difference between "murdering one person" vs "murdering 100". For limitless reasons!
Like, is a victim of life threatening domestic violence who shoots their abuser during an attack a "murderer"? Or is an abuser who killed their spouse in a rage a "murderer"? Obviously these are different and the prosecution/defense hash that out over a very, very long time.
Obviously mass murder is worse (and a more severe crime) than murdering one person, but I'm still lost as to what the existence of this spectrum has to do with the actual story. If you throw a rock at someone, being apprehended by the police is not the nuclear option.
Note that we're talking about murder because the comment that set this off tried to pass off "throwing spears" as benign comparatively. No it isn't!
This guy was accused of hurling a rock at a protester, it seems we are trying to defend the right to peaceful protest?
Like, this guy was identified off video of him throwing a rock at a protester that hit them in the face. By all accounts this is someone who is trying to violently suppress peoples rights. That he got off on police misconduct in the investigation is a loss to society, no matter how many waxing words try to twist him into being a "protester violated in his rights".
That's a separate issue. The US is an exception where evidence that is collected illegally (see 'fruit of the poisonous tree' - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree ) is not allowed in court. Thus, US law enforcements have come up with many creative means (like Parallel Construction - https://restorethe4th.com/our-new-brief-on-parallel-construc... ) to hide the fact that evidence was collected illegally. If you want justice to be done in the US, you want US law enforcement to comply with the law. Otherwise it could result in a miscarriage of justice - the guilty may escape because of police misconduct or innocents may be persecuted by the violation of their rights. This loophole used seems to be the grey area of the law. But loopholes too are slippery slopes in the law and shouldn't exist.
I definitely see both sides in this... it's a bad use of resources, that I'm not completely convinced police should be barred from all access to, if it exists... on the flip side, the context of protecting an a-hole throwing rocks at a protest irks me as well.
I'm actually against parallel construction and feel that is far more dangerous than a lot of other activities in that it literally prevents you from knowing your true accuser in terms of laying out a defense/confrontation in court.
This whole story is just full of bad guys all around to a large extent.
But I don't get the two sides here. From what I understood, the police aren't allowed to use facial recognition. I mean at that point, why not just allow the cops to search without warrants, and do whatever they have to do to catch bad guys?
Like I can totally see the potential debate about if this type of ban should be in place. Sure! But the fact is, that's the current situation. The police can't, and shouldn't, just ignore or bypass rules if they feel like they're too limiting. The police should have basically 0 say (a part from voting) in what the rules they have to follow are.
If I start deciding to ignore laws and rules that I don't like, that would probably be a crime. So why should the police be able to do the same?
I'm not suggesting they should bypass current laws. I do question if it should be against the law to check against an existing data source like facial recognition. One could have put the picture out to the press, and asked, "hey, do you know this person?" type of thing and gotten the same answer.
I get that it's a slippery slope and it is a bit invasive to even establish many of these databases... not to mention the license plate tracking, cell tracking, etc. I also don't like jerks throwing rocks at people.
> One could have put the picture out to the press, and asked, "hey, do you know this person?" type of thing and gotten the same answer.
There's no guarantee they would have done this or that they would have gotten the same answer, though, is kind of salient to the point. There's a chance they wouldn't, because you (hopefully) don't want to make someone look like a suspect to their entire community if their chances of being involved in a crime are low. And even if you do, there's a decent chance you wouldn't have gotten a reply -- especially if their loved ones believe they are innocent. And it would've alerted them and they would've had a higher chance to escape. Which is terrible thing for society if they're a genuine criminal, but a good thing when you're persecuting a non-criminal.
Probabilities and collateral damage matter. If you just treat everything that is "possible" uniformly, then you might as well claim that they COULD generate a random number and just happen to identify the person correctly by sheer luck, so who cares if they do anything to optimize that.
> That he got off on police misconduct in the investigation is a loss to society
There'a a balance though. I think that allowing police misconduct would be a larger loss to society.
When the state loses winable criminal cases because of police misconduct, it should be motivation at multiple levels to avoid such misconduct in the future.
I don't read it as a peaceful protest issue, I read it as police are breaking privacy laws over a Palestinian protestor specifically; as far as we know they aren't doing this to investigate other violent crime in NYC. I agree this is sloppy policework and an unnecessary loss to society as a result.
Okay and? They still bypassed a ban to do that. I guess we can just bypass any law, checks and balances whenever we really feel like someone might have committed a crime.
I've noticed many right-leaning tech types give quite a lot of lip service to free speech when it's about someone getting banned from a mailing list for being an asshole, and not so much when it's the government quashing protest against genocide. I'll personally always defend the idea of free speech, no matter the side.
>I'll personally always defend the idea of free speech, no matter the side.
You attacked the idea of free speech for the other side in the same comment where you said this. I would assume based on reference to government infringements that you're referring to the first amendment as "free speech" if you hadn't specifically emphasized "idea"; conservatives have no real first amendment case, but they do get censored and suppressed by people with power. The idea of free speech is very much still in play when university admin cancels a guest speaker or a forum moderator only allows left-wing or non-political posts. What am I missing here?
No? I would defend the first example too, which is why I specified the idea rather than the letter (the 1A). Is it so rare to see someone who genuinely cares about this stuff, not just for those who agree with me? That I think they're an asshole is irrelevant.
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you. If someone is being an asshole on a mailing list, I don't think it's a free speech issue to remove them, and I took that example in context to mean you were saying all conservative gripes were non-issues like that.
>Is it so rare to see someone who genuinely cares about this stuff, not just for those who agree with me?
Yes, absolutely. I can name maybe 8, including the both of us.
I did. I believe this sort of stuff to be, at least morally, a violation of the 4A. It's no secret that the anti-Israel protests have gotten an inordinate amount of attention from the law relative to any harm caused, and overstepping bounds like this even to catch actual criminals (as happened here) isn't worth the price paid in liberty.
My comment was targeted at the government/ICE's notorious targeting of anti-Israel protesters broadly. It's absolutely clear that we're giving up rights left and right for this total farce, the same way we did for 9/11. It is imperative to the survival of liberal democracy that this ceases.
Everybody feels the need to defend government overreach when it’s in their favour. The most famous example is any non-libertarian political leaning with free speech, but it was the same deal with the “left” complaining about Chevron v. USA being overturned when their guy was in power.
Probably people reading the article title without reading the headline, not realizing that that it's not only literally about shouting in movie theaters.
But tbh most commenters/voters on this site are reflexively imperialist, which is not surprising for a forum run by (and for!) capitalists in the imperial core. That's doubtless a big factor as well.
The 2nd amendment and the notion that we have physical power over the government is going to be whittled away as facial recognition and omnipresent government spying via data brokers gives them all the info they need to spy on every citizen, all the time.
AI means they don't only collect all the data they want for when they need it ala NSA 2008, but they can have a robot army of analysts transcribe photos and phone calls instantly and analyze for sentiment, flag for review.
If we don't demand, as a society, that government stay out of the business of the people, and that the military stay out of the business of civil society (ICE/National Guard/Marines), we are in for true evil.
The company used, Clearview AI, collects publicly available imagery. It would be different if the government was providing it. Here's an idea: maybe don't post your photos on social media. Still scary nonetheless.
I don’t, I deleted my social media accounts a decade ago and wasn’t into posting my own photos prior to that anyway. But other people can post photos with me/including me and I can’t control that (and since I don’t use social media I don’t even know when they do that).
“Don’t post your photos on social media” is precisely describing a chilling effect on people’s expression, i.e. the exact thing the First Amendment is designed to protect against.
I think the suggestion is that the government use of that public data could be such as to create a chilling effect. That is, the upload and interaction of the user with the private company is almost irrelevant: it is just part of the antecedent to the government's conduct.
If you believe the government would only use that data for just purposes then you probably wouldn't then believe that there is a 1A issue. But if you think the government would use it to identify persons at a protest and then take adverse actions against them on the basis of their presence alone (which to be clear, seems distinguished from the immediate instance) you would probably think there is a 1A issue.
You can go do some reading on Third Party Doctrine if you'd like.
SCOTUS ruled there are some instances where private use of a service is 1) effectively necessary for modern life and 2) leaks a huge amount of information about the person, then the government cannot utilize it without a warrant even if handed over or sold willingly by the third party.
I am suggesting that we likely need to expand Third Party Doctrine to things beyond cell tower data because 1) we don't have absolute control over how/where our images are used and associated with our names, and 2) the technology to later affiliate our always-on/always-visible identities (like faces, gaits, or fingerprints) with our names is getting better and better.
You're right that today this is not illegal, but I am pointing out that your argument for "what to do instead" is literally the precise argument for why it should be: it chills protected expression.
So while we are making funny euphemisms I hope I can "bypass ownership laws" to relieve the author of the money on their bank account. The state of journalism in 2025 is such they can't even call a spade a spade.
Another funny one: "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester" when they mean "Assault Suspect". I don't get why they're trying to associate pro Palestinian protesters with the actions of a few violent actors.
This one I'm not so sure is clearer - the charges were dismissed, and the fact that he was protesting for Palestine was interesting enough to the police to investigate as a potential hate crime, and may have motivated the police to break the facial ID law here, so it seems relevant enough to put in the title.
Was this person targeted because of protest activity or criminal activity? To me, therein lies the rub. Cops should have access to such systems to investigate crimes.
"reduced to a misdemeanor of second degree aggravated harassment" so it looks like the charge was exaggerated in the 1st place. The media and authorities tend to portray Zionist provocateurs as the second coming of Anne Frank when they get into trouble. Something similar happened when Israeli soccer hooligans got roughed up in Amsterdam.
Yes, the NYPD is genuinely full of cops who support Israel. They have partnerships with Israel, they are trained by Israeli, the NYPD even has an office in Tel Aviv. Check out the training they get: https://jewishcurrents.org/training-nypd-keffiyeh-watermelon...
Actually neither happened. The article says they were not able to find any identifiable information online. They had to use drivers license instead.
> the fire marshal sent links to Clearview AI face search results, an archive of school play photos and another to an archive of high school formal photos. He said he couldn’t find associated social media but offered to get a driver’s license photo for the detective. “We have access to that,” he wrote.
I read the sequence as,
1. They started with a protest video
2. Clearview provided public images of the same person, but no name. It was certainly more identifiable (e.g., their high school).
3. Then somehow they get the driver's license photo. Do they use the original protest video, or the Clearview images? How does this search even work? Nobody knows. Lazy journalism.
As readers, we have no idea if the Clearview search was actually important, or a dead end.
I think it might be an error in the article, specifically
>A minute later, the detective sent the fire marshal Ahmed’s name, date of birth and driver’s license number. Within five minutes, the fire marshal replied, “Bingo.”
I believe that is supposed to say that the fire marshal sent the detective the license information. The Fire Marshal was clearly able to find identifiable information online, in the form of multiple high school photos, but was unsuccessful getting a match to any social media accounts. So the facial recognition worked and found matches in Clearview AI’s database of scraped school photos, but not their database of scraped social media photos.
Then the Fire Marshal offered to get a driver’s license photo, and says he has access [presumably to the DMV database]. The fact the about a minute later, license information was passed, sounds like a search was run by the Fire Marshal, a match popped up, and he sent it to the detective. But it could be that the detective used high school photos (being higher quality and full front facing) to run a search against the DMV records (which the police have access to with “permission from supervisors”) but according to other articles about the NYPD in general, it doesn't seem like that are able to run facial recognition on DMV records.
Either way, I think the ID came directly from the information the Fire Marshal passed and the Judge said as much.
>The NYPD would not have identified Ahmed but for the FDNY’s Clearview AI search and accessing the DMV photo, the judge indicated in her ruling
I'm not a cop. I'm a politician though, so while we're there lets murder them and traffick their kids. I love being a member of a class to whom the law very blatantly just does not apply.
But it's not really a "right". The next police commissioner/mayor could conceivably overturn it if they wanted to. That's not the same as most other "rights", free speech for instance. More importantly to this case, because the police only violated a policy and not a constitutional right, the defense can't apply to have the evidence tossed under the exclusionary rule.
I remember a case (in Eastern Europe) where someone who took a video of their colleagues sleeping during a night shift got in trouble for the usage of phone (which is known to be used BTW), and nothing happened to the ones sleeping through the night shift. We are talking about a facility full of people with dementia and are known to go back and forth the hospital for serious falls and all that (at night, too). So backwards.
Which is in some ways similar to the case in this article. The police violated department policy to identify the student who hurled a rock at another student. And the article is somehow painting the rock-throwing attacker as a victim, even talking about the attacker's complaints that they were identified and are now receiving hate mail.
> The police violated department policy to identify the student who hurled a rock at another student.
Allegedly. The article doesn't mention any evidence that he actually did.
> "Per the record before this court, there is no additional evidence connecting the defendant to the alleged incident — no surveillance video to and from his home, no independent identification by others in attendance."
No evidence.
> "This case is premised on the complainant's word that he was the target of criminal actions by another person, and that other person was the defendant."
Weak evidence (with potential bias.)
> "The NYPD digitally altered the defendant's DMV photograph [...] never sought the metadata which would clearly indicate how, when, and perhaps by whom the photo was doctored."
Manufactured evidence.
> "That statement alone renders these medical records discoverable as possible impeachment material, necessitating their disclosure [...] Yet the People [...] have articulated no efforts to obtain these records"
This is the classical problem of do the police have the right to violate rules and law in order to bring case or not? The problem is that this open the box of abuse of power and rights of people to become the norm.
You should have the same rights as the underlying situation.
If I photograph you in public, where you have no reasonable expectations of privacy, you should have no expectations of privacy over the photograph’s contents nor over my commentary about it.
If I photograph you in a private setting, you should expect that privacy extends to the photographic record of it as well.
1. US foreign policy is uniparty. As terrible as this administration is, remember that quashing anti-war protests happened under Biden, too. Columbia, Hind Hall, etc were all under Biden. That being said, moving to deport or denaturalize pro-Palestinian protestors is new; and
2. The state will turn violent to quash anti-imperialist sentiment.
Let me give you some examples:
1. The MOVE bombing. In Philadelphia in 1985 there was a black liberation group called MOVE. After a day-long standoff with police, the police dropped a C4 explosive from a helicotper on the house. The resulting fire killed 11;
2. Kent State. In 1970, there was an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio. The Ohio National Guard had been called in. The protestors were unarmed. The National Guard were at least 100 yards from the protestors. Yet at some point the protestors got scared and fired on the protestors, killing 4; and
3. At a pro-Palestinian protest at UCLA, the encampment was attacked by pro-Zionists. The police stood by and did nothing and the next day used that violence as an excuse to violently break up the protest.
Facial recognition, mass surveillance, social media checks at ports of entry, weaponized deportation, etc. The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
2 of those 3 directly involve the US and US action. The outlier says a lot.
> The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
The current administration ran on an anti-imperialist platform. You can protest american, russian, french, chinese, british imperialism all you want. You can quote george washington's warning about empires and foreign wars all day long. What you can't protest is israel. Period.
>If you think Israel is controlling the US and getting them to arrest peaceful Palestinian protesters or that they somehow made it illegal to protest Israel then you've lost all critical thinking skills.
I think the situation is also not as simple as lawbreakers being investigated for breaking the law. What law did Mahmoud Khalil break to get himself arrested? The administration basically accused him of hate speech while being here on a Visa, not of breaking the peace or throwing rocks. The case in the article is different; with a very clear crime he should have been properly investigated for by NYPD. But this news is in the context of several other cases around these protests, and so attention to the lengths NYPD went to here is newsworthy.
Let me be clear, I agree wholeheartedly statements like "Israel controls the US" are an antisemitic trope that can be dismissed out of hand. But "protests against important US ally Israel have special attention from law enforcement agencies" - that's very different, and seems like it might have evidence here.
This is such blatant lie that it exposes you outright.
> You don't have the right to throw rocks at people.
Who says you have the right to throw rocks at people? Other than god in the torah, I know of no one who supports throwing rocks at anyone.
> If you think Israel is controlling the US
I don't have to think. The leader of israel literally went on american news and ordered the administration and state leaders to crack down on protests on US college campuses. And it immediately happened all over the country from ny to texas to california.
> getting them to arrest peaceful Palestinian protesters
Arrest violent palestinian and Israeli protestors. I don't care. But why lie about the crackdown on peaceful protestors?
You have the judge coming down on the side of privacy, which is good; but the circumstances of the particular case are troubling (allegations of someone throwing a rock at someone else).
I'd be happier gaining ground for privacy rights with cases about, e.g., blanket surveillance, using surveillance for political purposes, surveillance capitalism, etc. Then we figure out where the best lines are for when surveillance actually should or can be used.
(Edit: And ill-considered downvotes is why I'm not going to bother to try to have a meaningful discussion on HN.)
“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
The ACLU doesn’t defend nazis for free speech because they think nazi opinions should be embraced by society, but because rights need to be defended for the most reprehensible for them to be truly universal. Same deal here
Making a whole big "but" around something that probably happens on a playground everyday feels at best like bad faith here. Just maybe a low bar for "troubling," and is the perfect framing and mindset for allowing exceptions like this to continue to be pushed through.
Oh well, if he did something bad then it is totally ok for the police to do illegal and unconstitutional things to catch him. Thank god we can trust the police to never ever abuse or misuse things like this.
“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
Wikipedia: "Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people"
If Israel is committing a genocide can you explain the following:
- Roof knocking
- Aid convoys
- Pamphlets and phone calls warning before strikes
- Arab Israelis
- Israeli boots on the ground resulting in Israeli casualties. Why not just carpet bomb?
- If Israel is just trying to kill Palestinians, can you explain this? Are they just really bad at genocide? "Israel dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined"[1]. If this is true and Israel is trying to wipe out Palestinian the casualties should be a multiple of what it is now. During WW2, in two day "It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000"[2]. The bombing in Hamburg: "killing an estimated 37,000 people in Hamburg, wounding 180,000 more"[3]. And there is also the blitz: "More than 40,000 civilians were killed by Luftwaffe bombing during the war, almost half of them in the capital, where more than a million houses were destroyed or damaged." So two questions: Were the Allies committing genocide in WW2? How are there so few casualties when the Gaza strip is so dense? How is there anyone alive at all?
> it leads you to believe that they are IDing this person because they are a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester"
It is likewise misleading to imply that the fact they are a student protester is irrelevant. They are trying very hard to make an example out of these people.
> This headline is extremely misleading because it leads you to believe that they are IDing this person because they are a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester".
It read like a privacy issue. Then I read your comment, and was confused.
> More proper would be "NYPD Bypassed Facial Recognition Ban to ID Rock-Throwing Assailant"
This is inaccurate. The charges were dismissed. At best, it's an alleged rock-throwing assailant.
> In the end, this is not a free speech issue except tangentially; it is a privacy issue.
That's what the original headline suggested to me on first reading. Why did you think the headline was a free speech issue?
That being said, the threat of a government disobeying its own rules and policies is a deterrent to free speech.
> why mention that he was a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester"? That does not seem relevant at all
Because it seems highly unlikely that if I were to walk out of my apartment right now, walk down to the waterfront, and throw a rock at a group of people sitting at Marsha P Johnson park that the NYPD would even respond to the call. Never mind getting a fire marshal involved to run my photo through a facial recognition program. They've got more important things to deal with. (I'd also, of course, never do this).
This was a protest movement that was a national story and included congressional hearings, so it does seem relevant to have the context.
> If it is a privacy issue, why mention that he was a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester"? That does not seem relevant at all;
It provides context. The US has an extensive history of illegal/unconstitutional/questionable surveillance of protesters. This could be seen as either another example of exactly that or, at the very least, as a warning that the police in NY are willing to illegally use facial recognition when it suits their interests.
Here I am referring to their desire to find a person who committed what appeared to be a criminal act.
I am not excusing their use of the technology, only that the state and specifically the police have a compelling interest to find people who commit crimes. There are lots of limitations on their powers to accomplish this end, but we do want police to investigate crimes.
Feels like a real life shiri’s scissor[0] in how many different factors collide to stop rational discussion and “shortcut” thought to existing worldviews past nuance.
To engage in this discussion, you have to avoid falling into at least 4 major schisms where you can assume the other person is wrong about everything and dangerous to you, from Israel/Palestine, US privacy rights, US first amendment rights to protest, and US attitudes on policing.
Indeed. Enhancements are used too freely. They should only be an option in egregious cases, otherwise just charge people with the actual crime they committed.
I don’t like how enhancements are distributed like candy.
The trouble is that depending on the political affiliations of the people receiving the enhancement, you'll get different groups of people reflexively supporting or denouncing the system.
>A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology.
Why does the fire department need access to run facial recognition?
It is not so important that the fire marshal has facial recognition, because the office chose that option because access was then free of charge and a mere handshake to them. If not the fire marshal, some independent 3rd party. This is a known trivial loophole to facial recognition bans. (Former lead dev of globally leading FR system.)
Sorry, can you clarify this? I’m not understanding. I think you’re saying
- the fire marshal happened to be the route chosen in this case
- but there are many other routes
- so the fire marshal detail is kindof insignificant.
Is that a correct understanding? If so, I still wonder why the fire marshal has access?
Fire marshals are investigative, and under less scrutiny. That specific one probably just wanted it. If one wants Clearview FR, there is very little beyond ethics and the state of mind to understand the ethics preventing anyone from running Clearview FR.
It is not so important that the fire marshal has facial recognition, because the police department chose to ask the fire department because access was then free of charge and a mere handshake to them. If not the fire marshal, the police department would have chosen some independent 3rd party. This is a known trivial loophole to facial recognition bans. (Former lead dev of globally leading facial recognition system.)
The cop emailed the Fire Marshal who technically does investigations for stuff like arson. Maybe that's the justification for it, not sure.
Same operating model of law enforcement laundering their data requests on the Flock Safety/Group ALPR platform through adjacent agencies who have access. My hot take is this should be a termination and criminal offense in public employment (as a cybersecurity/risk mgmt practitioner).
Or Five Eyes doing data sharing between themselves which 'incidentally' bypasses domestic surveillance laws
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
This sounds great. Have your clients or employers followed this advice?
Yes, and in some cases, I was the person who had to sign off on the termination after providing a packet from the incident response case (which feels about as terrible as having to lay someone off, having had to do that before too).
> Why does the fire department need access to run facial recognition?
Arson investigation, identifying the people at the scene of a suspicious fire?
I really don't understand what the face of a person has to do with understanding whether something is arson or not. Just as I see no reason why my local grocery store's security guard needs to be able to look up my face in a database directly. If they need to gather more data, then they can ask law enforcement to identify any relevant people and gather relevant information (potentially bringing witnesses in for questioning if there's a legitimate need), then do their investigation based on the evidence to analyze the circumstances of the fire.
Wouldn't the fire department's role in an arson investigation be limited to consulting about the fire itself? (eg. identifying if accelerant was used, etc). I can't imagine they'd be identifying a suspect.
The job of the fire department should be to fight fires, not to investigate crimes.
The police should be the ones investigating crimes, under extremely strict and limited guidelines (eg. 4th amendment) which in this case include not being allowed to use facial recognition software.
The job of the fire department should be to fight fires, not to investigate crimes.
Part of the investigation is determining whether the event is actually a crime. I'd much rather have subject matter experts make the determination of arson vs. act-of-god rather than "every nail needs a hammer" police force.
Determining if it was an arson vs act-of-god should be mostly lab work, analyzing how the fire spread, whether there are any traces of flammable substances that should not be there, etc. That's what fire department should do, because they have expertise here. Analyzing security footage for potential suspects should be done by police.
Analyzing security footage for potential suspects should be done by police.
Again, it's not just "potential suspects" it's potential witnesses, or identification of potential casualties. I don't feel great about state actors of any type using facial ID, but I can think of any number of reasons why a FD might use it in the course of their duties, and I would much prefer they have it over the PD.
So adding more responsibilities to police to now also get expert level training in determining causes of fires and finding clues in a fire incident. That's kind of how we got here. Where the police are a panacea making them less effective and more corrupt since they are an even bigger keystone.
Separating out duties to experts is more effective. Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system. Same with mental health emergency cases. More social workers and experts dealing with a variety of mental disorders will be better to work people in crisis since they are trained for that.
The skills for putting out fires is very different from those for investigating fire-related crimes. It's literally a subarea of forensic science...
The fire department is bigger than the guys riding the truck. Those same guys aren't doing the investigation either. It's like saying cops can't investigate crimes because all they do is sit in medians and check for speeders.
I'm of course talking about the purpose of the department, not about the skills of an individual fireman.
> So adding more responsibilities to police to now also get expert level training in determining causes of fires and finding clues in a fire incident.
In Germany, we have the same separation. We have solved the issue by having dedicated units for stuff like political crimes, online crimes, fire/arson investigators, organized crime, property crimes, violent crimes, drug units, you name it.
They're all policemen and -women, but at the very least they stay on the unit for many years and learn on the job, or they get additional education, or they get actual professionals (aka, the police officers do the police/bureaucracy side of things, the expert does the forensics).
> Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system.
Bad idea, there are lots of things to take care about when collecting and securing evidence.
The US has similar department separation (just look at how many versions of Law and Order there are), but it's less diverse. So the number of departments is smaller.
Not a bad idea at all. The people from the fire department investigating arson are highly specialized. The only difference between the two systems is which head organization it falls under. So it would be like your fire/arson investigators working under the fire department instead of the police.
US policing has regularly been used to commit abuse and harassment as well as straight crimes. So having that consolidation of power is not good. This store is a perfect example of why they need to be separated because the police cannot be trusted to use facial ID tech responsibly.
I think it's better to have a specific expert non-police organization in charge of investigating specific crimes like this, in fact we could probably do more of this. The issue here is that the NYPD wasn't banned because of 4th amendment reasons but based on a local law that didn't consider this loophole.
Cause israel. The fire marshal probably is pro-israel or israel has dirt on him.
All because of a protest against a foreign country committing acts of genocide. It's unbelievable when you think about it.
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One thing's for sure, it always starts with the "terrorists" and "pedophiles". But it would never be used against someone like you, would it?
Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving is what this is.
Just because it was written does not make it true. Cops have come up with all sorts of excuses to justify their criminal behavior including just plain old “I’m a cop” defense.
> He hit (or at least was accused of hitting) a counter-protester with a rock. It's in the 3rd paragraph of the article.
And? Do you think the authorities would go to such extremes over a rock throwing incident if it didn't involve israel? Better yet, if it was the pro-israel counter-protestor throwing the rock, do you think the authorities would have wasted a second investigating the matter? Let alone breaking the law to get the suspect?
How many rights will we be asked to give up in order to squash anti-war sentiment?
What's happening in Gaza isn't a war, it's an invasion and attempted genocide by Israel.
It's not attempted. Its executed. Below are the articles that define genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
I don't get why this is downvoted. I'm gonna guess it's because of "attempted"...
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Oh it starts October 7th? How'd you choose that date?
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Self defense isn't "you killed 1,200 people of our people so we're going to kill 60,000+ of your people (majority of which are children), destroy any all your hospitals and educational centers and prevent basics like food, water and medical supplies from getting to you."
At what point do you listen to humanitarian organizations and the UN? Amazing that you think 24 people is a genocide but not 60,000+.
It is self-defense by any means.
You might want to argue that it is unfair as a revenge or something?
If you want to frame it like this it's out of the definition of virtually any legal definition of self defense.
Self defense usually implies a "reasonable" use of force, what's happening there hasn't been reasonable for more than a year now.
If someone points a gun at you you can kill them, that's self defense, if you burn their entire village down, track and kill their family members 3 generations up it's not self defense anymore
You are conflating civil law with international law. In a civil context, my right to self defense is very weak. If my neighbor is stockpiling weapons, and announcing his intention to kill me, I am obligated to trust the deterrent of the state. The state has the monopoly on force. I could easily be killed by this person, but they would be prosecuted by the state, and this system defends me quite well. It is only when my life is in active danger that I am allowed to take proactive measures. If the person shoots me in the leg and drops his gun and starts running away. I'm not allowed to pick it up and kill him in response. That's the state's job (There's no chance I would vote to convict this man if I was on a jury to be frank, but that's the principle).
This is very different from the interstate case. If a state shoots another state in the leg and runs away, the only way to establish a deterrent is to shoot back. There is no police force to do it for me. This is the main diffference between civil law and international law.
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Again, this isn't self defense. Maybe you're just not familiar with what self defense is. Self defense is not going to another country and murdering civilians en masse. Calling 60,000 deaths collateral damage is pure insanity. If China nuked HK and claimed self defense would you have the same sympathy?
It's comically to talk about International Law when Israel has so many violations that Netanyahu has a warrant for his arrest by the ICC. It's also incredibly convenient that the IDF indiscriminately bombs and shoots civilians and civilian structures and claims they were Hamas. Including journalists. The cherry on top is preventing anyone else from confirming it. The IDF has continually done this. Claimed all houses are secret ICBM sites and that all civilians in other countries are terrorists. With zero evidence and when they are proven factually wrong they say some captain screwed up and that they will investigate. Yet it keeps happening.
Every civilian in Gaza is starving and cannot get any aid at all because Israel is denying all foreign aid or distribution. These are text book conditions of genocide. I look forward to the future when these atrocities are finally acknowledged. But I have no doubt that will be after the people responsible are long gone sadly.
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Considering our government’s practices that most people are not even aware of leading up to WWI and WWI, in addition to the ones people are a bit more aware of regarding the anti-war, pro-peace movements leading up to Vietnam, not to mention what we were forced and willingly gave up following 9/11; most likely the government will abuse us and destroy the very few rights we have in theory.
I am 100% sure of this because the government has been 100% consistent and 100% abusive about this, 100% of the time.
Even the Civil War was clearly orchestrated and the people were abused and not just rights, but the very core Constitution was essentially destroyed and nullified, and what we’ve had since is nothing more than an abusive invalidated social contract upheld my sheer force, delusion, and bribing. The delusion and bribery part being what keeps people from realizing that.
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The police should follow the rules laid out for them. If they don't, I would very much like to see them in prison.
What point of mine do you think you are attacking? The parent comment said that these rights were being given up "in order to squash anti-war sentiment". This was wrong on two counts.
a) The rights were preserved, the assaulter walks free on account of the NYPD's misconduct. The rock throwers have zero cause to be upset, the law protected them from the police overreach successfully.
b) The student was not charged with "anti-war sentiment". He was charged with assault, for throwing rocks at people.
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The US actively supports Israel financially and militaristically. That's the difference. Those are my tax dollars killing innocent children over there in Gaza.
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This is what happens when AIPAC are allowed to fund our elected officials.
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Do you genuinely not see the difference to society between cops putting in footwork to find someone, and being able to instantly find anyone they want for any reason with nearly zero effort?
It’s the same basic thing as a spear being the same as a nuclear weapon. “They both kill people!”
Walking around with a photo versus walking around with a hundred million photos and asking everyone simultaneously should not be considered about the basic same thing.
It is very bad to throw spears at people, despite the existence of nuclear weapons.
Yes, but throwing a spear and detonating a nuclear weapon are not equal levels of violating. They're both on the spectrum, but there is still a big difference
I don't see how the spectrum is relevant. Murdering one person is not as bad as murdering 100. Still a murderer.
In the context of criminal prosecution/litigation, there's an enormous difference between "murdering one person" vs "murdering 100". For limitless reasons!
Like, is a victim of life threatening domestic violence who shoots their abuser during an attack a "murderer"? Or is an abuser who killed their spouse in a rage a "murderer"? Obviously these are different and the prosecution/defense hash that out over a very, very long time.
Details matter. Ask any public defender.
Obviously mass murder is worse (and a more severe crime) than murdering one person, but I'm still lost as to what the existence of this spectrum has to do with the actual story. If you throw a rock at someone, being apprehended by the police is not the nuclear option.
Note that we're talking about murder because the comment that set this off tried to pass off "throwing spears" as benign comparatively. No it isn't!
The fact that you can do it in a larger scale is the problem
This guy was accused of hurling a rock at a protester, it seems we are trying to defend the right to peaceful protest?
Like, this guy was identified off video of him throwing a rock at a protester that hit them in the face. By all accounts this is someone who is trying to violently suppress peoples rights. That he got off on police misconduct in the investigation is a loss to society, no matter how many waxing words try to twist him into being a "protester violated in his rights".
That's a separate issue. The US is an exception where evidence that is collected illegally (see 'fruit of the poisonous tree' - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree ) is not allowed in court. Thus, US law enforcements have come up with many creative means (like Parallel Construction - https://restorethe4th.com/our-new-brief-on-parallel-construc... ) to hide the fact that evidence was collected illegally. If you want justice to be done in the US, you want US law enforcement to comply with the law. Otherwise it could result in a miscarriage of justice - the guilty may escape because of police misconduct or innocents may be persecuted by the violation of their rights. This loophole used seems to be the grey area of the law. But loopholes too are slippery slopes in the law and shouldn't exist.
I definitely see both sides in this... it's a bad use of resources, that I'm not completely convinced police should be barred from all access to, if it exists... on the flip side, the context of protecting an a-hole throwing rocks at a protest irks me as well.
I'm actually against parallel construction and feel that is far more dangerous than a lot of other activities in that it literally prevents you from knowing your true accuser in terms of laying out a defense/confrontation in court.
This whole story is just full of bad guys all around to a large extent.
But I don't get the two sides here. From what I understood, the police aren't allowed to use facial recognition. I mean at that point, why not just allow the cops to search without warrants, and do whatever they have to do to catch bad guys?
Like I can totally see the potential debate about if this type of ban should be in place. Sure! But the fact is, that's the current situation. The police can't, and shouldn't, just ignore or bypass rules if they feel like they're too limiting. The police should have basically 0 say (a part from voting) in what the rules they have to follow are.
If I start deciding to ignore laws and rules that I don't like, that would probably be a crime. So why should the police be able to do the same?
I'm not suggesting they should bypass current laws. I do question if it should be against the law to check against an existing data source like facial recognition. One could have put the picture out to the press, and asked, "hey, do you know this person?" type of thing and gotten the same answer.
I get that it's a slippery slope and it is a bit invasive to even establish many of these databases... not to mention the license plate tracking, cell tracking, etc. I also don't like jerks throwing rocks at people.
> One could have put the picture out to the press, and asked, "hey, do you know this person?" type of thing and gotten the same answer.
There's no guarantee they would have done this or that they would have gotten the same answer, though, is kind of salient to the point. There's a chance they wouldn't, because you (hopefully) don't want to make someone look like a suspect to their entire community if their chances of being involved in a crime are low. And even if you do, there's a decent chance you wouldn't have gotten a reply -- especially if their loved ones believe they are innocent. And it would've alerted them and they would've had a higher chance to escape. Which is terrible thing for society if they're a genuine criminal, but a good thing when you're persecuting a non-criminal.
Probabilities and collateral damage matter. If you just treat everything that is "possible" uniformly, then you might as well claim that they COULD generate a random number and just happen to identify the person correctly by sheer luck, so who cares if they do anything to optimize that.
Worth remembering:
Saying that fruit of the poisonous tree is not admissible is a vast understatement of the complexity of this area of law.
> That he got off on police misconduct in the investigation is a loss to society
There'a a balance though. I think that allowing police misconduct would be a larger loss to society.
When the state loses winable criminal cases because of police misconduct, it should be motivation at multiple levels to avoid such misconduct in the future.
I don't read it as a peaceful protest issue, I read it as police are breaking privacy laws over a Palestinian protestor specifically; as far as we know they aren't doing this to investigate other violent crime in NYC. I agree this is sloppy policework and an unnecessary loss to society as a result.
Okay and? They still bypassed a ban to do that. I guess we can just bypass any law, checks and balances whenever we really feel like someone might have committed a crime.
Quite a lot. The #1 right, for instance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
Curious why this is downvoted?
Because the "fire" excuse is a favorite of those who like the 1A when it protects them.
I've noticed many right-leaning tech types give quite a lot of lip service to free speech when it's about someone getting banned from a mailing list for being an asshole, and not so much when it's the government quashing protest against genocide. I'll personally always defend the idea of free speech, no matter the side.
I've been pretty consistent in terms of supporting people saying things and even expressing views I find abhorrent.
I don't consider throwing rocks/bricks at people "free speech". I also don't consider launching fireworks into crowded buildings "free speech" either.
You're of course correct, but it's a complex issue. See my other comment for details.
>I'll personally always defend the idea of free speech, no matter the side.
You attacked the idea of free speech for the other side in the same comment where you said this. I would assume based on reference to government infringements that you're referring to the first amendment as "free speech" if you hadn't specifically emphasized "idea"; conservatives have no real first amendment case, but they do get censored and suppressed by people with power. The idea of free speech is very much still in play when university admin cancels a guest speaker or a forum moderator only allows left-wing or non-political posts. What am I missing here?
No? I would defend the first example too, which is why I specified the idea rather than the letter (the 1A). Is it so rare to see someone who genuinely cares about this stuff, not just for those who agree with me? That I think they're an asshole is irrelevant.
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you. If someone is being an asshole on a mailing list, I don't think it's a free speech issue to remove them, and I took that example in context to mean you were saying all conservative gripes were non-issues like that.
>Is it so rare to see someone who genuinely cares about this stuff, not just for those who agree with me?
Yes, absolutely. I can name maybe 8, including the both of us.
Then you should read the article.
I did. I believe this sort of stuff to be, at least morally, a violation of the 4A. It's no secret that the anti-Israel protests have gotten an inordinate amount of attention from the law relative to any harm caused, and overstepping bounds like this even to catch actual criminals (as happened here) isn't worth the price paid in liberty.
My comment was targeted at the government/ICE's notorious targeting of anti-Israel protesters broadly. It's absolutely clear that we're giving up rights left and right for this total farce, the same way we did for 9/11. It is imperative to the survival of liberal democracy that this ceases.
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Everybody feels the need to defend government overreach when it’s in their favour. The most famous example is any non-libertarian political leaning with free speech, but it was the same deal with the “left” complaining about Chevron v. USA being overturned when their guy was in power.
Yeah. It's not cool to be principled anymore, I guess...
> Curious why this is downvoted?
Probably people reading the article title without reading the headline, not realizing that that it's not only literally about shouting in movie theaters.
But tbh most commenters/voters on this site are reflexively imperialist, which is not surprising for a forum run by (and for!) capitalists in the imperial core. That's doubtless a big factor as well.
Once you give the government access to powerful tools, you can be certain they will abuse to maintain their power over you.
Indeed.
The 2nd amendment and the notion that we have physical power over the government is going to be whittled away as facial recognition and omnipresent government spying via data brokers gives them all the info they need to spy on every citizen, all the time.
AI means they don't only collect all the data they want for when they need it ala NSA 2008, but they can have a robot army of analysts transcribe photos and phone calls instantly and analyze for sentiment, flag for review.
If we don't demand, as a society, that government stay out of the business of the people, and that the military stay out of the business of civil society (ICE/National Guard/Marines), we are in for true evil.
at least in government there are paths to discovery; corporate applications on the other hand..
Well, keep in mind, corporate donors own the government.
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Just because the police said he threw a rock doesn't mean he threw a rock.
This argument is "could you rob a bank if it was to feed your family," applied to the police.
The company used, Clearview AI, collects publicly available imagery. It would be different if the government was providing it. Here's an idea: maybe don't post your photos on social media. Still scary nonetheless.
> maybe don't post your photos on social media.
I don’t, I deleted my social media accounts a decade ago and wasn’t into posting my own photos prior to that anyway. But other people can post photos with me/including me and I can’t control that (and since I don’t use social media I don’t even know when they do that).
Whats next? Innocent people don't have anything to hide?
> Here's an idea: maybe don't post your photos on social media.
Right. Also make sure your friends don't. And your family. Good luck with that.
“Don’t post your photos on social media” is precisely describing a chilling effect on people’s expression, i.e. the exact thing the First Amendment is designed to protect against.
If a user is willingly uploading their photos to a private company to be publicly shared, how does 1A apply?
I think the suggestion is that the government use of that public data could be such as to create a chilling effect. That is, the upload and interaction of the user with the private company is almost irrelevant: it is just part of the antecedent to the government's conduct.
If you believe the government would only use that data for just purposes then you probably wouldn't then believe that there is a 1A issue. But if you think the government would use it to identify persons at a protest and then take adverse actions against them on the basis of their presence alone (which to be clear, seems distinguished from the immediate instance) you would probably think there is a 1A issue.
You can go do some reading on Third Party Doctrine if you'd like.
SCOTUS ruled there are some instances where private use of a service is 1) effectively necessary for modern life and 2) leaks a huge amount of information about the person, then the government cannot utilize it without a warrant even if handed over or sold willingly by the third party.
I am suggesting that we likely need to expand Third Party Doctrine to things beyond cell tower data because 1) we don't have absolute control over how/where our images are used and associated with our names, and 2) the technology to later affiliate our always-on/always-visible identities (like faces, gaits, or fingerprints) with our names is getting better and better.
You're right that today this is not illegal, but I am pointing out that your argument for "what to do instead" is literally the precise argument for why it should be: it chills protected expression.
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So while we are making funny euphemisms I hope I can "bypass ownership laws" to relieve the author of the money on their bank account. The state of journalism in 2025 is such they can't even call a spade a spade.
Another funny one: "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester" when they mean "Assault Suspect". I don't get why they're trying to associate pro Palestinian protesters with the actions of a few violent actors.
This one I'm not so sure is clearer - the charges were dismissed, and the fact that he was protesting for Palestine was interesting enough to the police to investigate as a potential hate crime, and may have motivated the police to break the facial ID law here, so it seems relevant enough to put in the title.
Was this person targeted because of protest activity or criminal activity? To me, therein lies the rub. Cops should have access to such systems to investigate crimes.
Wow, NYPD is full of people who support Israel?
The article says he was suspected of hate crime assault. Then the police has a duty to act.
Edit: While I said "duty" I meant that I really hope the that the police investigate all allegations of hate crime assault properly.
The ban on NYPD's usage of facial recognition doesn't have exceptions based on the category of suspected crime.
"reduced to a misdemeanor of second degree aggravated harassment" so it looks like the charge was exaggerated in the 1st place. The media and authorities tend to portray Zionist provocateurs as the second coming of Anne Frank when they get into trouble. Something similar happened when Israeli soccer hooligans got roughed up in Amsterdam.
Certain animals are more equal than others.
The police has absolutely no duty to act whatsoever. See Warren v. District of Columbia.
Yes, the NYPD is genuinely full of cops who support Israel. They have partnerships with Israel, they are trained by Israeli, the NYPD even has an office in Tel Aviv. Check out the training they get: https://jewishcurrents.org/training-nypd-keffiyeh-watermelon...
Can we talk about the fact that such a tool exists? A private company is able to take a photo and identify you. Scary shit!
> take a photo and identify you
Actually neither happened. The article says they were not able to find any identifiable information online. They had to use drivers license instead.
> the fire marshal sent links to Clearview AI face search results, an archive of school play photos and another to an archive of high school formal photos. He said he couldn’t find associated social media but offered to get a driver’s license photo for the detective. “We have access to that,” he wrote.
I read the sequence as,
1. They started with a protest video
2. Clearview provided public images of the same person, but no name. It was certainly more identifiable (e.g., their high school).
3. Then somehow they get the driver's license photo. Do they use the original protest video, or the Clearview images? How does this search even work? Nobody knows. Lazy journalism.
As readers, we have no idea if the Clearview search was actually important, or a dead end.
I think it might be an error in the article, specifically
>A minute later, the detective sent the fire marshal Ahmed’s name, date of birth and driver’s license number. Within five minutes, the fire marshal replied, “Bingo.”
I believe that is supposed to say that the fire marshal sent the detective the license information. The Fire Marshal was clearly able to find identifiable information online, in the form of multiple high school photos, but was unsuccessful getting a match to any social media accounts. So the facial recognition worked and found matches in Clearview AI’s database of scraped school photos, but not their database of scraped social media photos.
Then the Fire Marshal offered to get a driver’s license photo, and says he has access [presumably to the DMV database]. The fact the about a minute later, license information was passed, sounds like a search was run by the Fire Marshal, a match popped up, and he sent it to the detective. But it could be that the detective used high school photos (being higher quality and full front facing) to run a search against the DMV records (which the police have access to with “permission from supervisors”) but according to other articles about the NYPD in general, it doesn't seem like that are able to run facial recognition on DMV records.
Either way, I think the ID came directly from the information the Fire Marshal passed and the Judge said as much.
>The NYPD would not have identified Ahmed but for the FDNY’s Clearview AI search and accessing the DMV photo, the judge indicated in her ruling
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It doesn't matter what I do if friends or family are posting me online as well.
Try taking a photo of your partner first thing in the morning and posting it online. You’ll probably figure out the distinction.
>bypassed ban
Broke the law is the phrase we want here. They did an illegal thing. They didn't just scoot past a barrier, they violated people's rights.
Wanna go bypass some burglary laws to take expensive things out of people's houses?
Assuming you're a cop of course, otherwise we'll go to jail.
I'm not a cop. I'm a politician though, so while we're there lets murder them and traffick their kids. I love being a member of a class to whom the law very blatantly just does not apply.
>They didn't just scoot past a barrier, they violated people's rights.
Claiming that an administrative policy against using facial recognition as a "right" seems like a stretch.
> Claiming that an administrative policy against using facial recognition as a "right" seems like a stretch.
This is such strange way to describe "right for privacy".
But it's not really a "right". The next police commissioner/mayor could conceivably overturn it if they wanted to. That's not the same as most other "rights", free speech for instance. More importantly to this case, because the police only violated a policy and not a constitutional right, the defense can't apply to have the evidence tossed under the exclusionary rule.
I remember a case (in Eastern Europe) where someone who took a video of their colleagues sleeping during a night shift got in trouble for the usage of phone (which is known to be used BTW), and nothing happened to the ones sleeping through the night shift. We are talking about a facility full of people with dementia and are known to go back and forth the hospital for serious falls and all that (at night, too). So backwards.
Which is in some ways similar to the case in this article. The police violated department policy to identify the student who hurled a rock at another student. And the article is somehow painting the rock-throwing attacker as a victim, even talking about the attacker's complaints that they were identified and are now receiving hate mail.
> The police violated department policy to identify the student who hurled a rock at another student.
Allegedly. The article doesn't mention any evidence that he actually did.
> "Per the record before this court, there is no additional evidence connecting the defendant to the alleged incident — no surveillance video to and from his home, no independent identification by others in attendance."
No evidence.
> "This case is premised on the complainant's word that he was the target of criminal actions by another person, and that other person was the defendant."
Weak evidence (with potential bias.)
> "The NYPD digitally altered the defendant's DMV photograph [...] never sought the metadata which would clearly indicate how, when, and perhaps by whom the photo was doctored."
Manufactured evidence.
> "That statement alone renders these medical records discoverable as possible impeachment material, necessitating their disclosure [...] Yet the People [...] have articulated no efforts to obtain these records"
Withholding evidence from the defence.
All in all, utter bullshit from the prosecution.
Yes?
The person hit by the rock is a victim of whomever threw it, be this person or another.
And this person is the victim of the police department's policy violation.
These things can coexist.
Yes?
Hurling a rock at someone is privacy now?
This is the classical problem of do the police have the right to violate rules and law in order to bring case or not? The problem is that this open the box of abuse of power and rights of people to become the norm.
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A secondary question: what rights do you have when someone else does that? What rights _should_ you have in that situation?
You should have the same rights as the underlying situation.
If I photograph you in public, where you have no reasonable expectations of privacy, you should have no expectations of privacy over the photograph’s contents nor over my commentary about it.
If I photograph you in a private setting, you should expect that privacy extends to the photographic record of it as well.
We all got excited and threw a rock once or twice in our youth
There are two takeaways from this:
1. US foreign policy is uniparty. As terrible as this administration is, remember that quashing anti-war protests happened under Biden, too. Columbia, Hind Hall, etc were all under Biden. That being said, moving to deport or denaturalize pro-Palestinian protestors is new; and
2. The state will turn violent to quash anti-imperialist sentiment.
Let me give you some examples:
1. The MOVE bombing. In Philadelphia in 1985 there was a black liberation group called MOVE. After a day-long standoff with police, the police dropped a C4 explosive from a helicotper on the house. The resulting fire killed 11;
2. Kent State. In 1970, there was an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio. The Ohio National Guard had been called in. The protestors were unarmed. The National Guard were at least 100 yards from the protestors. Yet at some point the protestors got scared and fired on the protestors, killing 4; and
3. At a pro-Palestinian protest at UCLA, the encampment was attacked by pro-Zionists. The police stood by and did nothing and the next day used that violence as an excuse to violently break up the protest.
Facial recognition, mass surveillance, social media checks at ports of entry, weaponized deportation, etc. The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
> 1. US foreign policy is uniparty.
Only in regards to one foreign entity.
> Let me give you some examples:
2 of those 3 directly involve the US and US action. The outlier says a lot.
> The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
The current administration ran on an anti-imperialist platform. You can protest american, russian, french, chinese, british imperialism all you want. You can quote george washington's warning about empires and foreign wars all day long. What you can't protest is israel. Period.
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>If you think Israel is controlling the US and getting them to arrest peaceful Palestinian protesters or that they somehow made it illegal to protest Israel then you've lost all critical thinking skills.
I think the situation is also not as simple as lawbreakers being investigated for breaking the law. What law did Mahmoud Khalil break to get himself arrested? The administration basically accused him of hate speech while being here on a Visa, not of breaking the peace or throwing rocks. The case in the article is different; with a very clear crime he should have been properly investigated for by NYPD. But this news is in the context of several other cases around these protests, and so attention to the lengths NYPD went to here is newsworthy.
Let me be clear, I agree wholeheartedly statements like "Israel controls the US" are an antisemitic trope that can be dismissed out of hand. But "protests against important US ally Israel have special attention from law enforcement agencies" - that's very different, and seems like it might have evidence here.
> Anyone can protest whatever they want.
This is such blatant lie that it exposes you outright.
> You don't have the right to throw rocks at people.
Who says you have the right to throw rocks at people? Other than god in the torah, I know of no one who supports throwing rocks at anyone.
> If you think Israel is controlling the US
I don't have to think. The leader of israel literally went on american news and ordered the administration and state leaders to crack down on protests on US college campuses. And it immediately happened all over the country from ny to texas to california.
> getting them to arrest peaceful Palestinian protesters
Arrest violent palestinian and Israeli protestors. I don't care. But why lie about the crackdown on peaceful protestors?
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This seems to be a mixed bag for privacy.
You have the judge coming down on the side of privacy, which is good; but the circumstances of the particular case are troubling (allegations of someone throwing a rock at someone else).
I'd be happier gaining ground for privacy rights with cases about, e.g., blanket surveillance, using surveillance for political purposes, surveillance capitalism, etc. Then we figure out where the best lines are for when surveillance actually should or can be used.
(Edit: And ill-considered downvotes is why I'm not going to bother to try to have a meaningful discussion on HN.)
“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
The ACLU doesn’t defend nazis for free speech because they think nazi opinions should be embraced by society, but because rights need to be defended for the most reprehensible for them to be truly universal. Same deal here
The problem with that approach is that it will validate police illegal surveillance, and they'll only do more and more of it.
We either have rights to privacy from the police or we don't - if we lose the “rights” at police discretion we don't.
The system has tools like warrants for this. It appears to me as just sloppy policework.
Making a whole big "but" around something that probably happens on a playground everyday feels at best like bad faith here. Just maybe a low bar for "troubling," and is the perfect framing and mindset for allowing exceptions like this to continue to be pushed through.
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> how this young man literally stoned a person engaging in political demonstration
If you read the judgement, there's no evidence that he did.
Oh well, if he did something bad then it is totally ok for the police to do illegal and unconstitutional things to catch him. Thank god we can trust the police to never ever abuse or misuse things like this.
“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
> "Ahmed, a Westchester resident who is Palestinian and grew up going to protests with his family,...."
The perversion is one side is protesting against genocide and another is protesting in favor of genocide.
> Sounds like an actual attack on democracy.
There is. And it's by the side you are on.
What do you think makes this a genocide vs a war?
The definitions of genocide and war.
To be clear: attempting to destroy a people for simply being a type of people is different from focusing on a state.
One can be at war and still be committing genocide.
Wikipedia: "Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people"
If Israel is committing a genocide can you explain the following:
- Roof knocking
- Aid convoys
- Pamphlets and phone calls warning before strikes
- Arab Israelis
- Israeli boots on the ground resulting in Israeli casualties. Why not just carpet bomb?
- If Israel is just trying to kill Palestinians, can you explain this? Are they just really bad at genocide? "Israel dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined"[1]. If this is true and Israel is trying to wipe out Palestinian the casualties should be a multiple of what it is now. During WW2, in two day "It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000"[2]. The bombing in Hamburg: "killing an estimated 37,000 people in Hamburg, wounding 180,000 more"[3]. And there is also the blitz: "More than 40,000 civilians were killed by Luftwaffe bombing during the war, almost half of them in the capital, where more than a million houses were destroyed or damaged." So two questions: Were the Allies committing genocide in WW2? How are there so few casualties when the Gaza strip is so dense? How is there anyone alive at all?
[1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/amount-of-israeli-bombs...
[2] https://www.britannica.com/event/bombing-of-Dresden
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_Wa...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz
Still waiting on a response to this an hour later....
Genuinely curious if anyone can defend their "it's a genocide" position. Seems to me like it is a (very one-sided) war.
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Laws need to apply to the govt, too.
seems like a pipedream. US politicians wont even ban or stop insider trading by themselves.
And they were applied. The evidence wasn’t allowed.
> it leads you to believe that they are IDing this person because they are a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester"
It is likewise misleading to imply that the fact they are a student protester is irrelevant. They are trying very hard to make an example out of these people.
> This headline is extremely misleading because it leads you to believe that they are IDing this person because they are a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester".
It read like a privacy issue. Then I read your comment, and was confused.
> More proper would be "NYPD Bypassed Facial Recognition Ban to ID Rock-Throwing Assailant"
This is inaccurate. The charges were dismissed. At best, it's an alleged rock-throwing assailant.
> In the end, this is not a free speech issue except tangentially; it is a privacy issue.
That's what the original headline suggested to me on first reading. Why did you think the headline was a free speech issue?
That being said, the threat of a government disobeying its own rules and policies is a deterrent to free speech.
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> why mention that he was a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester"? That does not seem relevant at all
Because it seems highly unlikely that if I were to walk out of my apartment right now, walk down to the waterfront, and throw a rock at a group of people sitting at Marsha P Johnson park that the NYPD would even respond to the call. Never mind getting a fire marshal involved to run my photo through a facial recognition program. They've got more important things to deal with. (I'd also, of course, never do this).
This was a protest movement that was a national story and included congressional hearings, so it does seem relevant to have the context.
> If it is a privacy issue, why mention that he was a "Pro-Palestinian Student Protester"? That does not seem relevant at all;
It provides context. The US has an extensive history of illegal/unconstitutional/questionable surveillance of protesters. This could be seen as either another example of exactly that or, at the very least, as a warning that the police in NY are willing to illegally use facial recognition when it suits their interests.
Here I am referring to their desire to find a person who committed what appeared to be a criminal act.
I am not excusing their use of the technology, only that the state and specifically the police have a compelling interest to find people who commit crimes. There are lots of limitations on their powers to accomplish this end, but we do want police to investigate crimes.
You are definitionally excusing their use of the technology.
The definition of "excusing": "attempt to lessen the blame attaching to (a fault or offense); seek to defend or justify."
Feels like a real life shiri’s scissor[0] in how many different factors collide to stop rational discussion and “shortcut” thought to existing worldviews past nuance.
To engage in this discussion, you have to avoid falling into at least 4 major schisms where you can assume the other person is wrong about everything and dangerous to you, from Israel/Palestine, US privacy rights, US first amendment rights to protest, and US attitudes on policing.
[0] fiction about ml writing controversial news stories that tear communities apart https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Really didn't look like a rock in the video and the target was uninjured.
Indeed. Enhancements are used too freely. They should only be an option in egregious cases, otherwise just charge people with the actual crime they committed.
I don’t like how enhancements are distributed like candy.
The trouble is that depending on the political affiliations of the people receiving the enhancement, you'll get different groups of people reflexively supporting or denouncing the system.
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Why did you call this innocent person a "perp"? Is it because of your pro-police political beliefs?
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