🚨🇪🇺EU TO PHASE OUT PHYSICAL PASSPORT STAMPS WITH NEW DIGITAL ENTRY SYSTEM

Starting November 10, the European Union will replace physical passport stamps with a digital Entry/Exit System for non-EU visitors.

The new system will use high-tech scanners to digitally register… pic.twitter.com/SoZlt9hPfx

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 6, 2024

This whole biometric ID system was first talked about as a way to deal with migrants, and people were like “yeah, but you could at any time just stop allowing these people in the country though?”

Then it really picked up steam during the coronavirus hoax, where they said they were going to stop virus people from moving around with viruses using biometrics. That also made no sense (even if you believed in the hoax), but it really pushed the plan forward. If you recall, the government could just do whatever during that virus hoax.

Now they’re planning to really fuck you bad with a total control grid, exactly like the one they claim exists in China (which does not actually even exist in China).

The Guardian:

The full implementation of an EU entry-exit system introducing fingerprinting and facial recognition checks at ports and airports is expected to be delayed again amid fears over congestion and long queues.

Ylva Johansson, the EU’s home affairs commissioner, said recently that the new entry-exit system (EES) would be introduced on 10 November with a contingency of delaying it one week to 17 November.

Johansson had given member states until 5 September to provide the required declaration on their state of readiness.

It is understood three countries, France, Germany and the Netherlands, have written to her to say they will not be ready. They raised concerns about the lack of testing of the system in the field, raising new questions about the target launch date, according to multiple sources.

…

The EES is being introduced at all entry ports and airports within the Schengen area so also impacts airports across the continent, particularly Schipol, Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt – three of Europe’s biggest transport hubs – while Germany is also concerned about Cologne and Munich.

Passengers will have their fingerprints or photo of their face taken the first time they arrive in the EU after the introduction of the EES, with electronic verification of biometric data thereafter.

The problem with face ID is that all black people look the same. That’s not a joke, go look it up.

You would think with the advances in AI, the software would be able to recognize blacks – surely, they don’t all literally look exactly alike? – but, no. Even with these new powerful LLM AIs, they still can’t make it work on blacks.

In China, an alert just goes off – WARNING WARNING BLACK FACE BLACK FACE RED ALERT.

I’m just joking. They don’t really go Defcon 3 for every black. But yeah, China’s face ID system does just acknowledge that all black people look the same, and I’m sure some people using it go on high alert when a black passes through.

Again, the scope of China’s biometric system is nowhere near what they claim in Western media in the first place. That’s another kind of blood libel against Chinese people, pushed by the West, which claims it is somehow “more free” than China, when anyone can just go to China and check that claim for themselves, realizing it is false about 10 minutes after arriving in the country.

Black people are the biggest criminals and the people you actually do need to check. But the EU probably wants to use this system to punish people who post supposedly offensive memes on the internet, so they don’t even care it doesn’t work on the blacks.

🇬🇧EU BORDER CHECKS THREATEN BRITAIN’S CHRISTMAS FOOD SUPPLY

New EU Entry/Exit System (EES) checks, starting November 10, may disrupt Britain’s food supply chain and create long delays at Dover.

The system requires fingerprint and facial recognition for non-EU passengers,… pic.twitter.com/NhHoZmBcW5

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 13, 2024

No one should be surprised by this.

Why wouldn’t the vending machine be spying on you?

We live in a democracy, meaning that any abuse that is possible is destined to happen.

Tech Spot:

A hot potato: Collecting personal biometric data through facial recognition or other methods for advertising purposes has long been controversial. However, most people don’t expect a vending machine to gather this type of personally identifying information (PII). Surprisingly, someone discovered an M&M machine on a Canadian university campus doing just that without students’ knowledge nor consent.

The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, began removing its vending machines after discovering facial recognition technology on one of them. The machine’s operators and manufacturers deny collecting or selling biometric data, but a prior case in the country gives students reason for alarm.

Student and Redditor “SquidKid47” posted a photo of an error message on one of the college’s M&M machines showing that a program called “Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognition.App.exe” had crashed. A subsequent investigation by a campus newspaper sparked outrage among students, prompting the school to order the campus’s vending machines’ removal.

Vending machine manufacturer Invenda advertises analytic services that provide operators with data on purchasing habits based on estimated age and gender, indicating that the machines have biometric recognition systems. The university outlet suggests the company could send customer data to M&M’s parent company, Mars.

Believing the vending machines host small cameras, students began covering them with items like chewing gum and Post-it notes while demanding their removal. The school’s administration hasn’t offered a clear timeline regarding the removal and replacement of the machines.

…

An official investigation by privacy officials in 2020 found that, in 2017 and 2018, Cadillac Fairview used cameras hidden in kiosks to collect the images of over five million shoppers in malls across Canada without their knowledge or consent. While there is no direct connection between Cadillac Fairview and Invenda, recalling the incident sparked debate among Waterloo’s students on whether to take Invenda or Adaria at their word.

The spying data is valuable to corporations. And the government wants it.

They’re going to take the data by any means necessary, and there is nothing you can do to stop them.

This is a democracy.

You have no say in what the corporations and the government does to you.

They can do anything they want.

We’re all being spied on all the time, everywhere

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) are holding a rally in “solidarity with all the people of the capital” to “denounce” the Dublin City riots. The ICTU have revealed themselves yet again to be an enemy of the people. No solidarity with with the families of the children or… pic.twitter.com/tDXhyeqLl4

— Lawyers For Justice Ireland (@LFJIreland) November 27, 2023

The Algerian immigrant in Dublin accused of carrying out a mass stabbing attack on children had been arrested this year on suspicion of possessing a knife but wasn’t convicted. He was previously supposed to be deported but was aided by activists. https://t.co/hUi2NNqkNf

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) November 27, 2023

Previously: “Far Right” Riot in Dublin After Allegedly Vibrant Stabber Stabs Children

You wouldn’t think you’d be able to ram through facial recognition software laws and then use them on footage recorded before the laws were passed.

But apparently, in Ireland, you can do that.

To protect democracy AKA mass immigration.

The Guardian:

Irish police are expected to make sweeping arrests of suspected ringleaders of Thursday’s riot in Dublin and to obtain wider rights to use facial recognition technology to help identify suspects in any future disorder.

The moves come amid mounting pressure on the government and police chiefs over the mayhem on 24 November when an estimated 500 anti-immigrant activists and gangs of youths looted shops, burned vehicles and attacked police, leaving swathes of Ireland’s capital resembling a war zone.

Senior officers have promised “large-scale arrests” of ringleaders and participants in coming weeks in addition to the 34 people already arrested, the Irish Times reported on Monday.

Helen McEntee, the justice minister, also signalled an intention to fast-track legislation to expand the use of facial recognition technology to help police trawl CCTV footage after public disorder incidents.

There are about 6,000 hours of footage from last week’s riot, she said. “This should not take months. It should be done in a matter of days and in a matter of weeks. With the use of facial recognition technology that can be possible.”

The proposal has dismayed civil liberty advocates, opposition politicians and members of the Green party, a junior member of the ruling coalition. “Ramming legislation through the Dáil without proper debate is not the solution,” said Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, the Labour party’s justice spokesperson. “There has been a building series of missteps in justice.”

Again, any normal government would respond to this kind of riot by listening to the concerns of the rioters and at least pretending to do something to placate the mob.

Instead, the Indian prime minister of Ireland is vowing revenge and a total shutdown.

BREAKING: Another stabbing has happened in Dublin this evening. It is said that an immigrant stabbed another immigrant during a brawl.

This has to stop. Send ‘em all back to where they came from. pic.twitter.com/FHIBdzlvxK

— Cillian (@CilComLFC) November 27, 2023

Apologies to the original posters who posted these videos, but it’s been officially confirmed. Yet another stabbing in #Dublin city last night. Talbot Street. I wasn’t sure when I saw the videos and waited for confirmation, but the pool of blood says it all… pic.twitter.com/XVqq7AKFUP

— Noel Dolan 🇮🇪 🇧🇴 (@cybernoelie) November 27, 2023

Here’s a real AI threat – they’re going to link every single CCTV camera in the Western world and track you in real time everywhere you go.

Again, it’s not the AI that’s the threat, it’s the people using it.

The Guardian:

Police will use live facial recognition technology in Cardiff during the Beyoncé concert on Wednesday, despite concerns about racial bias and human rights.

The technology will be used in Cardiff city centre, but not at the stadium, to “support” the artist’s concert at the Principality stadium by identifying wanted individuals and ensuring safeguarding, South Wales police said, as the artist kicks off the UK leg of her first solo headline tour in seven years.

A spokesperson for the force said the technology would be used in the city centre, not at the concert itself. In the past, police use of live facial recognition (LFR) in England and Wales had been limited to special operations such as football matches or the coronation, when there was a crackdown on protesters.

Daragh Murray, a senior lecturer of law at Queen Mary University in London, said the normalisation of invasive surveillance capability at events such as a concert was concerning, and was taking place without any real public debate.

“I find it very hard to believe that it could be useful at a concert, or at a rugby match,” said Murray, who has studied the Metropolitan police’s use of LFR. “But given the really significant interference with human rights, I think it’s up to the police to provide a really compelling argument as to why it’s necessary.”

With live facial recognition technology, it is typically a standalone deployment where, using cameras, police scan passersby to match biometrics against those held on a watchlist.

South Wales police last used the technology for the FIM Speedway Grand Prix held at the same stadium in August 2022. The event, which scanned 20,929 people against a watchlist of 245 images, produced no alerts, actions or arrests, according to the force.

Murray said the technology had dangerous effects on modifying behaviour and, in turn, democratic processes such as protests or political opposition.

“I think things like live facial recognition are the first step, but I think they’re opening the doors to the use of permanent facial recognition across city-wide surveillance camera networks,” he said.

It’s going to be more than city-wide, my friend.

There is zero reason it would not be established across the entire Anal Empire.

They are actually planning this.

Colorado-based Biofire Tech is taking orders for a smart gun enabled by facial-recognition technology, the latest development in personalized weapons that can only be fired by verified users https://t.co/6TISTmuFEg pic.twitter.com/tkJS0QnWeO

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 21, 2023

The second you put down the Smart Gun, it instantly relocks. Live from the Safety and Testing Facility at #Biofire HQ, we dive into the #safety features of the #BiofireSmartGun.

Learn more at https://t.co/t9vuFNWYVw#9mm #todayIlearned #technology pic.twitter.com/paikPIIav7

— Biofire (@BiofireUSA) April 21, 2023

This is a plan to make it so you can’t use your gun if you say nigger on the internet or lose Fishtank.

Reuters:

Colorado-based Biofire Tech is taking orders for a smart gun enabled by facial-recognition technology, the latest development in personalized weapons that can only be fired by verified users.

But in a sign of the long, challenging road that smart guns have faced, a prototype twice failed to fire when demonstrated for Reuters this week. Company founder and Chief Executive Kai Kloepfer said the software and electronics have been fully tested, and the failure was related to the mechanical gun which was made from pre-production and prototype parts.

At other times during the demonstration the weapon fired successfully and the facial-recognition technology appeared to function.

Biofire’s smart gun

Biofire’s gun can also be enabled by a fingerprint reader, one of several smart gun features designed to avoid accidental shootings by children, reduce suicides, protect police from gun grabs, or render lost and stolen guns useless.

The first consumer-ready versions of the 9mm handgun could be shipped to customers who pre-ordered as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, with the standard $1,499 model possibly available by the second quarter of 2024, Biofire said.

This is total bullshit.

We need plastic guns, that can’t be traced, that can be made by anyone.

We don’t need people controlling our guns.

Insofar as “this is not who we are” is a statement with a meaning, this is that situation.

Kai Kloepfer, CEO and founder of Biofire Technologies

It sure is convenient that global governments are using coronavirus spying mechanisms for regular spying!

No one could have predicted this. If someone did predict it, they were a white supremacist fascist, so their opinion means nothing.

AP:

Majd Ramlawi was serving coffee in Jerusalem’s Old City when a chilling text message appeared on his phone.

“You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it read in Arabic. “We will hold you accountable.”

Ramlawi, then 19, was among hundreds of people who civil rights attorneys estimate got the text last year, at the height of one of the most turbulent recent periods in the Holy Land. Many, including Ramlawi, say they only lived or worked in the neighborhood, and had nothing to do with the unrest. What he didn’t know was that the feared internal security agency, the Shin Bet, was using mass surveillance technology mobilized for coronavirus contact tracing, against Israeli residents and citizens for purposes entirely unrelated to COVID-19.

A worshipper shows a threatening message signed ”Israeli intelligence,” that reads: “Hello! You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in Al-Aqsa Mosque, and we will hold you accountable.”

In the pandemic’s bewildering early days, millions worldwide believed government officials who said they needed confidential data for new tech tools that could help stop coronavirus’ spread. In return, governments got a firehose of individuals’ private health details, photographs that captured their facial measurements and their home addresses.

Now, from Beijing to Jerusalem to Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia, The Associated Press has found that authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies. The issue has taken on fresh urgency almost three years into the pandemic as China’s ultra-strict zero-COVID policies recently ignited the sharpest public rebuke of the country’s authoritarian leadership since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

For more than a year, AP journalists interviewed sources and pored over thousands of documents to trace how technologies marketed to “flatten the curve” were put to other uses. Just as the balance between privacy and national security shifted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, COVID-19 has given officials justification to embed tracking tools in society that have lasted long after lockdowns.

“Any intervention that increases state power to monitor individuals has a long tail and is a ratcheting system,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Toronto-based internet watchdog Citizen Lab. “Once you get it, is very unlikely it will ever go away.”

…

In Jerusalem’s Old City, tourists sipping fresh pomegranate juice, worshippers and locals taking a shortcut home are all monitored by Israeli security forces holding automatic weapons. The labyrinth of cavernous pathways is also lined with CCTV cameras and what authorities have described as “advanced technologies.”

After clashes in May 2021 at the Al-Aqsa Mosque helped trigger an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, Israel experienced some of the worst violence in years. Police lobbed stun grenades into the disputed compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount, home to Al-Aqsa, Islam’s third-holiest site, as Palestinian crowds holed up inside hurling stones and firebombs at them.

By that time, Israelis had become accustomed to police showing up outside their homes to say they weren’t observing quarantine and knew that Israel’s Shin Bet security agency was repurposing phone surveillance technology it had previously used to monitor militants inside Palestinian territories. The practice made headlines at the start of the pandemic when the Israeli government said it would be deployed for COVID-19 contact tracing.

A year later, the Shin Bet quietly began using the same technology to send threatening messages to Israel’s Arab citizens and residents whom the agency suspected of participating in violent clashes with police. Some of the recipients, however, simply lived or worked in the area, or were mere passers-by.

Ramlawi’s coffeeshop sits in the ornate Cotton Merchant’s Market outside the mosque compound, an area lined with police and security cameras that likely would have identified the barista had he participated in violence.

Although Ramlawi deleted the message and hasn’t received a similar one since, he said the thought of his phone being used as a monitoring tool still haunts him.

“It’s like the government is in your bag,” said Ramlawi, who worries that surveillance enabled to stop COVID-19 poses a lasting menace for east Jerusalem residents. “When you move, the government is with you with this phone.”

…

‘360 DEGREE SURVEILLANCE’

Technologies designed to combat COVID-19 were redirected by law enforcement and intelligence services in other democracies as governments expanded their digital arsenals amid the pandemic.

In India, facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology exploded after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party swept into power in 2014, becoming a tool for police to monitor mass gatherings. The country is seeking to build what will be among the world’s largest facial recognition networks.

As the pandemic took hold in early 2020, state and central governments tasked local police with enforcing mask mandates. Fines of up to $25, as much as 12 days’ pay for some laborers and unaffordable for the nearly 230 million people estimated to be living in poverty in India, were introduced in some places.

In the south-central city of Hyderabad, police started taking pictures of people flaunting the mask mandate or simply wearing masks haphazardly.

Police Commissioner C.V. Anand said the city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on patrol vehicles, CCTV cameras, facial recognition and geo-tracking applications and several hundred facial recognition cameras, among other technologies powered by algorithms or machine learning. Inside Hyderabad’s Command and Control Center, officers showed an AP reporter how they run CCTV camera footage through facial recognition software that scans images against a database of offenders.

“When (companies) decide to invest in a city, they first look at the law-and-order situation,” Anand said, defending the use of such tools as absolutely necessary. “People here are aware of what the technologies can do, and there is wholesome support for it.”

By May 2020, the police chief of Telangana state tweeted about his department rolling out AI-based software using CCTV to zero-in on people not wearing masks. The tweet included photos of the software overlaying colored rectangles on the maskless faces of unsuspecting locals.

#AI based #FaceMaskViolationEnforcement is being rolled out by TS police.
Leveraging ComputerVision & #DeepLearningTechnique being implemented on surveillance CCTVs across the cities is #FirstOfItsKind in INDIA.
Shall be enabled shortly across the 3Commissionerates
*Hyd,Cyb&Rck. pic.twitter.com/hGwvq9cvsE

— DGP TELANGANA POLICE (@TelanganaDGP) May 8, 2020

More than a year later, police tweeted images of themselves using hand-held tablets to scan people’s faces using facial recognition software, according to a post from the official Twitter handle of the station house officer in the Amberpet neighborhood.

Police said the tablets, which can take ordinary photographs or link them to a facial recognition database of criminals, were a useful way for officers to catch and fine mask offenders.

“When they see someone not wearing a mask, they go up to them, take a photo on their tablet, take down their details like phone number and name,” said B Guru Naidu, an inspector in Hyderabad’s South Zone.

Officers decide who they deem suspicious, stoking fears among privacy advocates, some Muslims and members of Hyderabad’s lower-caste communities.

“If the patrolling officers suspect any person, they take their fingerprints or scan their face – the app on the tablet will then check these for any past criminal antecedents,” Naidu said.

S Q Masood, a social activist who has led government transparency campaigns in Hyderabad, sees more at stake. Masood and his father-in-law were seemingly stopped at random by police in Shahran market, a predominantly Muslim area, during a COVID-19 surge last year. Masood said officers told him to remove his mask so they could photograph him with a tablet.

“I told them I won’t remove my mask. They then asked me why not, and I told them I will not remove my mask.” He said they photographed him with it in place. Back home, Masood went from bewildered to anxious: Where and how was this photo to be used? Would it be added to the police’s facial recognition database?

Now he’s suing in the Telangana High Court to find out why his photo was taken and to limit the widespread use of facial recognition. His case could set the tone for India’s growing ambition to combine emerging technology with law enforcement in the world’s largest democracy, experts said.

India lacks a data protection law and even existing proposals won’t regulate surveillance technologies if they become law, said Apar Gupta, executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, which is helping to represent Masood.

Police responded to Masood’s lawsuit and denied using facial recognition in his case, saying that his photograph was not scanned against any database and that facial recognition is only used during the investigation of a crime or suspected crime, when it can be run against CCTV footage.

In two separate AP interviews, local police demonstrated both how the TSCOP app carried by police on the street can compare a person’s photograph to a facial recognition database of criminals, and how from the Command and Control Center police can use facial recognition analysis to compare stored mugshots of criminals to video gathered from CCTV cameras.

Masood’s lawyers are working on a response and awaiting a hearing date.

Privacy advocates in India believe that such stepped-up actions under the pandemic could enable what they call 360 degree surveillance, under which things like housing, welfare, health and other kinds of data are all linked together to create a profile.

“Surveillance today is being posed as a technological panacea to large social problems in India, which has brought us very close to China,” Gupta said. “There is no law. There are no safeguards. And this is general purpose deployment of mass surveillance.”

‘THE NEW NORMAL’

What use will ultimately be made of the data collected and tools developed during the height of the pandemic remains an open question. But recent uses in Australia and the United States may offer a glimpse.

During two years of strict border controls, Australia’s conservative former Prime Minister Scott Morrison took the extraordinary step of appointing himself minister of five departments, including the Department of Health. Authorities introduced both national and state-level apps to notify people when they had been in the vicinity of someone who tested positive for the virus.

But the apps were also used in other ways. Australia’s intelligence agencies were caught “incidentally” collecting data from the national COVIDSafe app. News of the breach surfaced in a November 2020 report by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, which said there was no evidence that the data was decrypted, accessed or used. The national app was canceled in August by a new administration as a waste of money: it had identified only two positive COVID-19 cases that wouldn’t have been found otherwise.

At the local level, people used apps to tap their phones against a site’s QR code, logging their individual ID so that if a COVID-19 outbreak occurred, they could be contacted. The data sometimes was used for other purposes. Australian law enforcement co-opted the state-level QR check-in data as a sort of electronic dragnet to investigate crimes.

After biker gang boss Nick Martin was shot and killed at a speedway in Perth, police accessed QR code check-in data from the health apps of 2,439 drag racing fans who attended the December 2020 race. It included names, phone numbers and arrival times.

Police accessed the information despite Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan’s promise on Facebook that the COVID-related data would only be accessible to contact-tracing personnel at the Department of Health. The murder was eventually solved using entirely traditional policing tactics, including footprint matching, cellphone tracking and ultimately a confession.

Western Australia police didn’t respond to requests for comment. Queensland and Victoria law enforcement also sought the public’s QR check-in data in connection with investigations. Police in both states did not address AP questions regarding why they sought the data, and lawmakers in Queensland and Victoria have since tightened the rules on police access to QR check-in information.

In the U.S., which relied on a hodge-podge of state and local quarantine orders to ensure compliance with COVID rules, the federal government took the opportunity to build out its surveillance toolkit, including two contracts in 2020 worth $24.9 million to the data mining and surveillance company Palantir Technologies Inc. to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ pandemic response. Documents obtained by the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with AP showed that federal officials contemplated how to share data that went far beyond COVID-19.

The possibilities included integrating “identifiable patient data,” such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control does not use any of that individual-level information in the platform CDC now manages, said Kevin Griffis, a department spokesman. Griffis said he could not comment on discussions that occurred under the previous administration.

The protocols appeared to lack information safeguards or usage restrictions, said Paromita Shah, Just Futures Law’s executive director.

“What the pandemic did was blow up an industry of mass collection of biometric and biographical data,” Shah said. “So, few things were off the table.”

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control purchased detailed cellphone location data revealing people’s daily whereabouts, nationwide. “Mobility insights” data from at least 20 million devices could be used to “project how much worse things would have been without the bans,” such as stay-at-home orders and business closures, according to a July 2021 contract obtained by the nonprofit group Tech Inquiry and shared with AP.

The contract shows data broker Cuebiq provided a “device ID,” which typically ties information to individual cell phones. The CDC also could use the information to examine the effect of closing borders, an emergency measure ordered by the Trump administration and continued by President Joe Biden, despite top scientists’ objections that there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said the agency acquired aggregated, anonymous data with extensive privacy protections for public health research, but did not address questions about whether the agency was still using the data. Cuebiq did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For Scott-Railton, that sets a dangerous precedent.

“What COVID did was accelerate state use of these tools and that data and normalize it, so it fit a narrative about there being a public benefit,” he said. “Now the question is, are we going to be capable of having a reckoning around the use of this data, or is this the new normal?”

Of course it’s the “new normal.”

None of these attacks on freedom are ever rolled back.

We’re still living under the Patriot Act, despite the fact that it’s now effectively illegal to talk about Moslems being terrorists.

They could admit the coronavirus never even existed, and they would never roll back these new spying measures.

The good news is: this can only go so far. Eventually, this system is going to be so monstrous and unnatural that it will have to collapse.

Your choices are cops that hate black people and want to kill them all, or robots who hate black people and want to kill them all.

No matter what, anyone on the planet who is in law enforcement hates black people. They hate the color of their skin.

Reuters:

Facial recognition is making a comeback in the United States as bans to thwart the technology and curb racial bias in policing come under threat amid a surge in crime and increased lobbying from developers.

Virginia in July will eliminate its prohibition on local police use of facial recognition a year after approving it, and California and the city of New Orleans as soon as this month could be next to hit the undo button.

Homicide reports in New Orleans rose 67% over the last two years compared with the pair before, and police say they need every possible tool.

“Technology is needed to solve these crimes and to hold individuals accountable,” police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson told reporters as he called on the city council to repeal a ban that went into effect last year.

Efforts to get bans in place are meeting resistance in jurisdictions big and small from New York and Colorado to West Lafayette, Indiana. Even Vermont, the last state left with a near-100% ban against police facial-recognition use, chipped away at its law last year to allow for investigating child sex crimes.

From 2019 through 2021, about two dozen U.S. state or local governments passed laws restricting facial recognition. Studies had found the technology less effective in identifying Black people, and the anti-police Black Lives Matter protests gave the arguments momentum.

But ongoing research by the federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown significant industrywide progress in accuracy. And Department of Homeland Security testing published last month found little variation in accuracy across skin tone and gender.

“There is growing interest in policy approaches that address concerns about the technology while ensuring it is used in a bounded, accurate and nondiscriminatory way that benefits communities,” said Jake Parker, senior director of government relations at the lobbying group Security Industry Association.

…

Though the recent studies have eased lawmakers’ reservations, debate is ongoing. The General Services Administration, which oversees federal contractors, said in a report released last month that major facial recognition tools disproportionately failed to match African Americans in its tests. The agency did not respond to requests to provide details about the testing.

Facial recognition will be reviewed by the president’s new National AI Advisory Committee, which last week began forming a subgroup tasked with studying its use in policing.

…

California in 2019 banned police from using facial recognition on mobile devices such as body-worn cameras. But the prohibition expires on Jan. 1 because of a provision state senators added.

Now, news reports about rising retail theft and smash-and-grab robberies have captured lawmakers’ attention, said Jennifer Jones, a staff attorney for ACLU of Northern California.

As a result, ACLU has faced resistance from law enforcement to make the ban permanent.

People talk about what facial recognition AI means for black people, but the real question no one is asking is what law enforcement using facial recognition technology means for women and makeup. Are we going to ban makeup so that the facial recognition AI works correctly?

Have you seen what the Blade Runner 2049 chick looks like with slightly less makeup?

A bit different than what she looks like on screen.

Enough difference to fool an evil, nigger-hating robot?

Clearly. The robots are so stupid and ignorant, they literally hate people for their skin. These robots are inbred trailer trash. They’re not smart.

For this AI to work, you’d have to ban makeup.

On the other hand, if we’d rather not have the government tracking our every move, we should tell women that facial recognition software means the end of makeup, and let them do the protesting.

You think they’re mad about the baby killing thing? Telling them they can’t wear their demon-masks will launch them into orbit.

Facial recognition isn’t simply racist – it is transphobic.

There isn’t really a way to make AI politically correct. It doesn’t understand the concept.

Daily Mail:

A female-only app has come under fire for discriminating against transgender women with its facial recognition AI.

Giggle, a social network ‘only for females’, which launched in early 2020, has since been the subject of complaints from transgender women, who told the Verge, that their requests to join have been denied by the app’s facial recognition system, because their features ware not ‘feminine’ enough.

However, now Giggle’s CEO Sall Grover, who is based in Queensland, has doubled down, claiming that there is no space on the app for ‘men claiming to be women’.

It’s not that I don’t “believe” trans women are female. It’s not about belief.

It’s that I acknowledge & live in reality. It’s about fact.

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) January 27, 2022

My comments in full: pic.twitter.com/LGGGpmUYgn

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) January 27, 2022

Grover, who does not believe trans women are female, told Femail: ‘The fact is, women of colour are on Giggle. Giggle is used by women of every race, religion and culture. The quality that Giggle users have in common is they are female.’

The AI Giggle uses for face recognition works by analysing the bone structure of its members, meaning that individuals with masculine features could be prevented from creating an account on the app.

Allegations of transphobia surrounding Giggle first surfaced when the app was created in early 2020.

However, the story has emerged again after LGBTQ+ publication PinkNews approached Grover for comment for an article about the controversy.

An unnamed freelance journalist writing for the publication sent a request for comment, asking whether trans women are ‘encouraged to join the Giggle app’ and whether the issue of facial recognition would be ‘fixed.’

Grover replied to the query, saying: ‘Giggle is a social networking app for females. Males are excluded from the user base. There is no other specific demographic that is excluded from the app other than males.

‘No males are encouraged to join Giggle. Giggle is clearly stated as being for females. It would be lovely, however, if male people respected female spaces and left them alone.’

Welp.

That’s it for them.

It’s been established for years that you are going to be totally destroyed if you refer to trannies as “male.”

It’s just totally not allowed at all.

Yeah, I’m not sure host even a normie didn’t have themselves involuntarily tagged in a photo and think “eyyy.”

I mean, this is weird, having computer intelligence identify your every move. This stuff should have been made illegal long before it was employed.

The Guardian:

Facebook will delete the “faceprints” of more than a billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the “many concerns” about using the technology.

The social media network has been under political, legal and regulatory pressure over its use of the software, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos – and let’s them know if a fellow user has posted a photo or video with them in it – if they have opted in to the feature. In a statement, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said it would shut down facial recognition on the platform over the coming weeks and delete 1 billion facial recognition templates.

Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, said the technology had helped visually impaired and blind users identify their friends in images and can help prevent fraud and impersonation. But Pesenti said the advantages needed to be weighed against “growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole”.

“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” he said. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”

If users have opted into the face recognition setting, the faceprint used to identify them will be deleted. If that face recognition setting is turned off, Meta said there is no faceprint to delete. Pesenti said Facebook will encourage users to tag posts manually.

In 2020, Facebook’s parent company paid $650m (£477m) to settle a US class action lawsuit brought by users who claimed the firm had created and stored scans of their faces without permission. Complaints had also been filed with the US competition regulator and in 2012 a Facebook application to introduce facial recognition in the EU had to be withdrawn because no provision had been made to gain user consent.

I definitely doubt they will actually delete it. These companies are not regulated, so they can simply lie to the public about anything and there cannot be consequences for them.

What is the point of having a government that feeds the people into corporate meat grinders?

Everyone must get vaccinated so we can stop wearing the masks that stop facial recognition from actually working, but vaccinated people should still wear a mask anyways.

Please get vaccinated. Please wear a mask. Lives are at stake. #NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/eN0l7mv88O

— Nancy Sinatra (@NancySinatra) August 23, 2021

If this doesn’t make sense to you, you better start following The Science or you’re gonna end up dead.

Washington Post:

The federal government plans to expand its use of facial recognition to pursue criminals and scan for threats, an internal survey has found, even as concerns grow about the technology’s potential for contributing to improper surveillance and false arrests.

Ten federal agencies — the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Interior, Justice, State, Treasury and Veterans Affairs — told the Government Accountability Office they intend to grow their facial recognition capabilities by 2023, the GAO said in a report posted to its website Tuesday.

Most of the agencies use face-scanning technology so employees can unlock their phones and laptops or access buildings, though a growing number said they are using the software to track people and investigate crime. The Department of Agriculture, for instance, said it wants to use it to monitor live surveillance feeds at its facilities and send an alert if it spots any faces also found on a watch list.

The government’s expansion comes as major tech companies have pushed to stall law enforcement’s adoption of the software. Amazon said in May that it had stopped selling its facial recognition software Rekognition to U.S. police, citing the lack of federal laws governing how the software should be used. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Three states — Virginia, Massachusetts and Maine — and more than a dozen cities, including Boston, Portland and San Francisco, have banned or restricted the technology’s use by public officials or police.

Representatives from both parties voiced concerns about the technology during a House Judiciary Committee hearing last month. And Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in April introduced a bill that would ban the government from using facial recognition systems that relied on data that had been “illegitimately obtained.”

Federal agencies need stricter limits on facial recognition to protect privacy, says government watchdogProponents say the software’s accuracy is improving and that it has played a critical role in helping track and identify major criminals. But the technology’s accuracy has been shown in research to vary wildly depending on the skin color of the person being surveilled. Facial recognition searches have been cited in at least three wrongful arrests, all of which were of Black men, and in the identification of protesters accused of violence during demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd.

“Even with all the privacy issues and accuracy problems, the government is pretty much saying, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,’” said Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog group in Washington.

Because of racist reasons, it’s pretty hard to apply the same algorithms to white people and black people.

Many have tried to figure out a way for black people to be correctly identified, but they all failed. Even Google failed.