Facial recognition used to identify Lafayette Square protester accused of assault
By Justin Jouvenal, Spencer Hsu,
The Washington Post
| 11. 22. 2020
A line of U.S. Park Police officers pushed protesters back from Lafayette Square on June 1, firing pepper balls and rolling canisters spewing irritant gas into the retreating crowds on H Street NW, video shows.
Amid screams and smoke, a man in a tie-dye T-shirt pulled an officer to the ground and punched him in the face, before disappearing into the chaos, according to charging documents.
The man grabbed another officer, before police caught up with him and attempted to make an arrest, authorities said. But the man wrestled free and vanished once again.
The protester might never have been identified, but an officer found an image of the man on Twitter and investigators fed it into a facial recognition system, court documents state. They found a match and made an arrest.
The court documents are believed to be the first public acknowledgment that authorities used the controversial technology in connection with the widely criticized sweep of largely peaceful protesters ahead of a photo op by President Trump. The case is one of a growing number nationwide in which...
Related Articles
By Erik Adams, Sundance | 09.08.2026
The scariest movie playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival isn’t about cursed audio recordings or a killer demon disguised as your true love; rather it’s a 110-minute essay film about how a handful of guys obsessed with numbers and...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
By Ann E. Marimow and J. David Goodman, The New York Times | 09.22.2026
Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday refused to intervene in a high-profile custody battle that involved difficult questions surrounding surrogacy and abortion, leaving in place a lower-court order that gave custody to the biological parents in the dispute.
The case drew...
By Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen, CNN | 09.18.2026
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The US...
