susano
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https://x.com/SeditionHunters/status/1798017890408689887
From the Democrap Underground:
A relative of mine, by marriage, was in D.C. on J6 for the rally.
They went radio silent for a few days after the insurrection. Husband has combed through photos looking for them. If he sees them, he's going to turn them in. Will cause quite a stink in the family if he does. Hopefully this person had enough brains not to go IN the Capitol.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219010280
The Sedition Hunters stand firmly on the side of protecting democracy by trying to prevent the rioters from escaping the law. Still, that a group of online vigilantes have so much power––in some cases beyond the abilities of the FBI––should raise eyebrows.
The Sedition Hunters’ analysis of social media posts is fairly anodyne. Where the Sedition Hunters go further is in using PimEyes, a controversial facial recognition software. Individuals upload a photograph of someone’s face to the service, then PimEyes analyzes it and compares it against a database with almost one billion photographs. (Enter a photo of yourself here if you’re curious what they’ve collected on you, but we can almost guarantee that you won’t like what you find.)
Anyone can appear in the database, as the images have been pulled from the internet without the original poster’s knowledge. In seconds, PimEyes can turn any internet user into an FBI agent running sophisticated facial recognition software, and privacy protections are all but nonexistent. Users can even set up alerts so that they can be notified whenever a new photograph of a particular person is posted on the internet.
The technology is highly controversial, and rightfully so. A similar company, Clearview AI, scraped more than 3 billion photos and videos from the internet by 2019 and created their own facial recognition database. Marketing to law enforcement, they sold their product to more than 600 agencies in America. Clearly, they had created something extremely powerful, yet at no point did they face scrutiny from regulators or have to worry about privacy protections. There is nothing preventing a company from downloading every photograph or video of a person’s face on the internet, creating a private database, powering it with advanced facial recognition technology, and releasing it to the world. Every time someone posts a photo to Facebook, they’re unwittingly building out their facial recognition profile.
Are the Sedition Hunters heroes or criminals?
PimEyes eases the Sedition Hunters’ work, but it may complicate their legacy. Openly-accessible facial recognition technology is aiding law enforcement in this instance, but it could threaten any semblance of privacy in years to come. An early investor in Clearview told the New York Times “I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy… Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
Maybe you can’t ban it, but you can absolutely regulate it. In Europe, the ??General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) established sweeping guidelines on how data can be handled, and promised significantly greater oversight. The United States should consider its own comprehensive data regulations to establish clear limitations on how private citizens and public entities can use personal data.
https://rdi.org/articles/who-are-the-sedition-hunters/
