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ICE Signs $274,000 Contract With Clearview
from the voted-Most-Hateable-for-two-years-running! dept
"ICE continues to not care what anyone thinks of it. Its tactics over the past few years have turned it into one of the federal government's most infamous monsters, thanks to its separation of families, caging of children, unfettered surveillance of undocumented immigrants, its fake university sting created to punish students trying to remain in the country legally, its sudden rescinding of COVID-related distance learning guidelines solely for the purpose of punishing students trying to remain in the country legally… well, you get the picture.Perhaps it's fitting ICE is buying tech from a company that appears unconcerned that most of the public hates it. Clearview -- the facial recognition software that matches uploaded facial images with billions of images scraped from the open web -- is one of the latest additions to ICE's surveillance tech arsenal.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for “mission support,” government contracting records show (as first spotted by the tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry). The purchase order for $224,000 describes “clearview licenses” and lists “ICE mission support dallas” as the contracting office. . .Either way, we can safely conclude both partners here suck. ICE is bad and keeps getting worse, and Clearview isn't ever going to improve and is presumably still scraping sites for "content" it can sell to its customers.
Filed Under: dhs, facial recognition, for the children, hsi, ics, surveillance
Companies: clearview, clearview ai
______________________________________________________________________________Companies: clearview, clearview ai
Because People Need To Be Able To Complain
About The Police
from the discourse-demands-it dept
"The storm has passed and the charges have been dropped. But the fact that someone who tweeted about police behavior, and, worse, people who retweeted that tweet, were ever charged over it is an outrage, and to make sure that it never happens again, we need to talk about it. Because it stands as a cautionary tale about why First Amendment protections are so important – and, as we'll explain here, why Section 230 is as well. To recap, protester Kevin Alfaro became upset by a police officer's behavior at a recent Black Lives Matter protest in Nutley, NJ. The officer had obscured his identifying information, so Alfaro tweeted a photo asking if anyone could identify the officer "to hold him accountable."
Several people, including Georgana Szisak, retweeted that tweet. The next thing they knew, Alfaro, Sziszak, and several other retweeters found themselves on the receiving end of a felony summons pressing charges of "cyber harassment" of the police officer.
As we've already pointed out, the charges were as pointless as they were spurious . . .
Think about it: think about how many of us share content online. Many of us may even share far more content created by others than we create ourselves. But all that sharing would grind to a halt, if we could be held liable for anything allegedly wrong with that content. Not just civilly, but, as this case shows, even criminally.
And that chilling is not a good thing.
. . .Our sole policy goal should be to enhance our speech protections, to impose costs on those who would undermine public discourse through their attempts at abusive process. The last thing we should be doing is taking steps to whittle away at them and make it any easier to chill discourse than it already is, and cases like this one, where people were trying to speak out against abuses of power, illustrate why.
Filed Under: criminal charges, georgana sziszak, kevin alfaro, new jersey, nutley, protests, retweets, section 230
_________________________________________________________________________Verizon Forced To Back Off Charging Extra For 5G
from the overhyped dept
"While fifth-generation (5G) wireless will result in faster, more resilient networks (once it's finally deployed at scale years from now), the technology has been over-hyped to an almost comical degree. Yes, faster, lower latency networks are a good thing, but 5G is not as paradigm-rattling as most wireless carriers and hardware vendors have led many in the press to believe. 5G is more of a useful evolution than a revolution, but it has become the equivalent of magic pixie dust in tech policy circles, wherein if you simply say "it will lead to faster deployment of 5G!" you'll immediately add gravitas to your otherwise underwhelming K Street policy pitch.Here on planet Earth, most consumers couldn't care less about 5G. In most surveys U.S. consumers -- who pay some of the highest prices in the world for mobile data -- say their top priority is usually lower prices. That's increasingly true during a pandemic and economic crisis, where every dollar counts.
Enter Verizon, which, instead of reading the market, has been repeatedly trying to charge $10 extra for 5G despite consumers not seeing the value. Verizon executives had fooled themselves into thinking a "premium" upgrade warranted a premium price tag. But consumers quickly realized the extra money simply wasn't worth it . . .
. . .So while Verizon has struggled to extract its pound of flesh via an additional 5G surcharge, they'll surely come up with some ingenious new fees down the road. And U.S. regulators and Congress, by and large, will not only be fine with that, but they'll help Verizon pretend it's the pinnacle of innovation. After all, we wouldn't want to lose the "race to 5G," right?
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Judge Forbids Facebook Users Being Sued By A Cop From Publishing The Cop's Name On Social Media
from the [insert-Big-Lebowski-quote] dept
Eugene Volokh reports an Ohio court has hit a number of defendants in a libel lawsuit with an unconstitutional order forbidding them from posting the name of the man suing them. It's no ordinary man, though. It's a police officer who several attendees of a Cincinnati city council meeting have both identified and claimed used a racist hand sign while interacting with them.A veteran Cincinnati police officer sued several citizens in early July, accusing them of defamation in a closely watched case that could be the beginning of a trend of police officers going after critics in court.The officer's Facebook page has had all of its posts deleted. The header image has been replaced with this, which appears to be a direct response to those accusing him of flashing the "ok" sign at the city council meeting.
Several citizens accused the officer of possibly being associated with white supremacy or of being racist after spotting a video and picture of him allegedly flashing the “ok” sign at a City Council meeting in June . . . >
