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Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

Otherwise, the investigation seems to have consisted entirely of the grainy cell phone photos of surveillance footage. According to the lawsuit, O’Connell checked them against photos from inmate booking records and the sex offender registry but found no potential matches. Weeks later, with no leads, he sent the photos to other law enforcement agencies, asking for help. It was at this point that an investigator ran them through facial recognition, which flagged Dillon.

But as the ACLU notes, facial recognition’s accuracy “depends significantly on the quality of the probe image. Lower-quality images contain less interpretable facial data, degrading the system’s ability to produce a reliable template.”

At the very least, it requires a much better source image. Besides, no such investigative tool should form the sole basis for an arrest warrant. “If you came to me with a facial recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office because that’s not how it works,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told local news. (Waters is among those being sued in the ACLU lawsuit, because it was an investigator from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office who ran the grainy photo through facial recognition and advised O’Connell it was a “93% match” to Dillon.)

While he was ultimately released, Dillon still had to suffer the indignity of not just being arrested, but being tarred as a possible child abuser. When deputies placed him in a group holding cell after his arrest, the lawsuit says Dillon “sat in silence, too frightened by the gravity of the charge to speak with or interact with anyone.” Even after the charges were dropped, it took an entire year for authorities to take down his mug shot and expunge the arrest from his record.

Unfortunately, Dillon is hardly the first person in this position: The ACLU estimates he is one of at least 14 people arrested since 2019 after being erroneously identified by facial recognition.

Dillon’s lawsuit, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, seeks both compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a requirement that the police departments in question will adopt new safeguards against the misuse of facial recognition technology in the future.

“The night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” Dillon said in a statement. “Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe.”

The post ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor appeared first on Reason.com.

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Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains. Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead would scheme to seize the global economy’s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice. But the people who hold such ideas don’t just appear in cartoons or in Rand’s novels.

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.

In early June, Piketty—the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations, and cherry-picked baselines—and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan. It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept. But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty’s plan would cap gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430. The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent, and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent. There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist. This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.

Let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan? About this matter, he is conveniently vague. Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history.

The mechanism must be authoritarian. It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat, and how many hours they are permitted to work.

And to what end? “Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Piketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the “RCP8.5” climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the United Nations’ own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things. Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It’s also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief. It’s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels. These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care, and pensions, and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people.

Rand’s villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.

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It’s hard to think of a better illustration of the dramatic changes that our President has wrought in the world of law and lawyering than the (still-very-much-unfinished) Todd Blanche story.  Blanche’s actions since being named Acting A.G. – the risible Comey indictment (“SeashellGate”?)[1], the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund for Trump’s cronies and January 6 insurrectionists that even Trump’s long-time supporters couldn’t stomach,[2] the waiver of claims against the President of the United States (his boss) that he forgot to include in the Settlement Agreement the DOJ had negotiated[3](!) – would surely, in earlier times, have gotten him fired, and possibly sanctioned or worse for having perpetrated a fraud on the court.[4]

Instead, it earned him a promotion.  To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, loyalty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

But the good news is that the nomination will allow the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Blanche some questions at his confirmation hearings.  Here are some questions that I’d like Blanche to answer:

1. Were you involved in the negotiations leading up to the May 18 “Settlement Agreement” between the President and the I.R.S.?  And/or the drafting of the Settlement Agreement itself?
   1. If you were not involved, were you briefed beforehand on the deal that was being struck?
   2. If you were involved, in what capacity were you acting – as counsel to the I.R.S.?
      1. Were you concerned about potential conflicts of interest in such a scenario, given that (a) before you became Acting AG you were the President’s personal lawyer, and (b) as Acting A.G. the President – your adversary in the action – is your direct superior and can fire you at will?
   3. Before the Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their claims in the Florida case, the Court had ordered special briefing on the question of whether there was a “case or controversy” in the action. Briefs were due in less than a week after Plaintiffs’ motion to have the claim dismissed was filed.  Presumably, the DOJ was hard at work preparing its briefs on the question.  What position was the DOJ going to take on behalf of its client (the IRS) on the matter? Was there, or was there not, a justiciable “case or controversy”?
   4. You didn’t sign the Settlement Agreement (although it was signed on behalf of the United States by your deputy, Assistant A.G. Woodward). Why not?
   5. When did you become aware that the parties had negotiated a provision pursuant to which the IRS would waive all of its claims against Mr. Trump that may have accrued up to that point in time?
   6. Do you know why the Settlement Agreement did not include any waiver of IRS claims? Was that just an oversight?  On whose part?  Is your order of May 19 an attempt to correct that oversight?
   7. The Settlement Agreement states that Mr. Trump and the other Plaintiffs will receive “a formal apology from the United States,”and that this was their “sole and complete relief” in the case. [Sec. III(A)]  But that would suggest that the IRS’ waiver was not part of the settlement between the parties. Is that correct?
   8. But if the waiver was not part of the settlement between the IRS and Mr. Trump, then what authorizes you to include it in your May 19 Order?
      1. If I promise to stop asking you uncomfortable questions about your behavior as Acting Attorney General, will you give me a waiver of all claims the IRS might have against me? And putting aside whether you’d like to do that – do you seriously believe that you are authorized to grant me such a waiver on behalf of the United States?   Please explain.
   9. The Settlement Agreement states that “the corpus of the Anti-Weaponization Fund’s funding does not represent the value of any current claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected value of future claimaints’ claims.” On May 18, the DOJ announced that the fund would receive $1.776 billion. Although you have backtracked on this point and declared that the DOJ is not moving forward with the Anti-Weaponization Fund, I am just curious – was this actually “the projected value of future claimants’ claims”?  You must have some worksheets and/or calculations to back that up, yes?  May we see them?

[1] See Eugene’s takedown of the charges against Comey here.

[2]  See my earlier postings here, here, and here.

[3] Seriously. You can see for yourself that the IRS did not waive any claims against Trump in the Settlement Agreement. That waiver was granted in the special “Order” Blanche issued on the following day.

Why wasn’t it included in the Settlement Agreement?  The only explanation I can come up with is that the lawyers simply forgot to include it.  Maybe they got confused; the Settlement Agreement does have a “waiver of claims” clause (see Sec III(B)) – but that one goes in the opposite direction! Plaintiffs are waiving their claims against the IRS!

You can imagine the scene:

Blanche: “Did you put that waiver into the Settlement Agreement?”

Lawyer in Charge of Drafting Settlement Agreement:  “We sure did!”

That kind of thing would get a first-year associate fired.  But Mr. Blanche has turned it into nomination to be our next Attorney General.

[4] We will learn, I hope, a great deal more on this score shortly.  Judge Williams, in the SD FL case, has asked for briefing, due this Friday, on possible collusive conduct by the two parties in this case, and I suspect she will hold at least one public hearing on the matter as well.  The long and the short of the allegation is that the two sides – Trump on one side, the IRS on the other – agreed that Trump would file a phony lawsuit against the IRS, that he would voluntarily dismiss his claims before the IRS had to answer the claims, and the parties would announce that they had “settled” the case.  This would enable them to get their hands on the DOJ’s “settlement fund,” without any of that nasty Congressional oversight or approval.

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