US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4967

On May 18 2025 00:19 Billyboy wrote:
Kind funny how Trump is changing his mind on taxes right in front of our eyes. He is no publicly telling CEO's to make less money when they have to have to pay the Trump Tax. I'm surprised all the librarian Republicans are not calling him a communist yet.



+ Show Spoiler +

NEW ORLEANS — For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found.

Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime. New Orleans police took this technology a step further, utilizing a private network of more than 200 facial recognition cameras to watch over the streets, constantly monitoring for wanted suspects and automatically pinging officers’ mobile phones through an app to convey the names and current locations of possible matches.

This appears out of step with a 2022 city council ordinance, which limited police to using facial recognition only for searches of specific suspects in their investigations of violent crimes and never as a more generalized “surveillance tool” for tracking people in public places. Each time police want to scan a face, the ordinance requires them to send a still image to trained examiners at a state facility and later provide details about these scans in reports to the city council — guardrails meant to protect the public’s privacy and prevent software errors from leading to wrongful arrests.

Since early 2023, the network of facial recognition cameras has played a role in dozens of arrests, including at least four people who were only charged with nonviolent crimes, according to police reports, court records and social media posts by Project NOLA, a crime prevention nonprofit company that buys and manages many of the cameras. Officers did not disclose their reliance on facial recognition matches in police reports for most of the arrests for which the police provided detailed records, and none of the cases were included in the department’s mandatory reports to the city council on its use of the technology. Project NOLA has no formal contract with the city, but has been working directly with police officers.

“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who has closely tracked the use of AI technologies by police. “This is the government giving itself the power to track anyone — for that matter, everyone — as we go about our lives walking around in public.”
....

Anne Kirkpatrick, who heads the New Orleans Police Department, paused the program in early April, she said in an interview, after a captain identified the alerts as a potential problem during a review. In an April 8 email reviewed by The Post, Kirkpatrick told Project NOLA that the automated alerts must be turned off until she is “sure that the use of the app meets all the requirements of the law and policies.” The Post began requesting public records about the alerts in February.

The police department “does not own, rely on, manage, or condone the use by members of the department of any artificial intelligence systems associated with the vast network of Project Nola crime cameras,” Reese Harper, a spokesman for the agency, said in an emailed statement.


...

The surveillance program in New Orleans relied on Project NOLA, a private group run by a former police officer who assembled a network of cameras outside of businesses in crime-heavy areas including the city’s French Quarter district.

Project NOLA configured the cameras to search for people on a list of wanted suspects. When the software determined it had found a match, it sent real-time alerts via an app some officers installed on their mobile phones. The officers would then quickly research the subject, go to the location and attempt to make arrests.

Police did not set up the program nor can they directly search for specific people, or add or remove people from the camera system’s watch list, according to Bryan Lagarde, Project NOLA’s founder.

Little about this arrangement resembles the process described in the city council ordinance from three years ago, which imagined detectives using facial recognition software only as part of methodical investigations with careful oversight. Each time police want to scan a face, the ordinance requires them to send a still image to a state-run “fusion center” in Baton Rouge, where various law enforcement agencies collaborate on investigations. There, examiners trained in identifying faces use AI software to compare the image with a database of photos and only return a “match” if at least two examiners agree.

Investigators have complained that process takes too long and often doesn’t result in any matches, according to a federally mandated audit of the department in 2023. It has only proved useful in a single case that led to an arrest since October 2022, according to records police provided to the city council.

...

Kirkpatrick said her agency has launched a formal review into how many officers used the real-time alerts, how many people were arrested as a result, how often the matches appear to have been wrong and whether these uses violated the city ordinance.

“We’re going to do what the ordinance says and the policies say, and if we find that we’re outside of those things, we’re going to stop it, correct it and get within the boundaries of the ordinance,” she said.

There are no federal regulations around the use of AI by local law enforcement. Four states — Maryland, Montana, Vermont and Virginia — as well as at least 19 cities in nine other states explicitly bar their own police from using facial recognition for live, automated or real-time identification or tracking, according to the Security Industry Association, a trade group.

...

5,000 cameras

Few people have as much visibility into the everyday lives of New Orleans residents as Lagarde, a former patrol officer and investigator who started his own video surveillance business in the late 1990s before launching Project NOLA in 2009.

Funded by donations and reliant on businesses that agree to host the cameras on their buildings or connect existing surveillance cameras to its centralized network, Lagarde said Project NOLA has access to 5,000 crime cameras across New Orleans, most of which are not equipped with facial recognition. The cameras all feed into a single control room in a leased office space on the University of New Orleans campus, Lagarde said in an interview at the facility. Some camera feeds are also monitored by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, he said.

Project NOLA made $806,724 in revenue in 2023, tax filings show. Much of it came from “cloud fees” the group charges local governments outside of New Orleans — from Monticello, Florida, to Frederick, Colorado — which install Project NOLA cameras across their own towns and rely on Lagarde’s assistance monitoring crime. He’s experimented with facial recognition in Mississippi, he said, but his “first instance of doing citywide facial recognition is New Orleans.” New Orleans does not pay Project NOLA.
...

Project NOLA found enthusiastic partners in local business owners, some of who were fed up with what they saw as the city’s inability to curb crime in the French Quarter — the engine of its tourism economy that’s also a hub for drug dealers and thieves who prey on tourists, said Tim Blake, the owner of Three Legged Dog, a bar that was one of the first places to host one of Project NOLA’s facial recognition cameras.

“Project NOLA would not exist if the government had done its job,” Blake said.

Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly has died at age 75

Connolly is the third Democratic congressman to die since March, only a few months into the new congressional term.

When the 119th Congress began in January, Republicans narrowly controlled the chamber in a 219-215 split. As of Connolly's death on May 21, Republicans control the chamber by a wider 220-212 margin.

On May 21 2025 23:48 Zambrah wrote:
Elderly politicians dying of cancer and what have you is probably gonna be happening a lot

On May 22 2025 00:01 Velr wrote:
75 isn't that bad honestly... If the person is still fit. Plenty of 75 year olds are still very capable (but by far not all).


But why do these guys stick around if they are ill? We also got no term limits in Switzerland and politics by it's nature is a bit of an old mans game but it's nowhere near as bad as in the US? The average age of the big swiss chamber after the last elections was 52. Which is way better than I tought it would be. In the US the average age in 2025 was 64. 64 is retirement age...

On May 22 2025 03:38 Zambrah wrote:


Right now they’re already the ones doing the best job of facilitating elderly Democrats dying by having many old, dying Democrats stick around for so long

On May 22 2025 00:32 Mohdoo wrote:


IMO it is totally reasonable to accept any potential lost leadership opportunities by disallowing elected officials from being older than 65. I'd go so far as to say someone should only be allowed to run for an elected office if they will end their term under the age of 66.

On May 22 2025 08:51 KwarK wrote:
With 30 year treasuries passing 5% the US is considerably less credit worthy than I am. I got 2.25% on my 30 year mortgage. But I wasn't borrowing an additional $4t to fund additional reductions in revenue while gutting the IRS the way Trump is so it probably makes sense that the US pays over twice what I do in interest.

On May 22 2025 10:21 GreenHorizons wrote:

What do you take if the US doesn't pay up on its treasuries?