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United States Privacy Technology

Justice Department Says Facial Recognition Helped End an Almost 15-year Manhunt (theverge.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A fugitive who Justice Department officials say had scammed more than 20 people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday, after being on the run for almost 15 years. From a report: Austrian authorities were able to identify Randy Levine, 54, of Boca Raton, Florida, due to a facial recognition system according to the DOJ, after he tried to use an alias to open a bank account, leading to his arrest in June 2020. Levine fled the US in 2005, after authorities seized his passport as part of an investigation into an alleged scam he had been running, the DOJ said in a release. According to Levine's plea agreement, which he signed in May, he would offer to set up gambling accounts for people if they sent him money. To help sell the idea that he really could help people make bets, Levine reportedly played a recording of casino sounds while he was on calls with victims (which he made using a Las Vegas phone number). Levine came under investigation by the FBI, but was able to get a replacement for the passport that law enforcement officials seized, by claiming the passport had simply been lost. He eventually ended up in Poland, where he was arrested in 2008. There was, however, a legal battle over whether he could be extradited to the US, which continued until late 2011. By the time Polish courts had decided that he could be extradited, Levine had already slipped away.
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Justice Department Says Facial Recognition Helped End an Almost 15-year Manhunt More

Justice Department Says Facial Recognition Helped End an Almost 15-year Manhunt

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  • Not enough time (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @01:18PM (#61708383) Homepage

    I think we need a log scale for punishments of financial crimes.
    0-1,000 = 0- 1 year
    1-10K = 1-3 years
    10-100k = 4-6 years
    100k-1 million = 7-10 years
    1-10 million = 11-15 years
    10-100 million = 15-20 years
    100+ million = 25-> Life

    • Does the financial impact count for nothing?

    • White collar criminals, thieves, to the tune of millions - or billions - of dollars are patted on the head. "Good boy."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        wealth is the current leading selection factor. however, that's actually a very fragile ecosystem and abuse will inevitably lead to a tipping point and selection factors change dramatically. history is full of instances of these environments collapsing ... and civilizations ending. the next big gig is going to be global. hell of a show!

    • Interesting FP. I basically like the idea, though it's kind of tangential.

      But I'm always too easily triggered to go tangential... I also like the idea of logarithmic voting weight for Representatives based on the number of voters who actually voted for them. (Combined with a ranked choice system so each voter has an actual Rep.)

      Back to the actual story. It wasn't supposed to be about how much punishment he deserved, but rather the technological abuse of facial recognition. Yeah, in this case it did nab the

      • I also like the idea of logarithmic voting weight for Representatives based on the number of voters who actually voted for them

        That's because you're a right winger, and so you hate competitive districts.

        To get the real hater freaks in office, you need really solid districts. If people are making an actual choice, they'd never choose those people.

        • That's because you're a right winger

          The right disproportionately benefits from the current district system. A proportional system would benefit the left.

          To get the real hater freaks in office, you need really solid districts.

          Nonsense. This is the exact opposite of what district gerrymandering tries to accomplish. The goal is to concentrate your opponents in one district while your own supporters are distributed through the remaining districts. This is easier for Republicans because Democratic voters are concentrated in dense urban areas.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            You're feeding a troll of some sort. Or maybe he's just reading impaired?

            But I'll go ahead and say a bit on the topic of partisan gerrymandering. First, I think your summary is pretty good, though I prefer to describe it as selecting the voters before they can select the politicians subject to two constraints: (1) Maximizing the number of your party's safe districts while (2) Minimizing the number of sacrificial districts. The key to an optimal solution is recognizing the consistent voters.

            I would be willin

            • Maybe I'm reading impaired. My reading comprehension is only a few 9's, that puts me way behind the idiot neckbeards around here. Like you. Right??

              However, that isn't the problem here. The problem is that you don't comprehend fractions.

              Or maybe you're just triggered when somebody points out that non-competitive right wing districts elect nutcases these days. The sort of people who want PI to be 3, because they're mad their kids got held back. And non-competitive left-wing districts elect people who believe

        • I also like the idea of logarithmic voting weight for Representatives based on the number of voters who actually voted for them

          That's because you're a right winger, and so you hate competitive districts.

          To get the real hater freaks in office, you need really solid districts. If people are making an actual choice, they'd never choose those people.

          There may actually be something to this seemingly crazy idea. It might actually help to blunt the impacts of gerrymandering. With gerrymandered districts, a slight majority in the district gets to control 100% of the representative. With the weighted vote idea, gerrymandered representatives are not as powerful as non-gerrymandered ones, and the tactic of lumping all of one's opponents into a single district means that that district has outsized voting weight. If the weighting were linear, that would m

          • You don't have the same people nominated in safe and competitive districts, so that blows up your idea, even if it affects both "parties" the same.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            I think you [larryjoe] are being trolled, but I also think I should clarify the context. But I also think the discussion is going WAY too far off topic. (I'm not sure about the trolling because I stopped reading his [97333's] stuff as soon he passed my threshold for "probable trollage".)

            Trying to keep it brief, but I think the key problems linked to modern scientific gerrymandering are that the math works and most voters are lazy and tend to vote in the same pattern. Put them together and the politicians ca

      • the technological abuse of facial recognition.

        This wasn't an abuse of FR. FR can be used appropriately in situations where there is no expectation of privacy and establishing identity is necessary.

        My face was scanned when I recently went through customs at the SFO airport. That's fine. They need to know who I am.

        Likewise, this guy was caught when trying to open a bank account. The bank had every right to check that he was who he said he was, and using FR as part of that process is appropriate.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Basically concurrence, though I think this example was closer to the technology-abuse line than you seem to think. If he wanted to deposit some of his stolen money in the bank, then it's clearly on one side of the line. But what if his business with the bank was purely legitimate and only involved money that he had earned legitimately? Or what if the facial identification incidentally led to his arrest for an old parking ticket?

          I increasingly feel like we're heading for a life of total surveillance where no

          • But what if his business with the bank was purely legitimate

            Whether your business is legitimate or not, you still need to identify yourself to open a bank account.

            Or what if the facial identification incidentally led to his arrest for an old parking ticket?

            Nothing would happen. The bank would not even check for that.

            What the bank DOES check is if you are who you say you are. In this case, he wasn't.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by shanen ( 462549 )

              Now I feel like you're missing my point. What if the bank routinely notified ALL of "the authorities" of the identities of every customer, even if there is no suspicious reason to do so?

              Maybe I should reword it the other way around? At what point would you feel like facial recognition was being abused?

        • Um. It would seem that America has a blanket FR system, and any old country has access to it without a legal warrant. I would say that is a problem.

  • That's all? Perhaps he should also be charged with falsifying a passport application and a few more years tacked on. I hope he enjoyed his shrimp on the barbie and Fosters in the land of Arnold.

  • Failure of the passport system (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @01:30PM (#61708437)

    Guy is arrested and has his passport confiscated. Somehow he still manages to flee the country and, later, gets a new passport simply by claiming that he'd lost it.

    Cool story bro about the facial recognition, but WTF? Why the two major fails of the passport system first? I'm not inclined to give law enforcement new tools when they're so obviously incompetent with the ones they have.

    (Yes, the facial recognition was done by a bank in Austria, but the press release by the US Dept of Justice is clearly using this as an example of why facial recognition is good and we need to do it here, too.)

    • It's not a failure of the passport system, it is a failure of the FBI. They were super-lazy and instead of doing the paperwork, they just confiscated the copy he had.

      • The whole "check if this this guy had his passport confiscated" thing is part of the passport application process, so, yeah. Not really sure what your point is here.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Xylantiel ( 177496 )
      Admittedly, you don't generally need a passport to leave a country except in a place like North Korea.

    • Honestly, it sounds more like a failure of judicial oversight.

      The fact that the people who confiscated his passport didn't fill out paperwork with the relevant government offices for chain of custody of the passport raises some pretty big red flags.

      Methinks maybe, juust maybe the confiscation wasn't quite legal and they knew it and were just trying to scare him into an admission / staying put so they could get some actual solid evidence against him.

  • They advertise the successes, but may not be telling us about the headaches of false positives.

  • ending 200 years of freedom (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @01:48PM (#61708503)
    Sure, a surveillance state that would be the envy of the Nazi’s is just what we need. The US is the most watched, recorded, surveilled , photographed and monitored society in the history of the plant. You cannot use the word LIBERTY in that situation. That’s the relationship between a slave and a master.
    • This was an Austrian system clocking this guy, FYI. Also, while these systems are most *definitely* a terrible idea for a free society, going full Godwin one sentence in every time someone's photo gets matched just makes it way, way easier for the people naively supporting this particular balm for the terrified masses to just convince themselves those opposing it are paranoid kooks. Scale it back a bit - you're at a 9, we need you at about a 5.
      • Maybe you are right. I respect the even-handed message. Still... The time for appeasing the masses is growing short. You'd better do some magical levels of convincing before the "big sort" is finished, because it feels like the time of debate and discussion is running out. I see a pretty good parallel to Afghanistan in America. They have quite a few people who have opposite ideas, but those folks have no weapons and even less will to fight. In the USA the Right wingers are correct in saying they have the l
        • This is going to be a huge tangent, so downvote away, folks.

          It's not an even-handed message that's needed, just a way less melodramatic one. All of these far too flippant "you're a Nazi/Fascist/Socialist/Communist" accusations being thrown around deaden the message so much that when an actual extreme viewpoint or position is being taken, it's hard to be taken seriously when pointing it out.

          The US spent eight years with one side of the aisle calling George W. Bush a fascist, then eight more calling Bar
          • American politics could also benefit from some diversity of opinion, rather than simply treating the "party platform" as firmware for one's brain so as to prevent any requirement for independent thought. An escape from the duopoly would be really excellent. I wish it could be Libertarians, but they/we are too fractious to be any type of real force. Hell, at this point I'd be okay with the "Bolshevik" and "Jackboot" parties being available if for no other reason to have a trashbin to stuff the crazies on bot
    • The story seems to be about comparing two *passport photos* to each other, one on the guy's US passport, which was presumably on the watch list, and another on a Mexican passport submitted to the bank. Not a lot of "watching" or "monitoring" involved there since both of these were on government-issued IDs.

  • Everything is being nicely set up for 1984 in the 21st. Mark that. Total Control.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 )

      Hate to tell ya, but you need to read 1984 again. We're way past that.

      Orwell couldn't even imagine a social credit system controlled by Dalek-like machines that aren't even able to apply human common sense or empathy anymore.

  • Real criminals don't go to a bank to open an account. Levine could have worn dark glasses and a face mask and the face recognition system would have missed him but this could have happened before the pandemic even as the arrest occured in June of 2020.

    • Rofl. Yeah, that perfectly traceable system with a globally replicated ledger... Really the perfect choice for criminals. XD

  • Randy Levine. Another Jew running a scam. Go figure.

  • Is that your sales-pitch?

  • US Extradition Really? (Score:3)

    by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @04:56PM (#61709185)
    After the Meng fiasco, people are still respecting US extradition requests? Austria must really want something from US.

    • Austria, like all NATO states, are US vassals ever since WWII.
      It's the main purpose of the CIA to keep them in check.

      There's a reason, "NATO" is known as
          North
          American
          Totalitarian
          Oppression
      over here. (Or some variant thereof.)

  • "WE FOUND ONE! WE FINALLY FOUND ONE!" It wasn't all just bullshit!

    Yes... yes, it was.

  • The real news here is that a private Australian get the list of US fugitives and actively looks for their faces using their surveillance cameras. I would have expected high collaboration between five eyes governments, but it seems private companies are also enrolled.

  • Suspicious timing ... (Score:3)

    by PinkyGigglebrain ( 730753 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @09:27PM (#61710061)

    I find it curious that just as several US states are passing or considering legislation to ban the use of facial recognition technologies this happens.

    I bet there are going to be some high profile child porn arrests soon too, all thanks to facial recognition technologies.

    So banning it would be a really bad thing. Don't you want to protect the children?

  • was able to get a replacement for the passport that law enforcement officials seized, by claiming the passport had simply been lost.

    Pretty pointless to seize his passport & then issue him with a new one. Doesn't the USA do joined-up government?

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