Category: reason

An American Civil Liberties Union experiment with Amazon’s facial recognition software showed the technology confused 28 lawmakers with the mugshots of criminals.

Since this is Congress we’re talking about, we should be clear: The lawmakers aren’t criminals. The pictures that Amazon’s “Rekognition” software matched to them were of different people.

This stunt is intended to serve as a wake-up call for lawmakers and law enforcement leaders about the potential problems of using facial recognition software to identify suspects. Privacy and technology experts and activists have been warning for years that the technology remains far too flawed to be used to identify criminal subjects, and the tech struggles particularly with differentiating between the faces of minorities.

The experiment here bore out that concern. Only 20 percent of the members of Congress are racial minorities. But 39 percent of the members of Congress who were mistaken for criminals were racial minorities.

The ACLU warns of the potential consequences of widespread implementation of such flawed recognition software:

If law enforcement is using Amazon Rekognition, it’s not hard to imagine a police officer getting a “match” indicating that a person has a previous concealed-weapon arrest, biasing the officer before an encounter even begins. Or an individual getting a knock on the door from law enforcement, and being questioned or having their home searched, based on a false identification.

An identification — whether accurate or not — could cost people their freedom or even their lives. People of color are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it’s easy to see how Rekognition could exacerbate that. A recent incident in San Francisco provides a disturbing illustration of that risk. Police stopped a car, handcuffed an elderly Black woman and forced her to kneel at gunpoint — all because an automatic license plate reader improperly identified her car as a stolen vehicle.

Amazon is marketing Rekognition to police to be used as an identification tool, and the ACLU notes that a sheriff’s department in Oregon is doing exactly what the ACLU did here, matching people’s faces to mugshot databases.

A representative for Amazon told The New York Times that the ACLU used the tools differently than how they expect law enforcement will. The ACLU used the default mode of 80 percent confidence in the match; Amazon recommends that police use a 95 percent threshold. “It is worth noting that in real world scenarios, Amazon Rekognition is almost exclusively used to help narrow the field and allow humans to expeditiously review and consider options using their judgment,” Amazon’s rep said in a statement.

I can’t imagine how anybody would find that reassuring. Not only do law enforcement officers have a lengthy history of stubbornly arresting and imprisoning people over cases of mistaken identity, Zuri Davis noted recently how one police chief was just flat-out arresting random innocent men in order to clear burglaries. Imagine being able to blame it on technology.

And keep in mind, in the midst of a federal government implementing a remarkably harsh crackdown on immigrants (both legal and illegal), the Department of Homeland Security is implementing a facial recognition system in airports that will scan everybody boarding international flights, including American citizens, all for the purpose of trying to catch illegal immigrants with expired visas. We already see cases of immigration officials detaining American citizens—some of them for months or even years—over mistaken identities.

But proponents note that facial recognition software has a place and does serve a purpose when it’s accurate. Officials used facial recognition tools to identify the alleged shooter at the Capitol Gazette in Maryland. Given the man’s historical obsession with that newspaper, though, it was only a matter of time before they figured out who he was.

The ACLU and dozens of other civil rights groups want Amazon to stop offering this surveillance tool to police, and they’re calling on Congress to enact a moratorium on the use of facial recognition tools until the software is improved to the point that these mistakes are much less likely.

It’s a testament to the power of the tiny soybean—or, actually, the political power of the farmers that grow them—that the Trump White House has been scrambling this week to appease growers’ complaints about the consequences of the president’s ill-thought-out trade war. But the president’s latest maneuver will do nothing to alleviate the harm caused his own bellicose trade policies.

First, there was the attempt to buy farmers’ support, with the White House announcing that it would spend $12 billion through a New Deal-era crop insurance program to bail out farms harmed by tariffs. This is the policy equivalent of lending a garden hose to the fire department after setting your house on fire (and then sticking taxpayers with the water bill). Then, on Tuesday, Trump was eager to announce the bare bones of a trade deal with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that would see the E.U. importing more soybeans.

Soybeans are a critical battleground in the trade war because the United States produces so damn many of them. Farmers planted more than 89 million acres of soybeans across the United States in 2018, narrowly edging out the 88 million acres of corn that were planted, according to an annual survey by the Department of Agriculture. The United States is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, with nearly half the U.S. crop exported annually—and China is the largest importer of them. There are few singular products that better illustrate the benefits of global trade between the world’s two largest economies than the humble soybean.

But it was only after this year’s soybean crop was already planted that Trump announced his tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese-made goods. China responded to those tariffs by targeting America’s soybean crop—since then, the price of soybeans has fallen dramatically—leaving American farmers in the lurch.

US and Brazil FOB soybean flat price price spreads from @FT pic.twitter.com/PTccawwXHT

— Kevin Roepke (@SoyMaizstro) July 18, 2018

That’s why, at first blush, yesterday’s joint announcement by Trump and Juncker appears to be a positive development—and, to be fair, any indication of a cease fire in the trade war is welcome. But a mere handshake agreement to send more soybeans across the Atlantic won’t make up for a reduction in exports across the Pacific.

For starters, that’s because the European Commission doesn’t actually have authority over how many soybeans Europe imports. It doesn’t procure soybeans for European markets and it doesn’t tell European businesses where to buy their soybeans.

Of course, there are other ways that governments can encourage businesses within their borders to purchase materials from certain sources. Lowering trade barriers is one way to do it. If the Trump-Juncker agreement would lower European tariffs on American-grown soybeans, for example, that might do the trick of getting Europe to buy more American beans.

Except, well, the European Commission currently doesn’t charge any tariffs on American soybeans. Which means European businesses already have access to all the American soybeans they would want. It’s hard to see how—short of subsidizing demand across the pond—Juncker will follow through with his promise to have Europe buy more soybeans (falling global prices might encourage more buying in Europe, but not to a significant degree).

Rather than being an agreement to import more soybeans, it seems like Tuesday’s deal was really nothing more than a pledge that Europe would not slap new tariffs on soybeans in response to American tariff-raising, like China did. Further reporting from Brussels seems to bear out that conclusion.

SOYBEAN MADNESS UPDATE: EU official confirms the Trump/Juncker agreement is a political pledge by the EU not to do anything that affects the market conditions responsible for Europe buying more beans. (Which also come in the form of cakes.) All clear?

— Adam Fleming (@adamfleming) July 26, 2018

In other words, Tuesday’s deal was not a sign that Trump’s tariffs are not forcing foreign officials to accept more global free trade—as the administration’s defenders continue to claim.

It’s also worth considering the scale of the soybean markets in China and Europe. In 2016, the most recent year for which full data is available in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization database, China imported more than 86 million tons of soybeans while Europe imported just under 19 million tons. Unless Juncker and Trump plan to start jamming soybeans down European throats, foie gras-style, there’s simply no way that Europe can possibly consume enough soybeans to make up for the loss of China as an American export market.

And all of this posturing ignores one really simple fact: Even if Europe did somehow manage to buy-up all the soybeans that won’t be sold to China this year, American farmers would only be breaking even, not coming out ahead. At best, the Trump-Juncker deal—like the White House’s plan to bail-out tariff-stricken farmers—is a band-aid on a wound willfully inflicted by Trump. This isn’t improving global markets or increasing free trade, it’s just damage control.

President Donald Trump slammed his favorite social media platform today for allegedly “shadow-banning” several prominent conservatives, meaning their accounts weren’t auto-populating in the dropdown bar when users searched for them.

In a tweet (ironically), Trump promised to “look into this discriminatory and illegal practice.”

Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2018

Trump’s pledge to investigate Twitter came one day after Vice News reported on several conservative leaders whose Twitter accounts didn’t auto-populate in the search bar, but could only be found with a manual search. Those affected included Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Donald Trump Jr. spokesperson Andrew Surabian, as well as the verified accounts of Reps. Mark Meadows (R–N.C.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

There did not appear to be a comparable crackdown on the left, says Vice:

McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress—including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan—all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same in Twitter’s search.

In May, Twitter said it was addressing the issue of trolls on the platform to ensure that “people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search.” Prominent far-right users like Mike Cernovich and Richard Spencer appear to have been “shadow-banned” as a result, but it wasn’t clear why more mainstream conservatives were getting the troll treatment as well.

Twitter acknowledged the issue but blamed it on a glitch, insisting political bias was not a factor. “To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets,” Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour tweeted. “Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate.”

On 2) Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

But many conservatives weren’t buying it:

So now @twitter is censoring @GOPChairwoman?

Enough is enough with this crap. @Jack it’s time for you to #StopTheBias against conservatives and Trump supporters and fix this once and for all. https://t.co/JC6i6y01Ek

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 25, 2018

Silicon Valley’s bias against conservatives is apparent. It’s time they acknowledge it and tell us what they are going to do to fix it. https://t.co/sXvFWaWrNQ

— Rep. Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) July 25, 2018

This is what it looks like when a social media company suppresses conservative voices. https://t.co/NW3xMrSd3C pic.twitter.com/XovW5IyCAg

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) July 26, 2018

By Thursday morning, the profiles for McDaniel, Surabian, Meadows, Jordan, Nunes, and Gaetz were once again auto-populating in the search bar.

But even if those conservatives were being censored, Twitter wasn’t, as Trump said, doing anything “illegal.” As a privately run company, the social media platform has every right to promote political viewpoints it likes and censor the ones it doesn’t.

Conservatives say they’re proponents of free speech and free markets, and while that doesn’t mean they have to like the political biases of the people who run Twitter and Facebook, they should at least respect a private company’s right to promote some views over others. There is nothing stopping right-leaning programmers from creating social media networks that amplify conservative voices at the expense of liberal ones. Some conservatives have done just that, though for many more, it’s much easier to complain about bias and argue the law should force private companies to accomodate them.

Donald Trump, who assembled a winning coalition that included manufacturing workers, farmers, ranchers, people who ride Harleys, and capitalists resentful of Barack Obama, is now doing his best to turn them all against him. As Steve Chapman observes, Trump’s insistence on levying tariffs on a wide range of products is perfectly designed to inflict pain on those who voted for him, along with everyone else.

View this article.

What purpose is served by the American Civil Liberties Union? Sure, the words “civil liberties” appear right there in the name, writes J.D. Tuccille, but it’s increasingly difficult to take that seriously as the organization’s mission. Just a month after leaked internal ACLU case-selection guidelinesrevealed the organization to be stepping back from viewpoint-neutral advocacy of free speech rights, the ACLU claims that vigorous advocacy for self-defense rights is to blame for government expansion of the security state.

“Mass shootings create a pervasive sense of insecurity and anxiety that politicians and policymakers will inevitably seek to address,” senior policy analyst Jay Stanley insisted on the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project blog. As a result, he argues, “those who support expansive gun rights as a protection against excessive government power should strongly consider how much government intrusion and expanded power they’re willing to trade for those rights.”

This is the old “why do you make him hit you?” argument applied to civil liberties, points out Tuccille. It excuses the actions of the abuser—the state in this case—as reactions to the missteps of the abused.

And this is also a blame-the-innocent argument that can be applied to so many civil liberties.

View this article.

Stormy sting fallout continues. A whistleblower within the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department has leaked emails suggesting that contrary to official statements, the recent arrest of Stormy Daniels at Sirens strip club was planned months in advance.

After the arrest, Columbus police stated that they just happened to be at the club as part of an “ongoing investigation into human trafficking, prostitution, and other vice-related offenses” when Daniels thrust her breasts in an officer’s face and they had no choice but to arrest her, owing to an Ohio law that bans nude or semi-nude workers from touching customers or themselves in certain areas.

But “a whistleblower from the City of Columbus contacted the [Fayette] Advocate with numerous emails between several high-ranking Columbus police detectives and VICE officers,” the newspaper reports. And these emails suggest that police intentionally went to Sirens that night to arrest Daniels. From the Advocate:

Inside the emails are news clippings discussing Daniels’ planned appearance in Columbus, pictures of Daniels with President Donald Trump, videos of her dancing, and even a map to the club where she would be performing, all sent days before she would pull into town on her tour bus.

The bulk of the emails that the whistleblower provided are from the email account of Detective Shana Keckley. Keckley was one of the lead-arresting officers the night that the “sting” operation went down.

The whistleblower told the Advocate that “It is clear that Keckley and her fellow officers were there because of Stormy and only because of Stormy,” and that “the police lied about it being a prostitution and human trafficking mission.”

The charges against Daniels were dismissed less than a day later, and charges against two other Sirens workers arrested that night—waiter Miranda Panda and dancer Brittany Walters—were dismissed the following week. Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs called the arrests a “mistake.”

Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein said that “after reviewing the charges for each of these cases closely, I’ve determined that the facts of these cases do not meet the elements required to prosecute under this law.”

“None of the three cases properly allege that the women made ‘regular appearances’ as required by law,” notes the city in a statement. In addition, “the charges against Walters and Panda have other unique issues. Brittany Walters did not meet the requirement of ‘touching a ‘patron’,” and Miranda Panda did not meet the requirements of appearing ‘nude or semi-nude’ while working as a server, and was working only her third shift ever at Sirens.”

FREE MINDS

Impeachment articles for Rod Rosenstein are “wrong and baseless” says Andrew Napolitano. Eleven Republican lawmakers from the House of Representatives’ “Freedom Caucus” filed the articles of impeachment against Rosenstein on Wednesday, accusing him of deliberately withholding from Congress documents related to the Justice Department’s pre-election investigations into Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

A vote on the articles is not guaranteed. Still, the move is “embarrassing for everybody involved,” said Judge Andrew Napolitano.

“Improperly signing off on a FISA warrant” and staying in a position despite a conflict of interest may be “ethical violations but not impeachable” offenses, Andrew Napolitano explained to a gaggle of grumbling Fox News anchors yesterday. He went on to call the move “wrong and baseless.”

.@Judgenap: “The DOJ has a legitimate, lawful basis for keeping certain documents secret in a pending investigation….[The Mueller investigation] is still pending and you’d be interfering with it if you force the public revelation of some of those documents.” pic.twitter.com/2W7AJYfJYq

— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 26, 2018

“I want this Mueller thing over as soon as possible,” Napolitano continued, “but it is still pending and you’d be interfering with it if you force the public revelation of some of those documents.”

FREE MARKETS

You keep using that word—I do not think it means what you think it means….

The most frustrating thing about this debate is that “Democratic Socialism” proponents never mention that Sweden and Denmark outrank the US on economic freedom. These countries have generous welfare states because of market economics, not #socialism. https://t.co/Bf0UcGPPYu https://t.co/vZz2uhErY7

— Matthew Feeney (@M_feeney) July 25, 2018

FOLLOW-UP

ACLU alleges yet more abhorrent behavior from ICE. Immigration officials tricked migrant parents into signing away reunification rights to their children, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “Some parents said they thought they were signing paperwork that would, in fact, allow them to reunite with their children,” reports The Washington Post based on ACLU’s court filings. “Others described being crowded into rooms with dozens of people, given only a few minutes to fill out forms that would determine whether they would reunite with their children or leave them behind in the United States. They signed the forms out of fear, or confusion, or a belief that they had no other choice, lawyers wrote in the court filing.”

QUICK HITS

• “After 9/11… the aloofness of irony gave way to the performatism of what Wikipedia and numerous unpublished dissertations on David Foster Wallace (probably) call the New Sincerity, which eventually made it acceptable for Arcade Fire to be a band and for adults to have Harry Potter-themed weddings.” Go read Leah Finnegan on why it’s time to bring back irony.
• The battle to scrub the entire internet of wrongthink continues.
• A CNN reporter was banned from covering a White House press announcement Wednesday afternoon after asking unwelcome questions of the president earlier in the day. No one seems able to decide if this is “unprecedented” or not.
• An FBI agent is on trial this week for allegedly lying about shots he fired during the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
• Daron Morris is challenging Seattle’s never-met-a-civil-liberty-he-didn’t-want-to-thwart Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg on his “crackdown on sex work, and on broader questions about the role of the criminal justice system in solving social problems.”
• “There is no sales tax in New Hampshire, but businesses there might have to start collecting sales taxes for other states because of online sales,” notes NPR. Now New Hampshire is pushing back.
• Protectionism is contagious: “Now that we have a court established finding that lack of country of origin labeling harms cattle producers in the United States, we’re going directly to the White House.”
• A judge said Tennessee can’t revoke driver’s licenses just because people can’t pay court fees. Yesterday, “the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security Commissioner David Purkey formally filed a notice of appeal.”
• Can you hear the blues a-callin? Kelsey Grammer is allegedly exploring a Frasier reboot.

In Riley v. California (2014), the U.S. Supreme Court held that law enforcement officials had violated the Fourth Amendment when they searched an arrestee’s cellphone without a warrant. “Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

The requirement to get a warrant may not apply, however, when an American citizen is returning home from abroad and U.S. border officials want to search the contents of that person’s phone—at least according to a decision issued in March by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, writes Damon Root.

View this article.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or EBRD, is an international bureaucracy set up in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet empire, ostensibly for the purpose of promoting capitalism in the post-communist world, and the United States is its largest financial supporter. Not surprisingly, its mission has since expanded to cover many other countries, as well as various noble-sounding causes.

But as Veronique de Rugy explains, there are countless flaws with the EBRD. Among them: It is cronyism, plain and simple. The bank picks winners and losers in the marketplace. The winners—often better-connected firms—benefit from an unfair advantage over their competition in the form of subsidies, lower borrowing costs, and other perks. Tough luck if you’re an unsubsidized firm competing in that market.

It’s time for the U.S. to pull out of the EBRD.

View this article.

Organizers of the Alaska Hempfest are facing possible fines for allowing people to use cannabis at the festival. While marijuana is legal in Alaska, state law bars its use in public. Nordica Friedrich, communication and music director for the festival, says the potential fines make no sense. “People would never go to a beer and barley wine festival and just talk about beer and barley wine and just look at pictures of it,” she said.

Having reported on Ross Ulbricht’s prosecution since the beginning, I’ve found a startlingly large number of people who didn’t follow the case closely believe his life sentence without parole for acts connected with launching the darkweb sales site Silk Road was because he tried to pay for the murder of people who’d stolen from or threatened him.

That’s not true; such charges were no part of the crimes he was actually convicted for. The waters were muddied, almost certainly with cold deliberation, by the federal government because they had a separate indictment out of Maryland hanging over him for the past nearly five years that did include such accusations.

Last week Robert Hur, U.S. Attorney for the district of Maryland, filed a motion to have the indictment containing those charges dropped.

“Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction and life sentence in the case handled by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have been affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case,” Hur said in a written statement. “We have dismissed the federal charges based on the same conduct pending against Mr. Ulbricht in Maryland, which allows us to direct our resources to other cases where justice has not yet been served.”

Hur’s statement contained an important misleading element. It isn’t true that he’s serving his ridiculously punitive sentence based on the “same conduct” as in the dropped indictment from Maryland. That indictment includes a charge of “attempted witness murder” and many lurid details of the specifics of his alleged involvement in a case of (never actually committed) murder and torture. Those charges were no part of what Ulbricht was actually tried and sentenced for.

The real tragedy haunting this otherwise good news is the mere fact of the accusations, despite never being proven in court, played into the insanely and unprecedentedly draconian sentence Ulbricht received. The failed appeal to the Supreme Court wanted them to judge the propriety of sentencing based on unadjudicated accusations, but alas the Court didn’t want to bother.

Some close to Ulbricht’s defense, such as his mother Lyn Ulbricht, also wonder if the fact that the murder for hire accusations rely on the work of federal agents who were themselves charged for crimes committed in the course of the investigation into Silk Road might have played a role in the failure to ever go to trial on those accusations. The U.S. Attorney’s office would not comment today on any possibility that might have played any role in their decision to drop that indictment.

It’s good that the charges have been dropped, but the government’s careless use of them as a media weapon to destroy Ulbricht’s reputation and to encourage the sentencing judge to be far harsher than the crimes he was convicted on actually would warrant have alas already done their damage. It’s hard not to think that was exactly why the indictment came down yet never went to court.

Now that Ulbricht has no chance of having his initial conviction and sentencing overturned or adjusted, it’s likely the feds out of Maryland decided the indictment no longer was needed make sure the government had some further means in their back pocket to punish Ulbricht for showing a safer, saner way around their insanely damaging drug war.