Amazon’s technology helps police summarize criminals

Tram Ho

Face recognition is an effective tool, but it is also controversial.

On a Saturday afternoon in November 2017, a woman entered Wilco Farm in Oregon and stole a 130 USD USD Georgia boot.

In just 24 hours, she was imprisoned in Washington County jail, not because of the police’s ability to investigate sorrow or miracles, all thanks to the face recognition tool.

Freedom in the database framework

The quick investigation was done by Amazon’s Rekognition software. This software helped the Washington County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) create a consultative database based on criminal image in the county prison.

A WCSO representative watched the video surveillance of the store recording the image of her stealing boots, then extracted her face and entered into the identification tool. The digitized results were quickly sent back with a series of images, then found an image that could coincide with the culprit.

Face recognition is an effective tool, but it is also controversial.

On a Saturday afternoon in November 2017, a woman entered Wilco Farm in Oregon and stole a 130 USD USD Georgia boot.

In just 24 hours, she was imprisoned in Washington County jail, not because of the police’s ability to investigate sorrow or miracles, all thanks to the face recognition tool.

Freedom in the database framework

The quick investigation was done by Amazon’s Rekognition software. This software helped the Washington County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) create a consultative database based on criminal image in the county prison.

A WCSO representative watched the video surveillance of the store recording the image of her stealing boots, then extracted her face and entered into the identification tool. The digitized results were quickly sent back with a series of images, then found an image that could coincide with the culprit.

When the representative contacted the woman the next day, she pleaded guilty and was convicted of stealing the second level.

Listen to Amazon to help him watch him quickly 1

Face recognition is a very useful technology, sometimes it helps government agencies solve the case in just a few hours instead of a few days. Photo: CNET.

Other agencies, including the Chief Justice of the Federal Bureau, also began creating a face-recognition database, while some police units were studying the technology further.

The use of this kind of complex technology can promote the analysis of millions of images based on computer vision and deep learning, which will gradually deprive people of “natural” freedom. Fear of being monitored, or undercover surveillance, reinforces the reason for human rights groups to prevent police from using this technology.

The conflict between community safety and privacy has quickly become a controversial issue.

WCSO has officially confirmed that they only use this tool with normal cases, such as the case of a woman stealing a gas tank worth $ 12 from Ace Hardware store.

This in turn raises issues of the value of new technology in order maintenance. Amazon’s expensive, labor-intensive technology is not used for more serious cases such as finding missing children. But if allowed to use, personal freedom seems to “be as small as a chip”.

Face recognition has been used as evidence of arrest in at least seven cases, according to information from sheriff’s offices. In it, Rekognition plays an important role in five cases, especially when suspects refuse to identify themselves.

In those cases, suspects were arrested for crimes such as illegal intrusion and bicycle theft. Two cases left tools to help solve theft cases in small shops such as the pair of boots and gasoline cans mentioned above.

Matt Cagle, a lawyer for the Northern California Civil Liberties Alliance, called for an end to the use of face-recognition technology in maintaining order. He said the use of the technology was “unnecessary”.

“Small crime cases do not need to produce such a large face recognition database,” he said.

Kill chickens using buffalo scalpel?

Commenting on this idea, Washington Talbot County representative of the public information bureau claimed that WCSO had issued orders to arrest in many cases at various levels through the use of Rekognition.

The creation of such a large face database raises doubts as to what the people behind are plotting, because such a large database must have been built long ago.

Rekognition was introduced by Amazon at the end of 2016, based on building the face structure and analyzing identity features, like Apple’s Face ID technology or Facebook’s photo identifier.

Listen to Amazon to help watch him quickly 2

An example of WCSO’s face recognition tool. Photo: WSCO.

One of the benefits of this technology is that it is not easy to be fooled by a new type of head or another pair of glasses, things that are easy to see through normal people. In addition, it also creates an advantage in finding potential suspects that they may have missed.

Some agencies, such as the FBI, also use face recognition databases to find pictures of drivers’ licenses or photos in prison. Last year, Maryland officials identified the identity of the culprit in the mass shooting at Annapolis, after the man refused to report his identity when he was arrested.

Before the technology was applied, the Washington county office took hours, even days, to identify potential suspects through photographs.

The agency must send an email to industry colleagues, local departments and post face images on social networking sites, thereby handling the results manually.

In cases where suspects refuse to give identities when arrested, the use of fingerprints to find matches can take an additional hour of investigation, assuming that the fingerprints are in the system. state. However, these methods are still used.

Many benefits cannot be denied

For Chris Adzima, head of information analysis system, Rekognition is really a hero. He took 300,000 criminal photos from the Washington County prison management system to the Amazon cloud server, then linked these pictures to Rekognition to create internal tools that allowed investigators to post and find potential compatible photos in less than a minute.

This tool is really a bargain when it only costs 400 USD to create and only 6 USD / month web service maintenance fee.

Even so, the WCSO system is not perfect. Sometimes this artificial intelligence suggests a white person, while criminals are black as shown below.

Listen to Amazon to help him watch him quickly 3

Errors like these can be used by the police to make unfair restraining orders.

This tool is only used to suggest potential objects in the survey, not to create evidence. So WCSO’s policy does not allow police to arrest someone based solely on Rekognition compatibility results. They were required to investigate further to verify the identity of the object.

Most cases resolved by Rekognition are small cases, when surveillance cameras are installed in stores or at home. Large cases often do not have videos, so Rekognition’s role is reduced.

In addition, cases are often seldom separate, a suspect arrested in small cases can play a big role or has been arrested in similar cases in the past.

Many law enforcement agencies contacted WCSO to learn how to use this identification tool. But pressure from the US Civil Liberties Federation and other human rights organizations has caught the attention of law enforcement officials.

This face recognition technology is also applied in real time. This idea has been used in China to track people in public places. A Orlando police team collaborated with Amazon to bring Rekognition into the camera to monitor the itinerary.

However, the ability to monitor the movement of all people is still not possible, due to the need to build a network of giant security cameras. “Current policies show that people have a greater arrangement for this project,” noted the representative of the US Civil Liberties Union.

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Source : ZingNews