alt Hacker News> Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? Because it happened, and it wasn't an AI overseeing (the lack of) due process. The police identifying suspects is part of their job. So are arrest warrants and all the rest of it. I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here. All I see is a gaping systemic issue that could have happened regardless of AI if the wrong person got the wrong idea or had a personal vendetta.
Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list. We blame the systemic practices and legal apparatus that permitted it all to happen in the first place.
You might as well blame the SUV manufacturer because without vehicles the police wouldn't hav been able to drive over to make the arrest, right?
> How do you arrive at that conclusion?
Because it's beyond obvious? How would this woman have ended up in jail if she hadn't been misidentified by the facial recognition software in use by the Fargo police? She lives 3 states over; would be a hell of a coincidence if some other avenue of investigation led them to her.
> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.
You honestly don't see what facial recognition software had to do with a woman being misidentified by facial recognition software?
> Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list.
I actually am completely willing to blame any entity that supplies ICE with the names of people it can reasonably assume will be targeted for "enforcement action" due to said entity representing said names as being legitimate targets for said enforcement action, without taking reasonable care to ensure said representation is correct in each and every case.
What you don't seem to understand is that these abuses of law enforcement authority are predicated on at least an appearance of legitimacy, which can be provided by (e.g.) an app with (presumably) a very official looking logo that agents can point at somebody to get a 'CITIZEN' or 'NOT CITIZEN' classification. It is upon this kind of basis that they perform illegal arrests. All parties—the app vendor and ICE, as well as the people who are meant to be overseeing ICE and providing accountability—are complicit enablers in these crimes. To absolve the vendors who provide the software knowing full well what it will be used for, what its limitations are, and how unlikely it is that ICE personnel will understand those limitations and work around them to keep everything legal, is totally absurd.