Whether it's AI that flagged her, or a witness who saw her, or her IP address appeared on the logs. Did anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm. But that's not what happened, they saw the data and said "we got her".
But this is the worst part of the story:
> And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
That's the lesson? Never go back to North Dakota. No, challenge the entire system. A few years back it was a kid accused of shoplifting [0]. Then a man dragged while his family was crying [1]. Unless we fight back, we are all guilty until cleared.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/29/apple_sis_lawsuit/
The incentive is to prosecte and prove the charges.
Speaking from the experience of being falsely accused after calling 911 to stop a drunk woman from driving.
The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
To me the scariest part of this as a process is how many times (I’d casually estimate at least 75%) it is blindingly obvious that the prosecutor has not read the statement of charges or officer statements until everyone is in front of the judge. I get on one hand this judge seems to often be handling probable cause hearings but so many of these should never have resulted in any paperwork being turned in to the prosecution, let alone anyone having to show up in court.
Minimum 1 year of jail time for grossly wrongful arrests that could be avoided with standard procedure or investigation tactics that were not applied.
The truth is much more complicated and involves politics. For example Seattle (and possibly other cities?) enacted a law that involves paying damages for being wrong in the event of bringing certain types of charges. But that has resulted in some widely publicized examples where the prosecutor erred by being overly cautious.
I don't get it, if they only care about prosecuting and proving the case, wouldn't they go by the bodycam evidence? They didn't prove the case. Maybe if their incentive was to prosecute and prove the charges, they'd go by the obvious evidence. Or am I missing something here?
That’s seems to be in the realm of poissibility here if I am understanding things correctly (imo)
A month ago or so people on HN discussed facial recognition when looking victims and perpetrators in child exploitation material, and people were complaining that meta did not allow this fast enough. Neither the article or the people in that discussion draw any connection that the issues in this article could happen. People seemingly want to think that the lesson is "Never go back to North Dakota", as that is a much easier lesson than considering false positives in detection algorithms and their impact on a legal system that is constrained in budget, time, training and incentives.
We could sit here all day arguing “you should always validate the results”, but even on HN there are people loudly advocating that you don’t need to.
You should always validate the results, but there is an inherint difference between an AI generated tool for personal use and a tool which could be used to destroy someones life.
To the extent people trust AI to be infallible, it's just laziness and rapport (AI is rarely if ever rude without prompting, nor does it criticize extensive question-asking as many humans would, it's the quintessential enabler[1]) that causes people to assume that because it's useful and helpful for so many things, it'll be right about everything.
The models all have disclaimers that state the inverse. People just gradually lose sight of that.
[1] This might be the nature of LLMs, or it might be by design, similar to social media slop driving engagement. It's in AI companies' interest to have people buying subscriptions to talk with AIs more. If AI goes meta and critiques the user (except in more serious cases like harm to self or others, or specific kinds of cultural wrongthink), that's bad for business.
"The trauma, loss of liberty, and reputational damage cannot be easily fixed,” Lipps' lawyers told CNN in an email.
That sounds a LOT like a statement you make for before suing for damages, not to mention they literally say "Her lawyers are exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit, they said."
This lady probably just wants to go back to normal life and get some money for the hell they put her in. She has never been on a airplane before, I doubt she is going to take on the entire system like you suggest. Easier said than done to "challenge the entire system", what does that even mean exactly?
...Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.
(Also, what happened to journalism - no Oxford comma?)
Effectively it just raises taxes to cover the cost of these failed prosecutions.
Everytime one of these cases happens, a cop and a prosecutor should be out of a job permanently. Possibly even jailed. The false arrest should lose the cop their job and get them blacklisted, the prosecution should lose the prosecutor's right to practice law.
And if the police union doesn't like that and decides to strike, every one of those cops should simply be fired. Much like we did to the ATC. We'd be better off hiring untrained civilians as cops than to keep propping up this system of warrior cops abusing the citizens.
It absolutely was. There's no question of this. Now we need to ask how was the system marketed, what did the police pay for it, how were they trained to use it?
> anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm.
Legally that amounts "hearsay" and cannot have any value. Those statements probably won't even be admissible in court without other supporting facts entered in first.
> we are all guilty until cleared.
This is not at a phenomenon that started with AI. If you scratch the surface, even slightly, you'll find that this is a common strategy used against defendants who are perceived as not being financially or logistically capable of defending themselves.
We have a private prison industry. The line between these two outcomes is very short.
I just want to understand your argument: you believe that any alibi provided is hearsay, and has no legal value, and that they can't even take the statement in order to validate it? That's your position?
How is that hearsay if she's directly testifying to her own whereabouts?
Hearsay would be if someone else was testifying "she was in X location on july 10th between 3 and 4pm", without the accused being available for cross
Agree in principle. But people like her does not have the resources, financially and emotionally to go through the legal system again. Unless there are charitable lawyers who are willing to do it on her behalf for free.
Better just to apply Musk or Altman software to the problem and avoid it entirely.
https://pub.towardsai.net/the-air-gapped-chronicles-the-cour...
The use case here is police facial recognition. Not hitting nails. The parent wasn't saying "AI is a liability" with no context.
Only one small little problem --- there is no way to tell if you are using it "correctly".
The only way to be sure is to not use it.
Using it basically boils down to, "Do you feel lucky?".
The Fargo police didn't get lucky in this case. And now the liability kicks in.
Now, if I misused a hammer and it hurt everyone's thumb in my country, then maybe what you said would have some merit.
Otherwise, I'd say it's an extremely lazy argument
I wonder if AI / shadow IT will change that.
I doubt it.
Computing has traditionally been all about math and logic. This is really all that a binary logic computer is capable of. When applied to this purpose, it can offer highly accurate results at very low cost.
Current AI is an attempt to branch out from simply calculating into decision making. But it does so in the worst possible way --- using probability and statistics (aka guesswork) instead of logic and reasoning. In other words, AI offers questionable results at high cost.
As this article shows, relying on guesswork is a legal liability issue waiting to happen in many (if not most) operating environments.
First, the detective used the FaceSketchID system, which has been around since around 2014. It is not new or uniquely tied to modern AI.
Second, the system only suggests possible matches. It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
The real question is why she was held in jail for four months. That is the part that I do not understand. My understanding is that there is 30-day limit (the requesting state must pick up the defendant within 30 day). Regarding the individual involved, Angela Lipps, she has reportedly been arrested before, so it is possible she was on parole. So maybe they were holding her because of that?
Can someone clarify how that process works?
They probably did “identity challenge” arguing that she is not the right person. But from Tennessee’s perspective, she was considered the correct person to be arrested, so there was no “mistaken identity” in their system. In other words, North Dakota Wanted person x and here is person x.
Once a judge in North Dakota reviewed the full evidence (and found that person they issued warrant for arrest is not one they want), the case was dismissed.
As the article gestures towards, challenging the extradition can greatly extend the timeline, from 30 days after the arrest to 90 days after a formal identity hearing. Which isn't fair and isn't intuitive, but is unfortunately a long-standing part of the system. (Even worse, this kind of mistaken identity can't be challenged in an extradition hearing; the question isn't whether she's the person who committed the crime but whether she's the person identified in the warrant.)
This is how it should work, but I still think it is important to discuss these failures in the context of AI risks.
One of the largest real-world dangers of AI (as we define that now) is that it is often confidently wrong and this is a terrible situation when it comes to human factors.
A lot of people are wired in such a way that perceived confidence hacks right through their amygdala and they immediately default to trust, no matter how unwarranted.
They picked her up in TN and held her for 4 months, even after:
The ND police knew the ID was fake and the person using it was not her. The ND police knew she had been in TN before, during, and after the crime.
She is still technically a suspect, even after all of this has come out.
Source: I live in Fargo and have been following this story closely. Everyone here is pissed
Maybe she objected to the extradition order without good counsel.
"I aint never been to N.Dakota". She found out the hard way how the law works..
What about the banks being hit. Surely they have good cameras. This was bad mojo. I would think a Wells Fargo/BoA has a unit for this stuff.
Finincial crimes handled like this. The banks will be sued too I suspect.. Deep pockets settle out.
https://www.clearview.ai/privacy-and-requests
I have suddenly becomes very interested in New York's S1422 Biometric Privacy Act.
"[I]t’s not just a technology problem, it’s a technology and people problem."
I can't. I just can't.
However, the system uses a dragnet approach, and is checking against millions of people. If you are checking 300 million people, that 99.999% accuracy check is going to find 3,000 people, and AT LEAST 99.96% of those people are going to be innocent.
This is why we can’t have wide, automated surveillance.
A judge and the warrant process are supposed to be the safeguard against police doing shady stuff (like relying on an AI hit to decide who commit a crime). But if the judges can't be bothered...
The fundamental problem is that among the 350 million people living in the United States, there are a lot of pairs of people who look pretty darn similar. It used to be impractical to ask a question like "who in the US looks like the person in this security footage", and so as a matter of practicality, once you found someone who looks like the suspect, you probably also have other evidence, even if it's pretty weak, linking them to the crime.
But with AI, you can ask "who in the US looks like this person", and so we need to re-calibrate what it means if all you know is that someone looks like a suspect. I am of the opinion that "looks like someone," in the absence of any other evidence, is reasonable suspicion, but not probable cause, that you are the person you look like. Reasonable suspicion is enough for the police to stop you on the street and ask for your ID, but not enough to arrest you. There are other data points that alone might not even be reasonable suspicion, but could be combined with "looks like someone" to make probable cause, such as "was near the place at the time the crime happened".
AI isn't really the problem, even whether or not the AI's determination that two people look alike is valid or reviewed by a human isn't the problem. The problem is assuming that because two people look alike they must be the same person, even if you have no other evidence of them being the same person.