Above the Law report
I know it’s never great to blame the victim, but this all could have been avoided if ICE officers hadn’t decided they all needed to act like paramilitary death squad members while raiding Home Deport parking lots. If you’re in the sort of business you feel you can’t do safely with your entire face exposed, you’re in the wrong business.
That this development was inevitable doesn’t make it any more welcome:
An activist has started using artificial intelligence to identify Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents beneath their masks — a use of the technology sparking new political concerns over AI-powered surveillance.
Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, estimates he and a group of volunteers have publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. He told POLITICO his experts are “able to reveal a face using AI, if they have 35 percent or more of the face visible.”
I’m not sure what software Skinner is running on this particular box, but asserting a whole face can be accurately determined from only 35% of a face is a non-starter. I certainly wouldn’t trust cops with this tech add-on to existing facial recognition software. It’s no more trustworthy (perhaps even less!) when it’s being deployed by citizens.
While I’d like to believe regular people would be more careful and conscientious of this tech’s limitations when using it, there’s no reason to believe they won’t be just as bad as cops, who continue to ignore false positives (and false arrests) because the tech makes it easier to arrest people, even if it’s not all that great at actually identifying people.
Of course, all of the administration’s frontmouths claim ICE agents need masks for safety reasons, something that’s being echoed all too often by people who should know better (or at least have staffers that know better).
ICE agents “don’t deserve to be hunted online by activists using AI,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on border management and the federal workforce.
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