Monday, May 18, 2020

Sol Pais, Semantic Tagging, and the Toxicity of Google Visual Search

This are the final observations I will offer about the Sol Pais history.

Before Sol Pais was found dead in the woods of Colorado, she came to my attention in some information streams I religiously monitor.  The authorities, according to these reports, were looking for her because of some mysterious connection to a Columbine anniversary.  I found the ambiguous nature of the evidence to be disturbing.  This country has far too many self-righteous vigilantes who shoot first and ask questions later for a young girl to be widely advertised to be a threat to a community perpetually "on edge".

Years ago, I had worked (as a Software Engineer) on the Homeland Security Information Network (HISN) that I suspected was used to communicate between Florida and Colorado authorities.  The more I read about this real-time manhunt, the more concerned I was about this woman's safety.

The other oddity about this event was the release of two photographs of Sol, one that made her look like a woman in her thirties and uncannily simulating a Patty Hearst ambiance.  I had a gut feeling she would not be seen alive again.

So, curiosity piqued, I started doing what I do well - research.  I took screen shots of the Sol Pais images and dropped them into Google search to see who she was aside from the shady pictures being published.  I didn't get the results I expected.

A picture search should, theoretically, return images that match the images you submit.  A picture of Sol Pais should have returned one of the many pictures of her I later found on numerous websites.  Instead what was returned were dozens of the same photos semantically tagged with Columbine, school threat, and so on.  And the rest of the photos returned were not young 18 year old girls but female killers and criminals.  The photo search was not comparing pictures but inferring semantic matches based on the tagging of the photos and the not the likeness of photos.  Furthermore, the photos released by the authorities and cloned in every MSM outlet were weighed to be given priority. Sol Pais may as well have been wearing a target on her forehead.

Given the ubiquity of this profile, Sol Pais was a marked target whose presumption of innocence was stripped from her systematically in multiple systems that were failing to ensure the veracity of the data being transmitted. To this day, from what I can puzzle together, I believe local Florida authorities twisted the words of a traumatized father to manufacture a nonexistent psychopath.  A sandbox psychopath that authorities in Columbine welcomed with open arms - target practice to satisfy a community on edge.

I continued to research the story for a few weeks after reports of her death.  My previous posts document what I found.  If she, in fact, committed suicide she should be recognized as a heroic figure.  Our society should be so lucky as to have suicidal individuals wander off somewhere and make decisions about themselves alone instead of inflicting violence to strangers.  Sol Pais is a tragedy and a study in our social mean but her image should have her semantic tags changed - updated for posterity as collateral damage.

I believe she did commit suicide - there's good evidence to that effect.  But there is also plenty of reason to fear for the health and welfare of anyone who gets caught in the pathological paranoia that is every community that has experienced a mass shooting.

Our systems no longer have a fail-safe mechanism to distinguish truth from lies and when government systems lie to MSM and Big Data search engines the result is a real-life terror that makes Black Mirror episodes seem tame.  Be afraid, be very afraid.