
Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk - Jerry2
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-recognition.html
======
Spooky23
Why? The surveillance is there.

I used this with some personal video surveillance to identify some thieves who
were casing driveways to find cars to get into. Instead of wasting hours
looking at footage, I was able to give the police excerpts that helped them
identify the perp. Also, because of the circumstances and footage, they were
able to charge him with a more serious crime than petit larceny, which means
he won't be back next week.

It's an effective tool. If you're allowed to have a camera, you should be
allowed to look at it with whatever means you want.

The reality is that the horse is out of the barn. The Federal government has
been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on
interstate corridors since at least the 90s.

~~~
mfringel
I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority of
the (United States) populace signed up for.

The legal Expectation of Privacy[0] continues to be important, even if there
are people who think that it was a legal handwave that only existed due to
lack of adequate technology.

\----

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy)

~~~
npongratz
> I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority
> of the (United States) populace signed up for.

I certainly agree, but just wait until They/Them/Those start telling us this
is part of some sacrosanct "social contract," and those who don't like it can
simply leave.

Edit: small changes for clarity.

~~~
PostOnce
> If you dont like it leave

people start leaving

> wait! dont leave! We're gonna jack up the renounce-your-citizenship fee by
> thousands of dollars!

actually happened already.

~~~
asimpletune
I didn’t know about this. Do you have any links?

~~~
geomark
Try
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship)

TL;DR: You could renounce your US citizenship for free before 2010. Then it
when up to $450. In 2014 the fee was raise to $2,350.

On top of the fee is the exit tax wherein you may be required to pay a tax on
the entirety of any gains on your assets as if you had sold them all that day.
And, further, if they think you are renouncing to avoid taxes they claim that
you must continue to pay taxes for 10 years after you renounce.

------
mlthoughts2018
I find this article a bit funny, and see it mostly as hype.

I worked very revently on a large internal face detection service for a legal
and compliance application at a large US company.

Being pragmatic engineers, the first thing we did was to pilot test
Rekognition against an in-house prototype built by modifying some open source
deep learning approaches.

Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state
of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance
problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our
training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of
the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us,
especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces
(Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned
whatever amount of faces it could process).

Our very simple prototype could fully process upwards of 30 faces with 1
second of latency, and so if using a similar 5 second timeout limit, we could
process around an order of magnitude more faces (which happens more often than
you think, e.g. crowds, people in public places).

I just could not believe that the web service, backed by a team surely
comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and
inaccurate.

We didn’t even bother trying to price out how expensive it would be for our
expected amount of throughput, because we knew from a simple accuracy and per-
request latency point of view, Rekognition just couldn’t cut it.

As I’ve moved into a more lead role with machine learning teams, this
experience really opened my eyes to how seductive cloud solutions can appear
to non-technical managers.

They will act like severe bean counters when they see a high salary request
from a really experienced machine learning engineer, but they won’t even
bother with due diligence or estimating cost-per-request or cost-per-unit-
accuracy for dropping money on a cloud service.

Instead of empowering a small team to do something much more cost-effective
for the company, they’ll ball at their internal engineers while setting a pile
of money ablaze.

~~~
amzn-throw
> backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon
> engineers, was so slow and inaccurate.

You'd be surprised. Many many AWS services are launched by a single 2-pizza
team (8-10 developers). It's in Amazon's DNA to act like a startup, ship
something quickly, collect feedback, then iterate, and scale.

Rekognition will get much better in time.

~~~
sadamznintern
Also, for the record, AWS is hardly top of the industry in terms of talent.
It's not Google or Facebook. I've never heard of an ML researcher joining
Amazon when they could have joined Google/FB/Apple.

~~~
tanilama
It could happen both way. Noted that Google is much more saturate for its ML
talents, so unless you are super top-notch, some people will take it to Amazon
for bigger impact. I personally know a few people, who is competitive in the
industry, having Google offer/leaving Google for Amazon.

No doubt, the flow is usually Amazon -> Google/Facebook, because for mid-level
engineer/scientist, money talks :), and Google/FB generally have much
open/better publication policy, while Amazon is neurotically secretive. Apple
is not on the picture, I think the internal engineer culture is very
problematic(no common codebase, severe NIH syndrome), except for the money, it
is subpar place to grow.

Disclaimer: Work in a ML related AWS team.

------
chisleu
They are NOT selling a service that identifies people from data sets other
than the police's supplied data sets. It is not inappropriate for police to be
able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known
criminal.

The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do
themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially
available information from linked in, facebook, etc to identify everyone's
whereabouts.

Pushing back this early will not have mass appeal and will not help to prevent
the future, broader concerns IMHO.

~~~
alex_young
> It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are
> interacting with if that person is a known criminal.

Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most
people.

There absolutely should be a clear delineation between what is possible and
what is allowed when considering state surveillance.

The 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

It's right there. You have a right to be secure as a person from unreasonable
searches. Massive face recognition of 'criminals' is a violation of exactly
that, and should be prevented without question.

~~~
fixermark
Reasonable people can disagree on the definition of "unreasonable," however.

Is it "unreasonable" for the Amber Alert system to co-opt the eyes and
attention of ten thousand citizens around a kidnapped child? Hard to say. Most
people seem to think 'no.'

If that system could co-opt camera feeds instead of human attention, we could
get most (all?) of the benefits of the existing Amber Alert without having to
burn civilian resources on it. Wouldn't that be a strict improvement over the
current system?

~~~
blitmap
I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass
surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest,
or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as
it hurts society.

~~~
doorbumper
What's interesting is that anyone implementing mass surveillance could care
less about your proposed benefits.

~~~
Buttons840
I believe technology will ever erode privacy, and that the best we can hope
for is to make sure the transparency goes both ways. The government should
become more transparent to the people as the people become more transparent to
the government. Like you though, I'm afraid we'll end up with a vast and
reliable surveillance system which police will be able to use, while the
police themselves are still "struggling" to get their body cams to work
reliably.

------
sykh
At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the
computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the
system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the
new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on
us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately
obtained information without a search warrant [1].

What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real,
pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list
is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in
the system.

The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology
progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared
for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless
surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking
of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance.

[1] [https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-
cit...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-
citizens.html)

~~~
excalibur
It's the leaking they fear most. The implementation of surveillance
technologies is unavoidable. Ban them all you like, they will be used
regardless. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it.

What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably
the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in
making surveillance data transparent and public.

~~~
thirduncle
_Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless._

We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least.

 _Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it._

If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - by
gosh, eventually it will become true.

~~~
excalibur
Your philosophy is admirable. Unfortunately it's also the one that led us
here. Shall we wait until the surveillance state has us intractably under its
boot before we stop arguing over whether its power should exist and start
focusing on who we would like wielding it?

------
mLuby
Asking a company to please not sell something doesn't seem like a scalable
approach. As long as there's a market someone will try to enter it. Either
make it illegal for companies to sell this technology or illegal for police
departments to buy it. It's a political matter.

~~~
matwood
I agree it's a legal matter, but completely illegal is not realistic. What's
needed is a legal/privacy framework that addresses these new technologies.
Unfortunately, I have zero faith in the law makers to understand the
technology enough to really do anything meaningful. Instead, we will probably
have to wait for a SCOTUS case at some point in the future to define the legal
side.

~~~
candiodari
Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate
scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it.

You might just as well outlaw knives (they are in fact illegal in many
European countries, which has done nothing about their easy availability, and
software will be far easier to acquire than knives)

~~~
matwood
> Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate
> scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it.

Which is why I said that completely illegal is not realistic. What laws can do
is provide a scope and framework on how technology is used. Data retention,
sampling, court admissibility, etc... are all pieces that can be argued and
adjusted to fit with new technology. But, like I also said above, I don't have
faith that current law makers understand technology enough to make any of
these laws. It will take some overreach cases that end up in SCOTUS to get
anything done.

> You might just as well outlaw knives

Using knives in a certain way (stabbing someone for example) is against the
law. Using this new technology in certain ways could also be against law.

------
teachrdan
Key quotation: "Facial recognition is not new technology, but the
[criticizing] organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its
prominence and what they see as a departure from the company’s oft-stated
focus on customers."

This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers
are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations
on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national
governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS
offerings.

~~~
ProAm
Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and
profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a
side-effect that they need consumers.

~~~
lainga
On the contrary as far as Amazon-the-online-store goes: they are notoriously
pro-customer to the detriment of small retailers.

~~~
ProAm
The number of counterfeits and abomination of UI argues against that point. I
think Amazon is against both customer and small retailer and that goes to my
point they are about market share and profit margin above all else.

~~~
Kocrachon
As someone who has sold on Amazon, its not as simple as you make it sound.

Amazon takes my product, which I identify, and puts it in a bin at whatever
warehouse. Another seller, sends in the same product, but theirs is
counterfeit. Without opening the package, how is Amazon to know which one of
us is selling the counterfeit and which one is real?

Now, my inventory is mixed in with amazon's and this counterfeiter, that
product gets shipped out with my name because the customer chose my price of
the list of sellers, but Amazon takes whichever one is closer, not the one I
sent them. This is done to help ensure cheapest/fastest possible shipping. I
take the blame even though someone else sent bad product.

This is a shitty situation all around, but how does Amazon fight back? They do
eventually go back after the counterfeiters, but its a slow and complicated
process because its super simple to set up as a seller on Amazon.

But, this is also not a new issue. Ebay still has this issue and I would say
its far more mature than Amazon at the "3rd party seller" crap and Ebay cant
fix it either. Its a shitty hard situation to deal with.

~~~
gowld
Amazon could do what Amazon used to do, and what everyone else does: Don't
comingle supplies from trusted sources from random third parties. Have you
every tried selling a wholesale bag of carrots to a your local grocery store?
They aren't interest, for good reason.

------
jedberg
This is a ridiculous article. Rekognition has been available for over a year,
and I've been using it for that whole year. I've even integrated it into my
own home security camera.

Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special
service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition
system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the
police and government, they tech is out there. Those groups could have used it
on their own.

~~~
sebringj
I'm not sure I follow because your home security system, correct me, is only
near your home, not connected to millions of people collectively that are
mechanical turked unwillingly. Them apples aren't oranges.

~~~
jedberg
I'm just saying that this technology is available for everyone, even in a
security context. It's not like they build this just for LE.

~~~
sebringj
Right valid true. Its just that it's scary if someone has tons of money and
users and AI etc etc that has this capability and misuses it on a massive
scale kind of how big data only works when its big. No one cares that my
localhost website has root access to my machine for example but maybe that's a
silly point but I think you get what I'm saying, kind of like the tree falling
in the forest... take your pick of metaphors.

------
onetimemanytime
I think this is going to happen, regardless of ACLU or whether Amazon pulls
the service or not. Face recognition will be refined and sold as a package.
Probably every cop car will have it one day. Courts will say that when you're
in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. Expect cop cars next
to you if you missed a court date or violated parole.

The scariest part is the DNA fishing expeditions through cousins like
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
crime/wp/2018/04/27...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
crime/wp/2018/04/27/golden-state-killer-dna-website-gedmatch-was-used-to-
identify-joseph-deangelo-as-suspect-police-say/?utm_term=.36cdc87a39e9) . They
find a hair in a crime scene and 17 years later, more or less, you need to
prove that you didn't do it. Maybe the victim was next to you at Starbucks or
picked your hair with his /her shoes. Good luck

~~~
Karunamon
> _Courts will say that when you 're in public you give certain privacy rights
> away etc. etc._

This is the law of the land right now. As to your next example, I don't see
what's wrong with those, as missing a court date or violating parole is a
perfectly legitimate reason for you to be arrested.

~~~
cryoshon
how will you feel when they start arresting serial jaywalkers?

~~~
partiallypro
They already wrongly ticket people at stop lights, it's a racket. They could
just mail you a ticket for very small petty "crimes," like not throwing
something in the right bin, jay walking, etc. Do people really think police
will only use this to solve crime? Solving crimes doesn't pay the bills.
Ticketing people does. Then they could also use the facial recognition to get
everyone that's at a protest of the government (they already do this somewhat
with cell phone signals) then they know who to put on a watch list...even if
it's a legitimate protest.

I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the
many bad ways that this can be used for, especially since police oversight is
notoriously bad, in virtually every country, including the west.

~~~
cryoshon
>I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the
many bad ways that this can be used for

they don't expect to be the ones facing oppression.

------
bpicolo
> If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread

The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist
regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs

~~~
codazoda
I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not
support this system.

~~~
maldeh
It's possible that in the short term, Amazon could be changing the economics
of mass surveillance, making it more feasible for police departments that
could not afford such tech before. But at this point, I think a change of
dynamic is important, and that we actually _need_ an 800 pound gorilla to
frighten us, before people wake up and start demanding action at the state and
federal level.

It's already been half a decade since the UK surveillance regime and the
reality of mass surveillance was opened to us, yet nobody batted an eyelid in
the US. Meanwhile, facial recognition has improved by an order of magnitude
and has already silently been seeing deployment everywhere around us. I'm
being led to believe that unless we have a public poster boy to rally against,
the situation isn't going to change.

~~~
fixermark
Speaking of which: how have things gone with the UK's experiment?

Maybe I'm not plugged into the right channels, but I haven't heard any news
about "London falsely jails thousands of people due to false-positives on the
camera surveillance network" or "the Crown finds and jails protesters by the
thousands."

~~~
maldeh
Last I heard, it got mired in legal issues, and was recently tossed out by the
courts [0]. (Something that's not quite as likely in the US due to the EU
being more privacy-conscious, and would require mass outrage and an act of
congress to deflect)

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-
digi...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digital-
surveillance-regime-ruled-unlawful-appeal-ruling-snoopers-charter)

------
josefresco
Reminds me of the Palantir / New Orleans situation.

[http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/art...](http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/article_4b98f8a8-1d91-11e8-86c3-0784f6dd4d4e.html)

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-
predict...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-
policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd)

------
djhworld
Usually this sort of thing would go to IBM, Accenture etc.

AWS has tried to position themselves as being different from the old
'dinosaurs', but the public sector market is probably ripe for them to move
into. They've already made steps with GovCloud, now it's time to get
specialist teams and consultant contracts going.

If Amazon didn't do it I bet Google wouldn't be far behind

------
sebringj
Being an app developer and producer this seems outrageous what you can do. If
anyone takes a video or image, you can track other people's faces in the scene
that may or may not be your users, can gather graph info about how they are
related and essentially have a wrapped up motive/alibi etc about how a
potential crime could have taken place using AI and auto deliver to
authorities. All this from a non-opt-in mechanical turk approach where no user
is compensated or willingly testifies. What the hell do you call that? A
police state?

------
mtgx
Amazon has always been a pro-law enforcement company. Remember how they shut
down Wikileak's site with a single call from Joe Lieberman? (not even an
official law enforcement request)

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-
webs...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-
cables-servers-amazon)

------
draugadrotten
Police should be given full access to the latest technology. The criminals
will have the latest tech. DNA, face recognition, speech recognition, big
data, ML, AI, whatever comes next. However just like with guns and wiretaps,
there should be laws controlling the appropriate use of these powerful tools
to avoid becoming Big Brother.

~~~
pnathan
Yes, the laws should move at the pace of technical capabilities. That's the
big takeaway here. Not asking the cops to live in the '70s technologically,
which is often the (effective) ask from privacy groups.

~~~
fixermark
Privacy groups and the NRA. The system for tracking gun sales is kept on paper
records by law; too much fear that digitizing the dataset would be tantamount
to a "national registry of gun owners," which is in the set of irrational
American fears alongside "National ID cards."

------
mattferderer
People will be outraged until everyone starts doing it.

How long until we see tons of marketplaces to sell your home & business
surveillance videos?

Maybe security companies will start offering free versions of things like Nest
as long as you let them sell the video in their marketplace. It's the 21st
Century way after all.

~~~
GabeIsman
Well this is a terrifying thought.

~~~
fixermark
I can't recommend David Brin's "The Transparent Society" hard enough on this
topic
[[https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0...](https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0738201448&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZoNun8JnbAhXtpVkKHRqrDcQQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=0738201448&f=false)].

It's a bit dated, but the basic premise---the pattern of technology getting
smaller, cheaper, and easier applies to surveillance technology also---tends
to continue to be an accurate depiction.

------
zizek23
Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The
HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people
working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going
to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for
employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or
discuss it.

Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the
right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own
logic and many have already made their peace with it.

~~~
forapurpose
> Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central.
> The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The
> people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

That is already becoming SV's reputation abroad:

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-
ruin...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruining-
americas-image/)

 _While Hollywood’s influence has waned, America’s leading internet companies
... have spread from Silicon Valley to all corners of the globe, even some
untouched by American movies and TV shows.

It’s time for Americans to recognize that they have a new major cultural
export, alongside movies and television: the set of modern communications
platforms created in the United States that have since overtaken the world.
The question then becomes: If the world looks at America and sees Facebook,
YouTube, and Twitter as its profile picture, what does the world think?

Americans should be concerned. We’ve reviewed how America’s new major cultural
export has been characterized in the international media and other public
discourse lately, and based on that we’ve identified three key features that
have become associated with it in the eyes of the global audience._

They go on to discuss that SV has a growing reputation as the engine of 1) the
spread of "hate and harmful ideas, 2) "foreign intervention in domestic
politics", and 3) "the general surrender of privacy". Well worth reading.

------
thinkling
Currently you have to pull out your phone and use their app to enter the
Amazon Go stores (the no-cashiers convenience stores).

Interesting to think that Amazon could use their face recognition tech instead
to let you enter without doing anything, just like you exit "without
friction". You'd just need an app the first time for them to learn your face.

They haven't done this. That means they either think it'd be perceived as too
creepy, or the tech isn't good enough yet.

------
giancarlostoro
I wonder how much more outraged people would be if you swapped Amazon for
Facebook which has names and much more information to tie back to a bunch of
faces.

~~~
Kocrachon
None, because as stated, even after this current facebook backlash, usage of
Facebook is still high...

[https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-
actu...](https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actually-
increased-after-privacy-scandal-data.html)

------
amaccuish
When this is China everyone piles in. When it's America, it's like meh

------
cwkoss
Does Amazon's Rekognition TOS allow them to keep your uploaded images as
training data?

If so, there is some serious moral hazard around using this service - you are
making anyone in your dataset more identifiable in the future.

------
fixermark
How long until there's a pay service where private citizens can access the
toolkit also?

(Follow-up question: how long until the toolkit is just an open-source library
that you can run on a Raspberry Pi? ;) ).

------
chiefalchemist
re: "“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,”"

Govs? Big Incs? Deep Pockets? Can any of them be trusted?

What used to be known as "local law enforcement" is now a heavily armed para-
military organization that dreams technology wet dreams. Its vendors dream of
drowning in cash.

The din of fear is taking its toll. The expectation of unlawfulness is
becoming self-fulfilling. The kids are not alright, as the normalization of
school shootings shows.

I'm not going to defend the NRA, but they are the least of my worry at this
point.

------
skybrian
Is it okay to sell face recognition services to everyone _except_ law
enforcement? Are other customers somehow more trustworthy? Maybe it shouldn't
be sold at all?

(And how about open source?)

------
thisisit
Does anyone know how good Amazon Rekognition actually is? If the technology is
not good then it might post more problems than it solves.

~~~
bsenftner
I write facial recognition software. If those example facial images and their
match scores are any indication of their systems accuracy, it is on the poor
side.

~~~
bitL
The point is that they made it available to customers as a full, scalable
pipeline. They can (and will) improve their accuracy continuously. Any kiddo
can take some bleeding-edge wide resnet variation and get better results than
they have right now, but can't make it available at scale to anyone.

~~~
bsenftner
"but can't make it available at scale to anyone." =- I guess that's the
popular misconception. Their system scales awful, rendering it's expense of
operation on the high end side, for a weak product. They are simply exploiting
their name.

------
cwperkins
Can someone create a bodycam sophisticated enough to let the police know if a
suspect is wielding a weapon or not?

------
trhway
Palantir's margin is Bezos' opportunity.

------
thinkling
Also being discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469)

------
mcphail
Why is today the day for backlash? They showcased this at re:Invent for all to
see, and the obvious use was for law enforcement and surveillance. Yet another
surveillance issue we're up in arms about today and won't care about tomorrow.

