This Site Unmasks Cops With Facial Recognition

0:03Hello, welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support to subscribe go to 404media.co as well as bonus content every single week subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments gain access to that content at 404media.co i'm your host joseph and with me are 404media co-founders sam cole hello emmanuel mayberg hello and jason kebler hi so we're doing something unprecedented for 404 media next week we are taking the week off we have not done that since we launched in around august 2023 obviously we've each taken days off here and there but we've never taken extended time off as a company so we'll be off for the week i notice other podcasts do this as well and they'll do a rerun or something like that there should be a podcast up next week anyway it will be probably an interview that jason recorded we're still working out the specifics and we actually want to do more of those interviews as well so um keep an eye out for that but you won't be getting the normal show next week we're getting uh something a little bit different let's go straight into this week's stories though this is one um emmanuel wrote fuck lapd.com lets anyone use facial recognition to instantly identify cops um i i guess just first of all emmanuel how did you first come across this because i came across it as well and i'll tell you how but how did you first see this i think oh i didn't know uh that you actually said also so i'm interested in knowing uh i found out about it via a subreddit that is dedicated to monitoring very aggressive ice crackdowns and ice raids, and they were just sharing it as a possibly useful tool.

2:09Where did you see it? So I saw it on TikTok where a person was using this tool, and we'll explain a little bit more about what it is and everything about it in a second. But basically, it's, as the headline says, facial recognition tool to identify cops. I saw somebody on TikTok using it, goes up to a police officer, points their iPhone or whatever camera into the face, brings up the cop's name, reads out his salary to the cop, and then the cop starts laughing a little bit. I was going to try and find it again, but I couldn't find the video. How much did he make? Do you remember? It was about 100k.

2:45And yeah, you can see him sniggering. It's very, very funny. but I can I tell you when I saw it because I either hallucinated this but I thought I saw something like this like a year ago to be totally honest with you we talked about this yeah that's why when I saw it at the weekend I was like haha that's funny they're still using that tool and I didn't actually realize it was new so sorry but I don't know what it was I don't think we wrote about it I don't remember where it was this is not like terribly interesting I wasn't here yesterday though but it's like I either dreamed about this or I saw a site that looked really similar to this.

3:20There is another site. So let me explain what this is and then we can talk about why we all thought it already existed. Which is the first thing I asked when I pitched it in Slack. I was like, isn't this old? Anyway, fucklapd.com is a site where it has a very simple interface. All you can do is upload a single image of a LAPD officer's face, and it will use facial recognition tech and a database of, from what I can tell, most of the LAPD workforce to automatically identify which police officer it is, pull up their name, badge number, and then also, yes, their salary, all of which are public records, which is why this data is available.

4:16And the reason this is something that has been launched now, according to the guy who made it, Kyle McDonald, he launched the site on Saturday, and this was in response to the anti-ICE protests in LA, which got very heated, and there were many instances of police violence against protesters. As everybody, I think, knows by now, the National Guard was called in. And there was a huge confrontation between the governor, Gavin Newsom, and Trump. And yeah, in response to LAPD playing fast and loose with protesters, he just created a tool that would allow people, hopefully, to identify cops who sometimes...

5:01I haven't seen this happen in the LA protests recently. Maybe Jason knows more, but definitely I remember during the George Floyd protests in New York, there were instances of cops who just like covered their badge number with a piece of tape. Very big during BLM. Right. Which they're supposed to keep visible for the purpose of allowing the, the population to like identify who is enforcing the law and who is maybe using too much force um and this would allow you to get to get around that that trick that some some cops use yeah um i haven't seen them doing it much in the anti-ice ones but you know there have been clips of horseback lapd officers beating up people when they don't think the cameras are looking and all of that sort of thing plenty of examples so you spoke to kyle mcdonald who is an artist who made this site and they've done other work which i think we'll touch on um in a minute you spoke to him just a little bit more explicitly why did he make this is it like uh for transparency is it for accountability like what does he tell you when you asked him hey why did you actually make this Yeah, so first of all, it's Kyle McDonald.

6:26He has a website called kylemcdonald.net. I really recommend people check it out. He's been working for more than a decade now doing this kind of work, doing exactly the kind of work that we used to cover all the time at Motherboard and I have covered a few times here at 4.4, just subversing technology, using it in unexpected ways to make art and often make pretty explicit political statements. In terms of this project, let me try and stumble through his quote here because I think it's pretty good and direct. He told me, we deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up.

7:09FuckLAPD.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ice raids and more broadly, the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over$2 billion in funding each year. So I think that is a pretty good summation of why he's doing this. Yeah, that makes sense. So Jason, what were you going to say? Okay, so now I remember where it came from or why I thought that this existed previously is back in 2023, there was a website called Watch the Watchers and it was a database of officers headshots, names, higher dates, ranks, and ethnicities that was compiled using public records requests.

7:58And the website looked sort of similar and you could search by badge number and it was billed as counter surveillance. Emmanuel, do you know if this is related? It is, yeah. So Kyle really wanted to stress. So the organization you're talking about, Watch the Watchers, is part of something called the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which is based in Skid Row in LA, which is a neighborhood with a lot of homeless people and a lot of people really having drug problems, mental health problems. It's kind of like a notorious part of the city. so they created this database they're not affiliated with fucklapd.com but that is where he pulled the data he is just using facial recognition to match the headshots that are in that database that then pull up the information about the individual offices.

9:03Yeah, rather than searching a badge number you search a face which practically speaking is probably going to be a lot more useful to people in a protest uh well first of all because if a badge number is covered obviously they're not gonna be able to get it but also just in the sort of hecticness of the situation of a protest it might be easier just to point a camera at somebody uh and then get their photo uh and then do it that way so watch the watchers gets this data free public records requests which i haven't seen the actual language of that but presumably it's like give us all the information of your staff.

9:37And I think they had to sue for some of that. It wasn't like an easy... It's like, I think... I mean, not to disrespect Kyle's work here, I think it's very good and interesting, but 4.4 Media is huge fans of FOIA. Like, really, you have to admire the work of just like getting this data out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it looks like it works because you tested it a few times. Walk us through that. What did you do and what were the results? Yeah, so I wanted to kind of give it an easy test case. So I just took a still from an LAPD press conference responding to accusations of police violence during the protest, actually.

10:21And I just screenshotted one of the faces of the cops that was a front shot of his face, very clear. And I uploaded that to the site. within a few seconds it pulled up nine results all and each result is like headshot name and a link to the watch the watchers database page for that person and they were all the officer was like a bald white man and it showed me nine officers that vaguely match that description but the first one was the correct one so it worked perfectly in this case the site, the fuck LAPD site is clear that it has limitations one of which is if you're pulling a TikTok video of some incident involving a LAPD officer and it's far away and it's blurry it's not going to work and then obviously at least when it comes to ICE ICE officers would not show up in this database but if the officer has their face covered, obviously that wouldn't work either.

11:31Yeah, and I mean, just because I didn't really spell out, but the reason that I thought, oh, this has already been done is because it had been done in other cities. We saw an example, I think Sam alluded to, there was the New York one, and then there was Portland as well, and again, this was mostly during BLM, that sort of thing. So I see facial recognition tool used on police, and I'm like, oh, okay, that they're still doing that. And no, this is an interesting marriage between facial recognition tech and public records. And I think it's particularly interesting in that it's all done locally on the device, which you couldn't have necessarily done even a couple of years ago.

12:15Would that be fair, Emmanuel? I think so. Kyle, who made this website, himself has made a similar tool for ICE called iSpy back in 2018. And that tool, I believe, doesn't work so well anymore, both because it doesn't have the... Like, the data isn't as good, right? It doesn't have this Watch the Watchers database to work with. But I don't believe that one runs locally. Well, when it launched, the iSpy one, which is to basically do the same thing, but to identify ICE employees. And that's not just immigration enforcement. It could be a lawyer in Texas or something like that, but ICE broadly. There's two things.

13:03It used Microsoft's facial recognition system, an API, and it was just using that to process the actual identification of faces. Microsoft sunset that after the project was released again in 2018. But now, Carl McDonald has brought it back because the processing can now be done locally on the device. So you're like, oh, okay, they're going to relaunch a tool or whatever. Obviously, that's especially notable, a tool that would identify ICE when there's mass deportations happening. And of course, ICE officials are repeatedly covering their faces. And maybe I can talk about that in a second. But there is a second component, which is the iSpy database is built on a scraped set of profile images and data from LinkedIn.

13:56So what somebody had done back in the day was go in, scrape LinkedIn for anybody you could find who worked at ICE, grab their name, their title, the city, and their profile photo. So now, in sort of a scary, depressing way, 2018 was actually a long, long time ago. Like, you know, several, several years, stuff has changed. Administrations have passed. People have joined ICE. People have left ICE. And I tried out ICE by, again, just for verification purposes. And frankly, it was bad. Like, it didn't get any of the results I uploaded. and I was actually giving it low balls just to start, and I was actually downloading images from LinkedIn of ICE officials and then running it through, and it didn't recognize those.

14:46I would upload a photo of a black man. It would just present a photo of another black man, and it was not accurate at all. That being said, that's probably not the facial recognition algorithm and system itself. it's because the data is out of date and it's sort of doing the best it possibly can with the data right and i guess just the last thing i'll say on that is that the the reason that people would probably want this for ice specifically is because as many of us have seen ice continues to carry out deportation efforts while not just covering their badges like police may have done in earlier protests, but full-on sunglasses, a baseball cap covering their neck, masks as well, refusing to say what agency they're from, refusing to provide their name.

15:41So facial recognition could actually provide a moment and a tool that people could actually use to identify who are these armed men who are saying, you need to get into my truck now and we're leaving and I'm from ICE. And of course, that refusal to identify themselves, that refusal to provide an avenue for accountability has created chaos where a group of four or five alleged ICE agents or whatever will go to a car wash or a Home Depot or whatever it is. And the civilians there really cannot tell whether this is actually a group of ICE agents or not. to the point now where we have criminals actually impersonating ICE officials, including in Brooklyn and an attempted rape.

16:26Elsewhere we have robberies as well. So they've created this environment where no one can be sure what is going on, which is of course beneficial to them in some respects. But now there's this narrative on Blue Sky and other places that, oh, none of these people are ICE officials. They are just bounty hunters or they're January Sixers or whatever. And don't get me wrong, I think eventually it will probably turn out that some of them were opportunistic random members of the public. But I think a lot of them are still ICE, you know. And a tool like this could help people figure out, okay, well, this ICE agent beat up my family, punching him in the face before throwing him to a van.

17:10And now I can identify him and at least, you know, file a lawsuit or contact the agency, find out where he's been. But without this, there's very little recourse for identifying an agent or identifying the agency as well. So I guess we'll see if they improve that tool. I was just going to say, I think that tools like this are super interesting and definitely we should be writing about them. People should know that they exist. I think the use cases of them are tricky, which is just to say again to like generalize an argument i've seen on blue sky is like people are saying if you get grabbed by a masked man like demand their badge demand that they are you know a federal officer etc etc and it's like that sounds great in theory i think in practice when this is happening very quickly.

18:11It's like a very scary situation. I've seen actual lawyers saying like, yes, this sounds like great in theory. Fighting back against it, if you assume that someone who is kidnapping you is not a federal agent, and you then assault a federal agent, fighting that in court is potentially like life ruining, very difficult situation. And it's just like that, that all just sort of underlines the fact that when these people are wearing masks, it is like, how are you supposed to respond as someone who is being, you know, grabbed by someone with a mask, I guess, especially in the context of what happened in Minnesota, where the, you know, alleged guy who assassinated a state lawmaker there was dressed up as a police officer or dressed up as law enforcement.

19:11And so you have alleged assassins dressing up as law enforcement. You have actual law enforcement masking themselves, not identifying themselves. And it's just a very, very scary and difficult time at this moment. And I think that tools like this are really useful when there's already footage and you can sort of figure this stuff out after the fact. I think during the fact, it's like, if you're like, hey, wait a second, let me take a picture of you and look you up while you're trying to arrest me. It's just a very, very volatile situation. And then I guess the last thing is like, I do kind of wonder, like I do think that this tool is very useful.

20:02I wonder if ICE and the LAPD use the existence of tools like this to say, look, we need to mask, like leftists are doxing us type vibes. And surely they will. I think that is an argument that will be made. That doesn't mean that tools like this aren't useful. but there's this narrative that the administration is putting out right now that like ICE agents are being harassed and attacked and that's why they're masking and I think that that is like a really it's just a tricky situation yeah um ICE has said the assaults of his officers have increased something like 400 percent but as the an opinion piece in the Washington Post broke it down is those numbers are a little bit iffy in that we don't know the actual number as a percentage.

20:51Do they go from 5 to 20 or something like that? And also ISIS putting themselves in a situation where people are more likely to fight back when they roll up with masks on people working at Home Depot or hot dog stand vendors or things like that. Or if you increase enforcement by 400%, would it not be logical that like incidents would increase like 400 % or something. Yeah. I'll just say also being in Los Angeles and like going around the city right now, there are places where there used to be vibrant communities of people that are empty right now. And it is really dystopian and really scary. It's like I went to Home Depot the other day and there usually are people there who are like, I will help you install this drywall that you're purchasing or like I will help you lay down this sod that you're buying or whatever.

21:49That is a common thing that I've experienced every single time I've been to Home Depot. I went to Home Depot this weekend. No one there. Like no one. I've seen some posts on Reddit like after concerts, there's like no hot dog stand vendors there. There's like a lot of farmers markets that are totally empty. There's like secondhand thrift markets that are empty. And it's like regardless of whether these people are undocumented or not, you have like anyone who has brown skin who is like scared to go out in public at this point. It's like a lot of my friends are scared to go out in public at this point.

22:29And it's really, really messed up. And it's like, again, Los Angeles like doesn't want this to be happening. The community doesn't want this to be happening. yeah I think that's a good place to leave it and we'll definitely keep an eye on this tool and if any of us are made or improved or whatever I'm sure we will do a follow-up after the break Sam is going to ask Jason all about his latest piece which is about a frankly pretty complicated court ruling that we spent a long time trying to get a headline for. We'll be right back after this.

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26:07And we're back. We're going to talk about a story that Jason published today. The headline is, Judge rules training AI on authors' books is legal, but pirating them is not. This story went through so many rounds of headline workshopping because it is kind of like a weird... Not really complicated, but it's a little bit hard to get your mind around what exactly the judge is talking about here. I think one of the headlines was like, Judge being annoying, training cool, piracy bad, judge says. It just is hard to encapsulate a story like this into one sentence. So yeah, Jason, do you want to just kind of give us like a really quick, just like top line of what the ruling said?

26:59It's based on the Books 3 case, right? Yeah. So three authors sued Anthropic, which makes Claude the AI tool. basically saying that Anthropic trained on their books without consent and without compensation. And so it's a copyright lawsuit about whether that is legal or not. There's like, I've seen a tracker, I think there's like over 100 cases like this, where it's, you know, authors, artists, you know, journalists, newspapers, New York Times, etc., suing an AI company about this question of whether you can train on someone's work without paying them without permission, etc, etc. And this is the first like major decision among these lawsuits.

27:45So it's pretty important for that reason, because it's like one of the first ones. And basically, the judge decided that it was fair use for Anthropic to train on these authors books, but that it was not legal for them to pirate the books to do so. And so the actual like pirating of the books, not fair use, training of the AI, transformative under fair use, which is like if you're transforming the work in some way, then it's protected by fair use, broadly speaking. And basically, the judge found training the AI was transformative, but downloading these books was not. And then there's caveats upon caveats from there, but that's top line, what was decided.

28:40Yeah. I feel like if you went back in time five years and explained... If you said exactly that to me, I would be like, yeah, obviously. That's not a difficult concept to understand. Piracy has been illegal for a very long time. So acquiring things via piracy to further your company's business is illegal. But because this decision is coming after all of these companies have already sucked up all of this copyrighted work via piracy in a lot of cases without permission, without consent from the authors in this case, and then gone ahead and used it to train their AI and their LLMs It's like, we're kind of working, we're putting this together backwards.

29:27And all of this copyright law is being like, shook up and re-litigated and maybe even litigated for the first time in a lot of cases. So it's like, that's why I said it's a complex situation, but it's not. It's like, these are very basic principles that we're now like arguing about again, is theft is bad. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And then also, I think the initial reaction from people was like, oh, this is very bad for authors. This is very bad for artists. And that was my initial reaction. And then as I was writing the story, as we were talking about it, and then especially after I published it, I was like, wait, maybe this is actually quite a good decision, perhaps.

30:08Yeah. Can you walk us through that? What does this mean, I guess? What could it mean, if anything? Yeah. So again, there's like hundreds of cases. And so the judge in this case had to look at the facts of this case. And in this case, Anthropic used Books 3, which is this massive torrent of books, Libgen and one other piracy site called Pirate Library Mirror to download hundreds of thousands of books. and the judge essentially and then crucially Anthropic made a like library slash database of all of these so not only did it like download all this information for training purposes it kept a copy of all of them and keeping the copy of them is sort of like what the judge said was bad but then also alongside of this Anthropic started buying physical books, like physical used books from mass resellers.

31:08And then it started scanning those books in the same way that Google Books was scanning books in the same way that the Internet Archive has done before as well. And basically the judge said, for the books that it bought legally, like all good, no problem here. For the ones that it pirated, not good, going to go to trial, going to look into damages and stuff like that. So basically, there's these instances of piracy that Anthropic might now have to pay for. And sort of like at first blush, it's like, oh, that's good for these three authors. What does it mean for the rest of us? Like everyone else that has had their stuff taken.

31:56And it seems like on first blush, it's like, oh, okay, they can train their AI on this stuff as long as they acquire it legally. But then you think about it, and it's like almost very little of what AI companies have acquired has been acquired legally. We've reported various times, Sam, you had an amazing story about NVIDIA. And we did one about Runway as well. You did one about Runway as well. And it's like they're scraping a lot of piracy sites. These companies are scraping piracy sites. They're scraping Netflix. They're scraping stuff that is paywalled that they are not allowed to do. And crucially, the judge was like, that's illegal.

32:39That's very bad in this case. And so when you think about it in terms of practicalities, it's like a lot of these AI companies have committed millions of instances of piracy. and the potential punishment and liability for that is like billions and billions of dollars. And so that's why I think it's maybe not as bad of a decision as I first thought, because like these AI companies very well could be on the hook for like millions of instances of piracy. And then the other thing that is really notable about this is the authors didn't allege that Claude reproduced their work in any way. Meaning they didn't talk to Claude and get Claude to spit out portions of their book verbatim.

33:36And a lot of the other lawsuits hinge on outputs like that, where like ChatGPT, New York Times versus OpenAI hinges on ChatGPT verbatim reproducing parts of New York Times articles, for example. and that that didn't happen in this case and and the people suing didn't even allege that it happened they were just like our books were in books three we know you trained on books three therefore you know we're suing you and the judge specifically sort of said well they didn't allege that uh you know the ai was reproducing their books therefore i'm not even going to consider that and i think that that's like a pretty crucial fact to keep in mind and that in these other cases, the AI tools are regurgitating pretty much verbatim or very similar like copyright characters, for example, in terms of the mid-journey, like Disney versus mid-journey lawsuit, things like that.