[Plura-list] IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition; ENDSARS; Companies target robots in disclosures

[Cory Doctorow]

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Today's Attack Surface Lecture: OpSec & Personal Cyber-Security: How Can
You Be Safe?

With Runa Sandvik and Window Snyder​

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-runa-sandvik-and-window-snyder-attack-surface-tickets-121808988965


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Today's links

* IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition: Privacy for the
powerless, transparency for the powerful.

* ENDSARS: Global protests over Nigeria's murdering special police.

* Companies target robots in disclosures: Sentiment analysis is finally
useful for something.

* US border cruelty, powered by Google cloud: IBM at Auschwitz.

* Free the law of Wisconsin: Carl Malamud wants you to read Wisconsin's
jury instructions.

* This day in history: 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🥽 IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition

As pandemic and climate emergency force the contradictions of capitalism
to the breaking-point, the world's streets have erupted in ceaseless,
ferocious protest. In a desperate bid to prolong their rule, elites have
fielded increasingly cruel and violent police responses.

The cops are, to varying degrees, complicit. They have chosen to follow
orders rather than risk their jobs (or even, in some cases, their safety
from state retaliation).

The increasingly obvious injustice of the cause they fight for also
increases the risk they bear.

There are three risks for the shock troops of late-stage capitalism:

I. the risk of official sanction by the state they fight for

II. the risk of punishment by a new regime should their cause fail

III. the risk of vigilante justice for the people they brutalize and murder

To reduce this risk, cops are going anonymous: not just wearing covid
masks, but also removing their badges, nametags, and (notoriously in
Portland), all insignia save generic windbreakers emblazoned POLICE, so
even their agency affiliation is anonymized.

For every measure, there is a countermeasure. Networked authoritarianism
has driven down the cost of facial recognition tools, and protesters
have turned these tools on anonymized cops.

Kashmir Hill's NY Times story on the phenomenon is wild.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/facial-recognition-police.html

During the Hong Kong uprisings, Colin Cheung was arrested after he
posted a video showing how he was identifying anonymized cops from
online photos:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/technology/hong-kong-protests-facial-recognition-surveillance.html

Artist Paolo Cirio posted an online exhibit called "Capture" with images
of 4,000 French cops who participated in the crackdown of the Gilet
Jaunes protests as a step toward automated identification (the photos
were removed after government threats).

https://paolocirio.net/work/capture/

And in Portland, a self-taught programmer named Christopher Howell
responded to police leadership's exhortation for officers to cover their
nametags by developing facial recognition to reidentify law enforcement
officers who took the advice.

Howell's project came to light when he responded to the city's call for
comments on a proposal to ban facial recognition tools, a measure that
was meant to curb authoritarian surveillance. He wanted to know if the
rule also banned antiauthoritarian surveillance?

The city's lawyer confirmed that Howell's tools would be legal as the
rule only banned organizations - not individuals - from using facial
recognition.

According to Hill, the authorities are "not pleased."

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🥽 ENDSARS

People of Nigerian descent and human rights activists around the world
have taken to the streets under the banner of #EndSARSProtest: a global
protest movement over Nigeria's lawless, murdering Special Anti-Robbery
Squad.

https://www.themarysue.com/endsars-what-it-means-protesting-in-nigeria/

SARS was founded in 1984 in answer to a wave of property crimes, today,
its founder Fulani Kwajafa says that it has "turned into banditry" -
Amnesty International has documented 82 cases of torture, brutality and
murder by SARS since 2017.

The current wave of protests was ignited by the public murder of a young
man by SARS officers on Oct 8. President Muhammadu Buhari has disbanded
the unit, but the criminals who served in it have been deployed
elsewhere in Nigerian security forces, spreading the contagion.

The End SARS movement has five demands:

I. Release protesters

II. Justice for survivors of police violence and for families of the
murdered

III. Independent oversight of police brutality complaints

IV. Retraining and psych evals for former SARS officers before they are
allowed to serve again

V. A living wage for cops so they do not need to commit crimes in order
to survive

https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/10/five-demands-from-endsars-protesters/

#EndSARS protests have been met with brutality in Nigeria, including
lethal police gunfire.

This video from Trevor Noah is an excellent backgrounder on the protests
and their demands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFzneJNI2RE

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🥽 Companies target robots in disclosures

To understand financialized snake-oil, you must understand Goodhart's
Law: "Any measure can become a target." Goodhart's Law explains why
something that works really well at the outset quickly turns into an
arms-race with grifters.

For a recent example, think of Pagerank, the original secret sauce of
Google Search. Larry Page had a key insight: a link from one web page to
another page was an indicator of significance.

The web was written primarily by human hands and making links took work.
If a web-writer linked to something on the web, it meant that they
thought it was important. Thus, you could assess the relative
significance of a web page by counting the number of links pointing to it.

This worked far better than rivals' methods - Altavista's idiotic
keyword-counting, for example (a page is relevant to the query "cat" if
the word "cat" and its synonyms appear frequently on that page; pages
with the most "cat"s go at the top of the listing).

At the outset, inbound links were a great measurement of significance.
But once inbound links became a way to game search-rank, they became a
target, too: web-writers found ways to garner inbound links, from the
relatively benign "webrings" to gross "linkfarms."

Today, Google's search ranking considers hundreds of "signals," locked
in an arms race scammers who want to chaff or spoof the system.

The same thing is going on in finance.

Public companies have a regulatory duty to publish financial
disclosures, which range from fanciful (Warren Buffet's annual letters)
to dry. Finance analysts once carefully pored over these reports looking
for clues to a company's fortunes.

As natural language parsing tools and machine learning improved, this
process was automated. The robots that digested these reports didn't
confine their analysis to the numbers: they also used "sentiment
analysis" to try to guess at the mental state of the reports' authors.

Sentiment analysis is a notoriously garbage technology, grounded in
low-quality, unreplicable psych research. Even when implemented by the
biggest corporate R&D; labs, it is effectively ML graphology, pure
pseudoscience.

https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~msap/pdfs/sap2019risk.pdf

The finance sector is full of superstitious nonsense. This is the
industry whose "smartest investors" hand (literal) trillions to hedge
funds that underperform simple index funds. It's not surprising that
they were marks for slicksters selling sentiment analysis magic-beans.

Analysts' ratings control share-prices, and corporate executives derive
the lion's share of their pay from stock in their own companies, and so
corporate governance becomes a giant game of Goodhart's Law in which
execs target the metrics that analysts rely on.

Share-based compensation is supposed to align managers' interests with
the shareholders: instead, it aligns their interests with the prejudices
of analysts.

Think of how Frontier went bankrupt after leaving $800m in profits on
the table because the spending needed to get it was dispreferred by the
analysts who controlled the company's share price (and thus its execs'
take-home pay):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

Predictably, then: the modern financial disclosure is optimized for
machine readability by analysts' robots, and it uses language that is
designed to be interpreted as positive by sentiment analysis systems:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27950

"Firms with high expected machine downloads manage textual sentiment and
audio emotion in ways catered to machine and AI readers, such as by
differentially avoiding words that are perceived as negative by
computational algorithms as compared to those by human readers, and by
exhibiting speech emotion favored by machine learning software processors."

-"How to Talk When a Machine is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the
Age of AI," Cao, Jiang, Yang & Zhang, NBER

The most grimly hilarious part of this: it will doubtless be offered as
evidence for sentiment analysis, when the real lesson is a tautology:
"If you speak in words that algorithms interpret as positive, the
algorithms will interpret the speech in a positive light."

It's the finance version of self-driving car grifters who insist that
their vehicles will be safe for pedestrians once we teach all the
pedestrians to behave in ways that the cars can correctly interpret.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#pogo-stick-problem

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🥽 US border cruelty, powered by Google cloud

In 2018, 20,000 googlers walked off the job in a protest over the
company's tolerance for (and rewards to) sexual predators.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18078664/google-walkout-history-tech-strikes-labor-organizing

The walkout was the culmination of a long year of moral reckonings for
Google workers, amid revelations that the company was secretly building
AI tools to help the Pentagon's drone program and search tools to help
the Chinese state suppress and spy on dissidence.

And while the walkouts killed these controversial projects, forced some
exec resignations, and ended the company's use of binding arbitration
clauses in employment contracts, the key organizers were forced out:

https://www.wired.com/story/most-google-walkout-organizers-left-company

Ultimately, the company's commitment to networked authoritarianism and
profits over human rights has continued to overpower any fear of worker
walkouts. How else to explain yesterday's news that the company is
helping CBP police the US-Mexican border?

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/21/google-cbp-border-contract-anduril/

As Lee Fang and Sam Biddle write for The Intercept, Google's role in
providing cloud AI services for the "virtual border" was laundered
through Thundercat Technology, a fact revealed by Jack Poulson, an AI
scientist who quit Google over its Chinese censorship project.

Google's Cloud and AI systems are being integrated with tools sold by
Anduril Industries, the company founded by the neofascist Palmer Luckey,
who was made a billionare by Facebook when they bought his Oculus VR
startup at a hugely inflated price.

Luckey is a sociopath pariah who has been caught secretly funding white
nationalist movements. His company is allied with Palantir, a company
that produces tools for automating racial oppression and mass surveillance.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-near-billionaire-secretly-funding-trumps-meme-machine

Luckey boasts that his company's recruiting materials court engineers
who want to build weapons. He has donated $1.7m to Donald Trump's
re-election campagin. He is precisely the kind of unsavory would-be
war-criminal that Google leadership promised it wouldn't associate with.

The history of tech is strewn with technologists who turned a blind eye
to the use of their inventions to commit hideous war crimes, such as
IBM's complicity in Nazi death camps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Google's use of a cutout to disguise its participation in the ethnic
cleansing project on the US sourther border is eerily reminiscent of
IBM's systems for laundering its complicity with extermination camps.

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🥽 Free the law of Wisconsin

Wisconsin's judges work with the state university system to produce
standard "jury instructions" that are key to how the state's juries
interpret the law when they deliberate. Judges then adapt these for each
trial based on the facts of the case.

Jury instructions are produced at public expense, by public employees,
including members of the judiciary in the course of their normal duties.
By any reasonable standard, these should free and in the public domain.

A bedrock of law - dating to the Magna Carta - is that it must be public
to be the law.

But neither the standard instructions nor the case-based versions are
available to the public. They are sold for $500 a pop, festooned with
copyright notices and dire warnings.

This is red meat for rogue archivist Carl Malamud, who has made a career
out of publishing copyrighted laws, including a recent victory at the
Supreme Court over whether the state of Georgia's copyright claims over
its laws were valid.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/in-unusual-lineup-supreme-court-rules-annotations-in-georgia-state-code-cant-be-copyrighted

After being contacted by a WI lawyer - who pointed out that law firms
were relying on out-of-date versions of jury instructions because
staying current costs $500/yr - Malamud wrote to the judges and the law
profs behind the jury instructions.

https://law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/regulations.gov.foia/gov.wicourts.20200601.signed.pdf

Malamud put them on notice that they should be publishing this vital
part of the state's law, and that if they didn't, he would. The judges
never wrote back, and the law profs turned it the matter over to their
university's counsel.

After some delays, the university's lawyer wrote back to Malamud and
told him that they were getting out of the business of copyrighting the
law, and the WI judicial conference would be making these public by
February.

https://law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/regulations.gov.foia/gov.wicourts.20200901.reply.pdf

The letter claims they're doing this because it's right, but adds
Wisconsin is within its rights to continue to claim copyright over the law.

To understand why this is a terrible and wrong idea, check out Public
Resource's excellent explainer video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-c2ppmT9qs

The video features EFF legal director Corynne McSherry, who has
represented Malamud on many occasions. Her explanation (about 25 mins
in) is an excellent, <10m primer on the need for the law to be public.

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🥽 This day in history

#5yrsago Fable Comics: anthology of great comics artists telling fables
from around the world
https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/fable-comics-anthology-of-great-comics-artists-telling-fables-from-around-the-world/

#5yrsago Son of Dieselgate: second line of VWs may have used “defeat
devices”
https://web.archive.org/web/20151022202413/https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/22/us-volkswagen-emissions-engines-idUSKCN0SG0US20151022

#5yrsago DHS admits it uses Stingrays for VIPs, vows to sometimes get
warrants, stop lying to judges
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/dhs-now-needs-warrant-for-stingray-use-but-not-when-protecting-president/

#5yrsago Half of Vanuatu’s government is going to jail
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/vanuatu-speaker-pardons-himself-and-13-mps

#5yrsago Obama administration petitions judge for no mercy in student
debt bankruptcy
https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33068-obama-administration-urges-no-bankruptcy-relief-for-student-debt

#1yrago Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments”: a long-awaited Handmaid’s
Tale sequel fulfills its promise
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/22/margaret-atwoods-the-testaments-a-long-awaited-handmaids-tale-sequel-fulfills-its-promise/

#1yrago Materiality: a new science fiction story for the Oslo
Architecture Triennale about sustainable, green abundance
https://ia803101.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_313/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_313_-_Materiality.mp3

#1yrago Ernst and Young subjected women employees to “training” about
keeping the company’s men happy
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-ernst-young-how-to-dress-act-around-men_n_5da721eee4b002e33e78606a

#1yrago NJ school district bans indebted students from prom and field
trips, refuses offer to pay off lunch debt
https://www.inquirer.com/education/school-lunch-shaming-cherry-hill-tuna-prom-20191018.html

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🥽 Colophon

Today's top sources: Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links, Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 530 words (75542
total).

Currently reading: Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 17)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/10/05/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-17/

Upcoming appearances:

* The Attack Surface Lectures: 8 nights of bookstore-hosted events in
which I and a massive group of entertaining and knowledgeable experts
discourse on my latest novel's themes, Oct 13-22
https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/

* Milehicon (Guest of Honor!), Oct 23-5, https://milehicon.org/

* Coding Democracy/Toronto International Festival of Authors, Oct 24
https://festivalofauthors.ca/event/maureen-webb-coding-democracy/

* Beaverbrook Lecture: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, Nov 30,
https://www.mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/channels/event/2020-beaverbrook-annual-lecture-part-ii-cory-doctorow-325538

Recent appearances:

* TWiT: The J to J Protocol
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/793

* Writing Excuses: Researching the FCK out of Things
https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/11/15-41-researching-the-fck-out-of-things-with-cory-doctorow/

* SRSLY WRONG: Stop Techno Dystopia!
https://srslywrong.com/podcast/220-stop-techno-dystopia-w-cory-doctorow/

Latest book:

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

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provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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