I would like to see a national law requiring the permanent deletion of mugshots if the arrested is not convicted of a crime within a certain period after the arrest. What percentage of these mugshots that are archived and shared are of innocent people?
The county I grew up in recently stopped posting mugshots online.
There was a whole cottage industry that sprang up where people were selling these like..tabloid periodicals that just had people's mugshots in them. No guilty verdict or anything.
So people would be at the gas station or convenient store and there's a stack of free mugshot tabloids. It was wild. Once or twice a year I'd get texts from friends, "hey did you see that so and so got their mugshot taken!?"
Big data is different, has different threat models, and needs to be treated differently.
Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider.
Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.
Mugshots are pretty locked down now, but when I was younger, you could just scroll and scroll. Used to go through, check to see if I knew anybody. Got lucky a few times. Well, if you think you're safe, you're not, and if you think it's deleted, it knows everything about you. The difference between the marginal mugshot and the whole database is how prepared you are. Scrape that data every day, baby.
The Supreme Court has historically recognized this, too - the FBI tried to argue that putting a tracker on a car was no different than having an agent tail the car, and were roundly shut down for that.
I've always thought it will be really interesting to see the courts grapple with mass tracking by drone instead someday. Precisely for this reason, that the rationale the Supreme Court previously used to strike down warrantless tracking devices wouldn't apply. It's an even closer analogy to actual human officers tailing the car, just replaced by robots.
Certainly hope they would still overrule that too... but drawing a bright line somewhere between "scales really cheaply due to technology" and "scales more expensively due to human labor" is such a fascinating and critical problem to solve in the era we live in now.
I'm not sure that makes the trade right. If you think they shouldn't be public (I don't) then it certainly wouldn't.
Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"
Is there any surveillance involved in this proposal at all, let alone "total" surveillance? Facial recognition software doesn't "surveil" anything on its own.
If you want to talk about total surveillance, I'd worry more about something like Flock where they're actually deploying cameras on a massive scale.
Legal Ownership in perpetuity of 2.5M citizen mugshots accompained by their respective "metadata" Name, gender, age...? Or the right to scan the pictures to store hashes only?
"Free facial Recognition Access" is "Two licenses" Worth $12,500 each. For how long? Under which limitations? etc
PSCO stands for Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. The dataset mentioned contains 47,784 mugshots of 18,007 recidivists spanning from the years 1994 to 2010.
You'll be one of the first harrassing them to "fix" their algorithm when it starts noticing unflattering facts about the frequency of black faces in mugshot data.
I would like to see a national law requiring the permanent deletion of mugshots if the arrested is not convicted of a crime within a certain period after the arrest. What percentage of these mugshots that are archived and shared are of innocent people?
The county I grew up in recently stopped posting mugshots online.
There was a whole cottage industry that sprang up where people were selling these like..tabloid periodicals that just had people's mugshots in them. No guilty verdict or anything.
So people would be at the gas station or convenient store and there's a stack of free mugshot tabloids. It was wild. Once or twice a year I'd get texts from friends, "hey did you see that so and so got their mugshot taken!?"
Mugshots are typically available to the public anyway. I think they traded easier access to mugshots.
Big data is different, has different threat models, and needs to be treated differently.
Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider.
Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.
Mugshots are pretty locked down now, but when I was younger, you could just scroll and scroll. Used to go through, check to see if I knew anybody. Got lucky a few times. Well, if you think you're safe, you're not, and if you think it's deleted, it knows everything about you. The difference between the marginal mugshot and the whole database is how prepared you are. Scrape that data every day, baby.
The Supreme Court has historically recognized this, too - the FBI tried to argue that putting a tracker on a car was no different than having an agent tail the car, and were roundly shut down for that.
Yes, but the majority opinion in that case was based on the physical intrusion of placing the tracker, which doesn't apply here.
I've always thought it will be really interesting to see the courts grapple with mass tracking by drone instead someday. Precisely for this reason, that the rationale the Supreme Court previously used to strike down warrantless tracking devices wouldn't apply. It's an even closer analogy to actual human officers tailing the car, just replaced by robots.
Certainly hope they would still overrule that too... but drawing a bright line somewhere between "scales really cheaply due to technology" and "scales more expensively due to human labor" is such a fascinating and critical problem to solve in the era we live in now.
I'm not sure that makes the trade right. If you think they shouldn't be public (I don't) then it certainly wouldn't.
Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"
Reasonable solution: Extract homomorohically encrypted features and mandate homomorphic face search
Am I wrong to assume police already have access to their area’s database of driver’s license photos?
Never mind mugshots - I think they already have access to most people’s faces, even those that have never been arrested.
Is it the first total surveillance proposal in the US?
Total Information Awareness goes back to the 1990s
Is there any surveillance involved in this proposal at all, let alone "total" surveillance? Facial recognition software doesn't "surveil" anything on its own.
If you want to talk about total surveillance, I'd worry more about something like Flock where they're actually deploying cameras on a massive scale.
Flock is a YC investment btw. It’s what YC supports
Legal Ownership in perpetuity of 2.5M citizen mugshots accompained by their respective "metadata" Name, gender, age...? Or the right to scan the pictures to store hashes only?
"Free facial Recognition Access" is "Two licenses" Worth $12,500 each. For how long? Under which limitations? etc
"Milwaukee police _consider_ trade"
Wait until y’all learn about the PCSO facial recognition dataset
Can you tell us more about that?
Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. It looks like they have been working on facial recognition since 2001. This is all I found with a quick search https://nicic.gov/weblink/welcome-interagency-use-facial-rec...
Oh plenty more when you put in the full name. https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22Pinellas+County+Sheriff...
PSCO stands for Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. The dataset mentioned contains 47,784 mugshots of 18,007 recidivists spanning from the years 1994 to 2010.
Dataset information gleamed from https://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/Publications/Face/DebBestRowd...
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You'll be one of the first harrassing them to "fix" their algorithm when it starts noticing unflattering facts about the frequency of black faces in mugshot data.
Seems like a good deal