FBI recruits Amazon Rekognition AI to hunt down 'nudity, weapons, explosives' The FBI plans to use Amazon's controversial Rekognition cloud service "to extract information and insights from lawfully acquired images and videos," according to US Justice Department documents. In its Agency Inventory of AI Use Cases, the DOJ lists the project, code-named Tyr, as being in the "initiation" phase for the FBI, …
Nudity is banned in the US, at least in the media.
Weapons -- by that I mean guns that are not obviously for hunting but for 'self-defense' and other militarist fantasizing -- are really only allowed to white people. Anyone else carrying anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon is likely to be shot dead on sight.
On a more serious note, the collection of street images from Ring doorbell cameras by the police is positively benign compared to what the FBI is planning to do with that Amazon product. Ring cameras just collect street and porch views than can be stitched together to get a picture of street crime (and they're definitely not fair to porch pirates) but Rekognition can -- and will -- be used to stitch up people.
If they had said 'child pornorgraphy' instead of 'nudity' you might have put two and two together and remembered the recent news story wherein the agents that were supposed to be preventing its distribution were actually distributing it professionally (they had their own FBI webserver distributing it), and producing it (one agent wascreating his own material)...and getting caught.
... but since there are all these various prohibitions and bans on using computers for facial-feature recognition, the FBI will be running software (or contracting it out) which will (try to) identify individuals by other-feature recognition. Just don't "free Willy", because someone might take a snap, and you will be mis-identified by the computer as Perpetrator X.
It'll be Horizon v2.0.
Because "Recognition" is not a name they can get a trademark on :-)
I agree with you though, that's a turn-off for those reasons. It does have connotations of that (though it wouldn't have to, we just associate that shit with Eastern Europe). Especially seeing as it's an authoritarian technology, the way they intend to use it.
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