The Face Is the Final Frontier of Privacy | Could economic indicators give an early warning of a war over Taiwan? | The Unravelling of an Expert on Serial Killers

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The Face Is the Final Frontier of Privacy - TIME.com

“Step up to the camera.” an airport gate agent commanded, pointing me to move my body closer to a kiosk set up to scan the faces of passengers boarding the aircraft. I hesitated. The flight was already heavily delayed, and I was due to attend the DVF awards in Venice. I felt conflicted. Impatient travelers were queuing up behind me adding social pressure to comply. Loss of opportunity was also part of my mental calculus. If I was viewed as a troublemaker, I might miss the flight all together and my opportunity to meet a number of personal heroes. If I followed the command to scan my face, I would be counted among passengers who consented to use facial recognition at an airport even though I have actively campaigned against coercive uses of the technology. I had mere seconds to make a decision and a significant amount of money and time already allocated to this trip: economic pressure. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

As an AI researcher, I have studied the privacy risks and dangerous law enforcement uses of AI- powered facial recognition while publishing widely read research on racial and gender bias in AI systems that scan faces from tech giants including Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. I have written about data breaches and data overreaches from government contractors. As the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), I have testified in front of congress on the need for federal laws on invasive use of facial recognition technologies. Beyond airports this technology is infiltrating multiple aspects of everyday life including having people scan their faces to access government services, take important examinations, and access emergency health services. Chillingly, false arrests linked to facial recognition misidentification continue, one of the most recent this year involved Porcha Woodruff who was arrested while 8 months pregnant for a carjacking she did not commit. She didn’t even fit the description given by a witness. Porcha reported having contractions while sitting in a holding cell and was rushed to the emergency room upon her release. Over reliance on AI imperiled two precious lives.

Adding even more pressure to the situation, earlier this summer at a Presidential AI Roundtable convened by the White house, face-to-face with President Biden, I urged him to prioritize biometric rights and protections as AI systems infiltrate more aspects of our lives: pressure to walk the talk.

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Could economic indicators give an early warning of a war over Taiwan? - The Economist

In the early 1980s, during a tense period in the cold war, the Soviet Union feared that America and its allies were considering a nuclear strike and went looking for warning signs. The KGB’s list of indicators ranged well beyond the military sphere. Big campaigns to donate blood, the slaughter of livestock and the movement of art might signal that an attack was coming.

Today a new kind of cold war pits America against China. And again analysts are looking for signs of a potential conflict. The most likely flashpoint is Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims and America supports. Were China planning to invade Taiwan, its military preparations would be hard to hide. But before troops begin to muster, other actions, of an economic and financial nature, might signal China’s intent.

The Soviet Union mistook ordinary activities, such as blood drives, for possible indicators of war. When it comes to China, finding signals in the noise is even harder. The country has spent decades improving its armed forces. It routinely stockpiles food. And it has hardened its economy against potential sanctions. All of these actions have fed fears of war—yet they do not necessarily mean that one is imminent. The challenge for Western intelligence agencies, then, is to imagine how China might deviate from this wary baseline in the run-up to an actual attack.

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The Unravelling of an Expert on Serial Killers - The New Yorker

A brother and a sister are standing on the balcony of a sixth-floor apartment in Monte Carlo. It’s the nineteen-seventies, in May, the afternoon of the Grand Prix. The sun is glinting off the dinghies in the turquoise shallows of the harbor. The trees are so lush they’re almost black.

The brother, Stéphane Bourgoin, is in his twenties. He’s come from Paris to visit his sister Claude-Marie Dugué. Race cars circle the city, careening onto the straightaway on Boulevard Albert 1er, which Dugué’s apartment overlooks. Over the thrum, Bourgoin leans in and tells her something shocking: in America, where he’d recently been living, he had a girlfriend who was murdered and “cut up into pieces.” Her name was Hélène.

Bourgoin’s revelation was one of those moments when you “remember exactly what you were doing that day at that precise moment, the news is so striking and indelible,” Dugué recalled recently. “It was stupefaction and shudders, amid the revving engines of Formula 1.” Dugué and Bourgoin shared a father but had different mothers. They had got to know each other not long before, and Dugué didn’t feel that she could probe for details about a girlfriend she hadn’t met, or even heard of until that day. “I found the whole situation disturbing,” she said. She simply told Bourgoin how sorry she was.

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Emma Thompson’s Third Act - The New Yorker

Emma Thompson has what she calls "the habit of continuity," an impulse hardwired into her by her parents, Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson, who were both actors and children from broken families. Thompson, who has been dubbed a Presbyterian in the high church of celebrity, still lives on the West Hampstead street where she grew up. She shuttles between London and a lush remote glen above Loch Long, in Scotlandâwhere, in 1959, her parents paid three hundred pounds for a cottageâwhich was the rural idyll of her childhood. Those two places provide her with an "unassailable context" that protects her, she said, from her "capacity for self-deception." She added, "I'm surrounded by people I've known since I was a child. They're not going to put up with me being grand."

Her road in London is a sloping quarter mile of comfortable semidetached houses, a football field away from the swankier dwellings across noisy Finchley Road. Among those currently residing there are Thompson's extended family: her now ninety-year-old mother; her informally adopted son, Tindyebwa Agaba, and his wife, He Zhang; and a collection of A-team actors, most of whom she's worked with through the yearsâImelda Staunton, Jim Carter, Derek Jacobi, Jim Broadbent. "We're terrible gossips, but 'gossip' in the sense that Phyllis Rose described it, the first step on the ladder to self-knowledge," Thompson said, adding, "Gossip is discussion about life's detail. And in life's details are all the little bits of stitching that you need to hold it to-fucking-gether."

The somnolent street has no distinguishing architectural features until you come to a house whose overgrown front garden is dominated by an eye-catching pink-and-white bathtub full of plants, with a mannequin's shower-capped head protruding at one end and a pair of shapely wooden legs dangling over the edge at the other. This gesture of capriceâa whimsical raspberry blown at the sedateness of the surroundingsâsits among an equally droll collection of miniature stone animals: frogs, turtles, cats, dogs, and a lone bird affixed to the garden wall. The tableau, which is Phyllida Law's playful creation, offers a clue to her daughter's blithe spirit. Asked once what was the most important thing her parents had taught her, Thompson replied, "To laugh in the face of disaster."

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