Faces of the Riot used open source software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos taken from the insurrection on January 6. When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform’s contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site’s users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup. Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone. (…) The site’s developer counters that Faces of the Riot leans not on facial recognition but facial detection. While he did use the open source machine learning tool Tensor Flow and the facial recognition software Dlib to analyze the Parler videos, he says he used that software only to detect and “cluster” faces from the 11 hours of video of the Capitol riot; Dlib allowed him to deduplicate the 200,000 images of faces extracted from video frames to around 6,000 unique faces. (He concedes that there are nonetheless some duplicates and images of faces on protest signs included too. Even the number “45” on some signs was in some cases identified as a human face.) He emphasizes also that there’s no search tool on the site, and it doesn’t attempt to link faces with names or other identifying details. Nor is there any feature for uploading an image and matching it with images in the site’s collection, which he says could lead to dangerous misidentifications. “There’s a very hard no on allowing a user to take a photo from a wanted poster and search for it,” the site’s creator says. “That’s never going to happen.” The roughly 42 gigabytes of Parler videos that Faces of the Riot analyzed were downloaded prior to Amazon’s decision early last week to cut off Parler’s web hosting, leaving the site largely offline since. Racing against that takedown, hacktivists took advantage of a security flaw in Parler that allowed them to download and archive every post from the service, which bills itself as an uncensored “free speech” alternative to Twitter or Facebook. Faces of the Riot obtained Parler’s salvaged videos after they were made available online by Kyle McDonald, a media artist who obtained them from a third party he declined to identify.
via wired: This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos
siehe auch: FACES OF THE RIOT. / , Sedition Tracker. se·di·tion: incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority
