The day after the deadly shooting left five people dead in the newsroom at Capital Gazette, a seemingly unusual fact has emerged about how police identified their suspect.
According to The New York Times, ABC News, and others, after capturing the suspect, Jarrod Ramos, authorities used facial recognition technology to identify him.
After he was in police custody, Ramos refused to cooperate with authorities. He at first evaded identification when the fingerprint scanning machine malfunctioned, causing police to speculate that he’d filed off his fingerprints prior to the attack. With an uncooperative suspect and malfunctioning fingerprint machine, investigators were left to use other methods to ID him.
Local police sent an image of Ramos to the Maryland Combined Analysis Center, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare told reporters, which then compared the image to photos of known offenders contained in the Maryland Image Repository System (MIRS) database. MIRS contains more than ten million photos, including those of known offenders and every driver’s license photo in Maryland. It can also access the mug shot database maintained by the FBI, which contains some 25 million faces.
Ramos had previously been convicted of harassment and was likely present in the database.
MIRS photos have helped Maryland authorities identify criminals in the past. A robbery suspect was caught after police compared an Instagram photo to the state DMV database, which linked them to the suspect. Facial recognition is also used at DMVs around the country, reports The Verge, to minimize ID fraud and duplicates.
Catching and identifying criminals is obviously essential but if you’re worried about the connection between facial recognition technology and the steady creep of surveillance into every aspect of our society, you’re not alone. Privacy advocates have challenged this use of facial recognition, calling it a threat to civil liberties. One concern is that, although authorities are instructed to remove the photos of people who’ve been arrested but found innocent, systems like MIRS aren’t often inspected to ensure that’s the case.
Facial recognition technology has been in the news lately after the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that police departments were testing Amazon’s facial recognition software in the field.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.
Comets probably weren’t reliable couriers for the ingredients that helped life begin on Earth. A new Cambridge-led study found that fragile organic molecules would usually have been destroyed when the comets carrying them struck the surface.
Published in Scientific Reports, the research tracked hydrogen cyanide, a molecule involved in chemistry that can precede life. Rare successful deliveries remain possible, but the simulations offered little support for a steady supply from comets.