"This cannot happen here" should be classified as a logical fallacy.

That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.

I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.

Wired still seems to write some good pieces.

I subscribe to keep the reporting going. Journalism costs money.

Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982633 - February 2026

(ProPublica, 404media, APM Marketplace, Associated Press, Vox, Block Club Chicago, Climate Town, Tampa Bay Times, etc get my journalism dollars as well)

are you using a vpn or something like that that might look like “you” have read wired articles?

I think the facial rec systems you're thinking of will recognize faces, but not ID them. They need you to label a face, and then it recognizes that face with a name from there on. Clearview is different in that you can provide it an unknown face and it returns a name. Whether it's just some ML based AI vs an LLM, it's still under the AI umbrella technically.

After the literal first one which just measured distance between nose and mouth and stuff like that from the 1960s, everything else has been based on AI.

If my memory serves me, we had a PCA and LDA based one in the 90s and then the 2000s we had a lot of hand-woven adaboosts and (non AI)SIFTs. This is where 3D sensors proved useful, and is the basis for all scifi potrayals of facial recognition(a surface depth map drawn on the face).

In the 2010s, when deep learning became feasible, facial recognition as well as all other AI started using an end to end neural network. This is what is used to this day. It is the first iteration pretty much to work flawlessly regardless of lighting, angle and what not. [1]

Note about the terms AI, ML, Signal processing:

In any given era:

- whatever data-fitting/function approximation method is the latest one is typically called AI.

- the previous generation one is called ML

- the really old now boring ones are called signal processing

Sometimes the calling-it-ML stage is skipped.

[1] All data fitting methods are only as good as the data. Most of these were trained on caucasian people initially so many of them were not as good for other people. These days the ones deployed by Google photos and stuff of course works for other races as well, but many models don't.

That will be wildly unpopular with both parties and most importantly their constituents. I doubt even the libertarian party should they get the president, house and senate could pull it off

Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play. Better to have better disclosure and de-anonymization in some cases. If some live in fear (e.g. of cartels), go after the cartels harder than they go after you.

Same could be said about the computer systems that have been developed in the last 20 years. But that hasn’t happened…

I wonder how many laws and sentencing guidelines etc are formulated with an implicit assumption that most of the time, people aren't caught.

are you sure it won't enabled targeted enforcement for people law enforcement finds irritating, more than evenly applied law? It's still people setting the priorities and exercising discretion about charging.

Meanwhile all AI face recognition software works poorely on non-caucasians.

None of the destruction of your rights has lead to improvement in clearance rates.

Crimes aren't solved, despite having a literal panopticon. This view is just false.

Cops are choosing to not do their job. Giving them free access to all private information hasn't fixed that.

The targets for the AI are still set by humans, the data the AI was trained on is still created by humans. Involving a computer in the system doesn't magically make it less biased.

LE has been getting increasingly advanced technology over the years. The only thing that’s increased is their ability to repress and oppress.

Go lick boots elsewhere.

This is exactly, precisely the opposite of what the impact will be.

For example:

- every technology has false positives. False positives here will mean 4th amendment violations and will add an undue burden on people who share physical characteristics with those in the training data. (This is the updated "fits the description."

- this technology will predictably be used to enable dragnets in particular areas. Those areas will not necessarily be chosen on any rational basis.

- this is all predictable because we have watched the War on Drugs for 3 generations. We have all seen how it was a tactical militaristic problem in cities and became a health concern/addiction issues problem when enforced in rural areas. There is approximately zero chance this technology becomes the first use of law enforcement that applies laws evenly.

Why do you write so many low-effort, disingenuous, inflammatory comments? They're "not even wrong", yet they just suck energy right out of productive discussion as people inevitably respond to one part of your broken framing, and then they're off to the races arguing about nonsense.

The main problem with the law not being applied evenly is structural - how do you get the people tasked with enforcing the law to enforce the law against their own ingroup? "AI" and the surveillance society will not solve this, rather they are making it ten times worse.

Not only is this incredibly naive, it misses that whole "consent of the governed" thing. I don't want AI involved in policing. They are bad enough and have so little accountability without "computer says so" to fall back on, That's all AI will do, make a bad situation worse.

Aren't we back to where this is illegal again, unless you're an ICE agent.

I think anything short of fully obscuring your face (a-la ICE-agent/stormtrooper) will be merely a mitigation and not 100% successful. I recall articles talking about face recognition being used "successfully" on people wearing surgical masks in China. In the US they ask you to remove face masks in places where face recognition is used (at the border, TSA checkpoints), but would be unsurprised if that isn't strictly needed in most cases (but asking people to remove it preemptively ends up being faster for throughput).

I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.

I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...