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biometrics

Massachusetts lawmakers vote to pass a statewide police ban on facial recognition

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Massachusetts lawmakers have voted to pass a new police reform bill that will ban police departments and public agencies from using facial recognition technology across the state.

The bill was passed by both the state’s House and Senate on Tuesday, a day after senior lawmakers announced an agreement that ended months of deadlock.

The police reform bill also bans the use of chokeholds and rubber bullets, and limits the use of chemical agents like tear gas, and also allows police officers to intervene to prevent the use of excessive and unreasonable force. But the bill does not remove qualified immunity for police, a controversial measure that shields serving police from legal action for misconduct, following objections from police groups.

Lawmakers brought the bill to the state legislature in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, since charged with his murder.

A beginner’s guide to diversity, equity and inclusion

Critics have for years complained that facial recognition technology is flawed, biased and disproportionately misidentifies people and communities of color. But the bill grants police an exception to run facial recognition searches against the state’s driver license database with a warrant. In granting that exception, the state will have to publish annual transparency figures on the number of searches made by officers.

The Massachusetts Senate voted 28-12 to pass, and the House voted 92-67. The bill will now be sent to Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker for his signature.

Kade Crockford, who leads the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, praised the bill’s passing.

“No one should have to fear the government tracking and identifying their face wherever they go, or facing wrongful arrest because of biased, error-prone technology,” said Crockford. In the last year, the ACLU of Massachusetts has worked with community organizations and legislators across the state to ban face surveillance in seven municipalities, from Boston to Springfield. We commend the legislature for advancing a bill to protect all Massachusetts residents from unregulated face surveillance technology.”

In the absence of privacy legislation from the federal government, laws curtailing the use of facial recognition are popping up on a state and city level. The patchwork nature of that legislation means that state and city laws have room to experiment, creating an array of blueprints for future laws that can be replicated elsewhere.

Portland, Oregon passed a broad ban on facial recognition tech this September. The ban, one of the most aggressive in the nation, blocks city bureaus from using the technology but will also prohibit private companies from deploying facial recognition systems in public spaces. Months of clashes between protesters and aggressive law enforcement in that city raised the stakes on Portland’s ban.

Earlier bans in Oakland, San Francisco and Boston focused on forbidding their city governments from using the technology but, like Massachusetts, stopped short of limiting its use by private companies. San Francisco’s ban passed in May of last year, making the international tech hub the first major city to ban the use of facial recognition by city agencies and police departments.

At the same time that cities across the U.S. are acting to limit the creep of biometric surveillance, those same systems are spreading at the federal level. In August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract for access to a facial recognition database created by Clearview AI, a deeply controversial company that scrapes facial images from online sources, including social media sites.

While most activism against facial recognition only pertains to local issues, at least one state law has proven powerful enough to make waves on a national scale. In Illinois, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has ensnared major tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet for training facial recognition systems on Illinois residents without permission.

Updated with comment from the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Lawsuits allege Microsoft, Amazon and Google violated Illinois facial recognition privacy law

Aerospace

Virgin Galactic plans first rocket-powered test flight from New Mexico for next week

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Virgin Galactic has revealed the flight window for the first rocket-powered flight of its VSS Unity spacecraft from the shiny new Spaceport America in New Mexico. The ship could be in the air as early as December 11.

This flight will be the third for Unity out of the future passenger spaceport, but the last two have been gliding flights, not propulsive ones. This will be the first time Unity has hit the throttle in nearly two years — back when it touched the edge of space at something like Mach 2.9.

Since then the company and its aircraft have moved home, from Mojave, California to the spaceport in New Mexico, where it hopes eventually passengers will come and lounge before taking off on a brief visit to space.

The glides, in which Unity is taken to a high altitude by a carrier craft, the VMS Eve, and let go to perform a controlled descent to Earth, show that everything is bolted on tightly and ready for the more substantial rigors of rocket thrust.

Virgin Galactic flies second SpaceShipTwo test at New Mexico spaceport, clearing the way for powered spaceflight

Originally this powered flight was intended to happen a bit earlier in the year, but COVID-19-related precautions led to delays. But weather permitting, next week should see Unity flying again.

This flight won’t be strictly for testing purposes, though: It will be taking up several payloads under NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, which contracts with smaller launch providers to perform experiments in and near space. Other aspiring space-travel companies, like Blue Origin, have also taken up payloads for brief visits to the edge of the atmosphere.

Of course COVID-19 is still a serious issue, so Virgin Galactic is limiting exposure by minimizing people on site: no media or guests, only essential personnel.

Equity podcast

Equity Shot: Salesforce’s $27.7 billion-dollar Slack message

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Welcome to an Equity Shot all about the huge, and hugely interesting, Salesforce -Slack deal, in which the enterprise social company will be subsumed for the mere price of $27.7 billion.

TechCrunch has notes on the deal here, and on what Salesforce expects the acquisition will do for its growth rate here.

Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal

Some of the drama, we admit, was removed when the deal was presaged several days ago, but that didn’t stop the Equity crew from having a lot to say on the matter. Here are some of the topics we discuss:

How big is this deal, both literally and figuratively?
We talk about the market reception and if the rumors correctly valued the deal
Does Slack deserve snaps or just a simple pat on the back?
What does the deal tell us about vertical SaaS tools?
The COVID-19 effect on remote tools
What does SoftBank have to do with this (and why does SoftBank always have something to do with everything)?
And whole lot of conversation and discussion on Microsoft and its competitor

Salesforce beats growth expectations as investors digest the Slack acquisition

We are back in two days’ time, so don’t wander too far. Chat soon!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Climate change

Cultured meat has been approved for consumers for the first time

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The first lab-grown, or cultured, meat product has been given the green light to be sold for human consumption. In the landmark approval, regulators in Singapore granted Just, a San Francisco–based startup, the right to sell cultured chicken—in the form of chicken nuggets—to the public.

Just had been working with the regulators for the past two years and was formally granted approval on November 26. Singapore’s regulatory body assembled a panel of seven experts in food toxicology, bioinformatics, nutrition, epidemiology, public health policy, food science, and food technology to evaluate each stage of Just’s manufacturing process and make sure the chicken is safe to eat. “They didn’t just look at the final product; they looked at all the steps that led to that product,“ says Josh Tetrick, Just’s cofounder and CEO. “We were impressed with how thoughtful and rigorous they were.”

An as-yet-unnamed restaurant in Singapore will soon be the first to have Just’s cultured chicken on the menu, but Tetrick says he plans to expand after that. “We’ll go from a single restaurant to five to 10 and then eventually into retail and then after that, outside Singapore,” he says.

Most cultured meat is made in a similar way. Cells are taken from an animal, often via a biopsy or from an established animal cell line. These cells are then fed a nutrient broth and placed in a bioreactor, where they multiply until there are enough to harvest for use in meatballs or nuggets. A slew of startups have been founded using variations on this approach, in the belief that cultured meat will appeal to flexitarians—people who want to reduce the amount of meat they eat for ethical or environmental reasons, but don’t want to give it up entirely.

The budding industry has progressed a long way since a $330,000 burger was famously cooked on TV in 2013, driven by the idea that if it’s done right, meat could be produced with far lower greenhouse-gas emissions and zero animal suffering. But cost is still a hurdle: the high price of the growth factors required to develop the cells mean the price tags for pure cultured meat products are still measured in hundreds of dollars per pound, far too expensive to compete with regular meat. So Just’s first chicken products will be chicken “bites” that use cultured chicken cells mixed with plant protein—although Tetrick wouldn’t say in what proportion. “Chicken nuggets are already blended—this one wont be any different,” he says. The bites will be labeled as “cultured chicken” on the restaurant’s menu.

Singapore’s decision could kick-start the first wave of regulatory approvals around the world.

“We are hoping and expecting that the US, China, and the EU will pick up the gauntlet that Singapore just threw down,” says Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that works in meat alternatives. “Nothing is more important for the climate than a shift away from industrial animal agriculture.”

While Just has beaten them to the punch, many big firms are already working with regulators to get their own products to market. This is not something to be rushed, Friedrich says: “It is critical for cultivated meat companies to be extra careful and to go beyond consumer expectation in ensuring consumer comfort with their products.”

Memphis Meats, which counts Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and traditional meat manufacturer Tyson Foods among its many investors, has teamed up with a number of other firms, including Just and cultured-seafood makers BlueNalu and Finless Foods, to form a lobbying group that is working with US regulators to get their products approved.

The way that might actually happen was only hammered out relatively recently. In March 2019, it was announced that the FDA would regulate the early stages of the cultured-meat process, including cell banks and cell growth. The US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service will then take over at the cell harvesting stage and will inspect production facilities and approve labels used on cultured-meat products. In Europe, companies must apply for authorization and meet the European Union’s regulation on novel foods. The process is likely to take at least 18 months, and no cultured-meat company has yet applied.

Both Singapore and Israel have actively made themselves welcoming to startups in plant and cultured meat, Freidrich says. Governments should follow their lead and start treating this like initiatives in renewable energy and global health, he says.

“We need a space-race-type commitment toward making meat from plants or growing it from cells,” he says. “We need a Manhattan Project focused on remaking meat.”

Biotechnology

US official says every American who wants a covid-19 vaccine will have one by June

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An official with the US covid-19 vaccine initiative says anyone in the country who wants a vaccine will be able to have it by June, seven months from now.

The confident projection was made by retired Lieutenant General Paul Ostrowski, director of supply, production, and distribution for Operation Warp Speed, during an appearance on MSNBC on Monday, November 30.

“A hundred percent of Americans that want the vaccine will have had the vaccine by that point in time,” said Ostrowksi, adding that the US would secure more than 300 million doses to make it happen.

The prediction, if it proves true, could signal a way out of the pandemic, but it also foreshadows a coming period of global vaccine haves and have-nots. In a statement, the World Health Organization said it believes vaccinations should be prioritized for those at high risk, of infection or dying, wherever they are, rather than vaccinating “entire populations of some countries while everyone else is waiting in line.”

The health agency, based in Geneva, is participating in a plan to buy and distribute vaccines to almost 200 counties, half of them poor ones, but it says it thinks population-level vaccination will only occur in 2022. “We’re going to see very short supplies of vaccines over the next six months and it is going to take a year to even begin to cover 15 to 20% of the world’s population,” the WHO said.

So far, two genetic vaccines, one from Pfizer and one from Moderna Pharmaceuticals, are pending authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration following dramatic results which showed they prevented about 95% of covid-19 cases.

While supplies of those two vaccines will be limited in the coming months, the US has purchased a large part of Pfizer’s initial supply, and all of Moderna’s first 100 million doses. Together, the two firms are projecting they will have enough vaccine to immunize a billion people by the end of 2021.

It is unclear if the June projection by the Operation Warp Speed official referred to only those two vaccines, or if hitting the summer target would require the authorization of a third vaccine. One frontrunner, made by AstraZeneca, is easier to manufacture in large quantities (the US has contracted 300 million doses) but initial results suggest it is less effective and errors in its trial could delay a final answer.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services said Ostrowski’s remark was based “on the best assessment of available vaccine doses” but didn’t clarify which companies’ products were considered.

Some greeted the Warp Speed claim of widely available vaccinations by June with skepticism, noting previous false promises from the US administration, including that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Memorial Day, as well as President Donald Trump’s promise in March that “anybody who wants a test can get a test.” In reality there were shortfalls of testing equipment and long waits for results.

Topher Spiro, vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, tweeted that the Warp Speed claim is “not true.” Spiro predicted a shortage of syringes and needles, and lack of funding for the mass vaccination program, in parking lots or community centers, he thinks will be necessary. “You can’t vaccinate hundreds of millions of people at doctors’ offices and pharmacies” in a short period, Spiro posted on Twitter.

Although the covid-19 vaccine campaign will be unprecedented in many ways, the medical industry is able to reach great masses of people with inoculations. Each year, for instance, about half of Americans receive a flu shot.

It’s not clear how many people will sign up to get a covid-19 vaccine, and widespread “vaccine refusal” could end up making it easier for Warp Speed to meet its promise of June supplies for any “that want” the vaccine. According to a poll in October by Gallup, of 2,985 adults, only six in 10 Americans said they would agree to be vaccinated with an FDA-approved vaccine.

Other experts, however, said they think a June target is realistic. “I think they will have a vaccine in America, but the whole world will not,” says Mark Emalfarb, CEO of a company, Dyadic, involved in manufacturing vaccines. “If we want to travel between countries, we need to vaccinate most of the world, or all of it.”

Emalfarb says he anticipates public confusion as people try to weight the plusses and minuses of each vaccine, in the event they have a choice which to take. “We are going to have a smorgasbord of different vaccines, because none of these guys can make enough,” he says.

Many hope a vaccine will end the pandemic, but for the foreseeable future, other public health measures will still be needed to suppress the spread of the virus. Given rampant levels of infection in the US, estimates are that 50 million Americans have already caught the virus. By June, it’s possible that number could double again to a third of the country’s population.

The incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden has said it wants to spend $25 billion on vaccine manufacturing and distribution to “guarantee” every American gets a cost-free shot. In the recent MSNBC interview, Ostrowski said he briefed the incoming Biden team during the week of Thanksgiving.

Space

China’s Chang’e 5 mission has successfully landed on the moon

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China has just landed a new spacecraft on the surface of the moon. The mission, Chang’e 5, will collect lunar rocks and soil to bring back to Earth, as part of China’s first-ever sample return mission.

What happened: China launched Chang’e 5 on November 23. On Sunday, while in lunar orbit, Chang’e 5 separated into two parts: an orbiter and return capsule that would remain in lunar orbit, and a lander and ascent stage that would make its way to the surface a couple of days later.

At around 10:13 a.m. Eastern Time today, the lander successfully landed at a site close to Mons Rümker, a volcanic formation in the Oceanus Procellarum region on the western edge of the near side of the moon. This area is thought to be home to lunar rocks that are a couple of billion years younger than those the Apollo program brought back. Chang’e 5 is expected to begin drilling into the lunar ground for subsurface samples almost immediately.

Digging for moon rocks: Chang’e 5 will aim to scoop up at least four pounds of material from the moon. One-quarter will be from underground samples (about 6.5 feet deep), and the other three-quarters from surface material. Unlike its lunar rover predecessor, Chang’e 5 isn’t equipped with with any heating units to protect its more sensitive components from the frigid temperatures of the lunar night. That means the mission only has 14 days (the length of the lunar day) to properly gather samples before it freezes to death (figuratively speaking).

In about 48 hours, the ascent vehicle will ferry the lunar samples up for a rendezvous with the orbiter, which will then place the samples into the return capsule and head back to Earth several days later. Upon nearing Earth, the orbiter will jettison the return capsule, which should land in Inner Mongolia by December 17.

Making history: At this point, China is no stranger to lunar missions. The country has pulled off four successful robotic missions to the moon, including the delivery of two rovers to the surface. Chang’e 5 is the third lunar landing for the country, but only its first ever sample return mission. Only the US and the former Soviet Union have ever brought lunar rocks back to Earth. If successful, this will be the first time in 44 years (since the Soviet Union’s Lunar 24 mission) that anyone has pulled off a lunar sample return mission.

Chang’e 6 is a follow-up lunar sample return mission that should launch in 2023. Though its ostensibly a backup to Chang’e 5, it would head toward the lunar south pole for samples instead of back to Mons Rümker should Chang’e 5 prove successful.