Maryland is a unique place to debate face recognition regulation, says Andrew Northrup, an attorney in the forensics division of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. He calls Baltimore "a petri dish for surveillance technology," because the city spends more money per capita on police among 72 major cities in the US, according to a 2021 analysis by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, and has a long history of surveillance technology in policing. The use of invasive surveillance technology including face recognition in Baltimore during protests following the 2015 death of Freddie Gray led former House Oversight and Reform Committee chair Elijah Cummings to interrogate the issue in Congress. And in 2021, the Baltimore City Council voted to place a one-year moratorium on face recognition use by public and private actors, but not police, that expired in December. Northrup spoke in favor of the bill and its requirement for proficiency testing at the same House of Delegates Judiciary Committee hearing addressed by Carronne Sawyer this month.

Carronne Sawyer took the week off work to get her husband Alonzo out of jail. She knew he was asleep on the couch with her at the time police alleged he assaulted a bus driver near Baltimore and stole their smartphone. But an intelligence analyst using face recognition software had labeled him a possible match with the suspect seen on CCTV footage from the bus, police records show, and an officer had confirmed it. At a police station and in a meeting with her husband's former parole officer, the person who had confirmed the software's suggested match, Carronne drew attention to details in photos on her phone taken recently by her daughter. Her husband is taller than the suspect in the video, she explained, and has facial hair and gaps between his teeth.

I have a great deal of respect for the vision of Mr. Elon Musk, (Tesla, SpaceX) and have even become something of a SpaceX groupie, watching the SpaceX youtube streaming of every (yes, every) launch. For the last few years, he has been quite vocal about his fears of AI! And many others have joined in with him. Having spent the better part of 40 years in deep IT (Information Technology), I have become somewhat jaded to the alarmist views of these sorts, in documentaries, and Sci-Fi flicks. You know the score, man builds a machine, machine becomes conscious, and attacks its creator; just as the angels and man himself is supposed to have rebelled against their creator (Paradise Lost(1667), John Milton).

Twitter hasn't done anything interesting with AI lately. I know this because whatever machine learning they use to stop online harassment is more like an email filter to weed out some political fluff from your inbox or kill spam. Users are still able to create fake accounts, send harassing tweets, criticize you over and over again, remain completely anonymous, and come up with a variety of unflattering slams against celebrities that are never caught by the filters and go completely ignored for days or weeks on end. That's what makes Mark Cuban's comments today about investing in Twitter because of their foray into AI a bit perplexing. The one that still lets trolls do whatever they want?