Homeland Security backs off on scanning US citizens, Amazon ups AI ante, and more

They're making the investments so they can copyright it and make money. That's what drives everybody else.

Because if you do your own R&D, you get to know what you want to know, not whatever someone else happened to uncover.

That's basically the same reason everyone does R&D, even when everyone else's findings are published.

Bet they're still going to scan

Everybody. It's just that now when they are caught at it they'll fall back to "rogue employee" or "equipment malfunction"

Still awaiting a convertible leopard.

Oops! folk wisdom is apparently not infallible:

https://www.livescience.com/950-leopard-spots.html

(References Alan Turing, too)

Apparently a leopard _can_ change its spots, but only as part of the maturing process and not subject to voluntary control. Who Knew?

Bet they're still going to scan resident foreigners though.

The article says this.

You forgot the Commissioner Vice President the Commissioner President, the Commissioner General and ...

Remember the hidebound cronyism and bureaucracy built into US govt institutions

"Director" or "Executive" is a political position. "Deputy" are the career people - the ones with the _actual_ power.

An intern reporting to the Personal Assistant to the Special Secretary to the Deputy Executive Assistant Commissioner assures us that DEAC is an important role in the trim and efficient DHS bureaucracy, and that the DHS is in no way an enormous and unwieldy boondoggle created by an ill-considered merging of several already large and complicated Federal agencies with different structures and cultures.

For that matter, you could strike "to advance AI" from that sentence without losing any accuracy.

Re: Sellafield, Maze, facial comparison …

Meh, things change their names all the time for all sorts of reasons. The ECSC became the EEC became the EC became the EU, as its ambitions became more political. The Holy Roman Empire became the Austrian Empire, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as nationalism became more important than historical continuity. St Petersburg became Petrograd became Leningrad, then back again, as governments changed their priorities.

"Killer whales" were rebranded as "orca dolphins", which I suspect the real dolphins were none too happy about but wisely refrained from publicly objecting. The successor to the 80486 processor was renamed "Pentium" (from "80586") because Intel had realised it was hard to enforce a trademark on a number. Global warming became climate change, and now I'm beginning to see "global heating" bandied about.

OK, in some of these cases there may have been a taint of ordure about the old name, but in most cases it's about either political fashion or commercial expediency.

And if you're masked, especially by religious tenet?

Seeing != recording

Re: "extending the process to include American citizens was too risky"

"This proposal would amount to disturbing government coercion, and as the recent data breach at Customs and Border Protection shows, Homeland Security cannot be trusted to keep our information safe and secure."

Damned right. Our information as well, dontchathink?

Re: "extending the process to include American citizens was too risky"

Well, they reckon that foreign governments, such as our own, will protest so strongly on our behalf to America, going to the wall to protect our individual rights on principle, and saving us from Leviathan, it might not be worth their while to hassle Britons.

We shall never be slaves.

Re: "extending the process to include American citizens was too risky"

"But treating every tourist like a potential terrorist isn't ?"

Exactly this - and exactly what's been costing the USA a large (and increasing) chunk of travel/tourism revenue as more and more people who can route around the USA choose to do so.

Re: "extending the process to include American citizens was too risky"

For a foreigner to get into the USA, they already have to complete at least one form (possibly more), be fingerprinted, and interviewed by an immigration official who is on average about as welcoming as Joe Stalin. All that after getting a visa to travel in the first place, which is where they demand access to your social media accounts.

I don't see anyone who's prepared to put up with all that making much fuss about a photograph. I've been avoiding the USA since 2002, but enough people don't to keep it in business.

Re: ensure that innocent American citizens are never forced to hand over their ...

To be fair, many people in the US find the CBP's treatment of non-US-citizens outrageous, or at least exceptional. But the resources to fight the DHS are limited. The ACLU routinely objects to infringements of civil rights for citizens and non-citizens alike, but they have to pick their battles. Similarly, people like Ed Markey¹ have only a certain amount of political capital and attention from the press to use as a bully pulpit.

The present Federal administration is not going to make any consideration whatsoever for people who aren't US citizens. They're occasionally forced into a bit of a retreat by the courts, but they don't give a damn about the rights of foreigners.

¹Who's on the side of the angels for this issue, but is hardly a saint, any more than any other member of Congress. He was one of the driving forces behind the idiotic extension of Daylight Saving Time, for example, based on pseudoscientific evidence from a highly flawed and long-outdated study conducted by the Department of Transportation.

Re: The Motivation For Face Scanning Is (Presumably)...

to recognize wanted criminals,

Considering the TSA has consistently failed utterly to do this, even when hiring its own employees, I don't have much hope the CBP will do better.

people on a no-fly list,

The no-fly list is pointless security theater, and everyone knows it. (Also, it applies to the TSA, not the CBP, and it's the latter who are deploying the facial-recognition tech.) The TSA would prefer not to identify people on the no-fly list, because preventing them from flying doesn't do shit to improve security, and it's a hassle for everyone involved, including other people trying to get through security. The list is just for the TSA to use as (bogus) evidence that they're accomplishing something.

or potential terrorists

Who isn't a potential terrorist? What attribute prevents someone from ever becoming a terrorist? Well, being dead, I guess. But aside from that?

What you want to be able to detect is actual terrorists. Given the small number of actual terrorists in the world population, and the presumably much smaller fraction of those for whom we have decent facial photographs, automated detection is going to perform very badly. An automated system would have to have astounding precision and recall to provide decent false-positive and false-negative rates given the very low rate of true occurrence in the data.

Of course, it's also possible someone at the DHS misunderstood Miss Pym Disposes and is hoping to reinvent criminal physiognomy. "Yes, sir, the AI positively identified this man as a terrorist based on his eyebrow shape."