I Hope You’re Ready to Spend Months in Jail After AI Facial Recognition Tools Frame You for a Crime

Today in techno-dystopia news: You may have recently come across the story of a Tennessee woman named Angela Lipps, who spent more than five months in jail, first in Tennessee and then North Dakota, seemingly based on nothing more than the fact that she was mistakenly identified as a person of interest in a fraud investigation, in a state she says she’s never been to, by AI facial recognition tools used by police. It’s an infuriating story, although like so many tales in this mode, the more one looks into it, the more confusing and frustrating the lack of pertinent details becomes. What is not in dispute, though, is the fact that AI facial recognition tools are what ultimately pinned responsibility on Lipps, an incident that she says has effectively ruined her life as she weighs the possibility of a massive civil suit. And she’s not the first to suffer such an indignity–she’s just on the vanguard of a new victim class, such as the man in the U.K. who was arrested on suspicion of burglary due to facial recognition tools, despite the fact that he was 100 miles away from where the burglary actually occurred.

For now, though, let’s focus on the case of Angela Lipps, which the woman’s lawyers have described as “the longest AI-related wrongful detention case in U.S. history” to date. It involves Lipps spending more than five months behind bars after her July, 2025 arrest, until her charges were dropped in December on Christmas Eve, thanks primarily to what certainly looks like good old-fashioned police incompetence.

Lawyers for the woman who was held more than five months before charges were dropped said the press conference confirmed their findings.

“It appears that the Fargo Police Department did not undertake basic investigative efforts before causing a warrant and charges to issue for Angela Lipps.”

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— MPR News (@mprnews.org) Mar 24, 2026 at 7:17 PM

The impetus for the initial arrest of Angela Lipps was a series of financial crimes in April and May of 2025, which occurred in the Fargo area, in which an unknown woman visited several banks and was somehow able to withdraw what local reporters called “tens of thousands of dollars” by using “a fake U.S. Army military ID.” This is just one of countless details of the story that is frustratingly vague–how exactly does one manage to withdraw funds from multiple accounts, or at multiple banks, by merely using a “fake military ID”? Did the perpetrator actually know any account information, like account numbers or passcodes? Whose actual accounts were being targeted? None of the local media’s reporting on the case so much as acknowledges these obvious questions. Regardless, local Fargo police, using “our partner agency’s facial recognition technology” from the West Fargo Police Department, somehow determined that 50-year-old Tennessee grandmother Angela Lipps–who lived 1,000 miles away and says she’s never been to even one of the states that borders North Dakota–was in fact the woman responsible. Again, there are many things I’d like to have clarified: Did Lipps register as a facial match based on security footage from the banks, or merely based on the fraudulent ID in question, as CNN’s report seems to suggest? Are they saying this woman was arrested merely because a thief stole her image and put it on a fake ID? That program from the West Fargo Police Department is reportedly from a company called Clearview AI, “a startup with a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet, including social media.”

Using this supposed facial match, the State’s Attorney’s Office and a judge signed off on a warrant for Lipps’ arrest with nationwide extradition in early July of 2025. She was arrested on July 14 in her Tennessee home of Elizabethton–according to Lipps’ statement on a GoFundMe that has now raised more than $72,000, she was arrested by U.S. Marshals with guns drawn as she was babysitting four children in her home. Lipps reportedly has three adult children and five grandchildren. She was brought to a Tennessee jail and held without bail as a “fugitive from justice.”

This is where the story gets particularly stupid. Lipps would linger in that Tennessee jail for 108 days, locked away while seemingly no movement of any kind happened in her case, with North Dakota authorities claiming that no one informed them that Lipps was in custody in Tennessee. This, despite the release of an email seemingly showing that notice was sent to the Fargo Police in July saying in no uncertain terms that Lipps had been arrested there. Incredibly, this type of apparent miscommunication happened not once, but twice: Lipps first sat in jail in Tennessee for 108 days before being transferred to the Cass County, North Dakota jail on Oct. 30, 2025. She would then sit there in North Dakota for another 35 days, with the Fargo Police claiming yet again that no one informed them that she was now in local custody. As City of Fargo Police Chief David Zibolski claimed to local reporters: “It wasn’t until Dec. 5 that we were advised she was in custody.” By that point, it had been almost five months since Lipps’ arrest. Zibolski, not at all suspiciously, also announced his retirement at the exact moment that the Lipps case began to gain national attention.

The story will make your blood boil. It’s a perfect combination of lazy cops, bad tech and the creeping reach of the surveillance state.

The goons like Marc Andreessen who are pushing this dangerous, invasive tech want you to think it makes you safer. It doesn’t. Angela Lipps is just one example

— Evan Sutton (@evansutton.bsky.social) Mar 19, 2026 at 1:58 PM

Five months into the ordeal, Lipps was assigned an attorney in North Dakota, and this man, Jay Greenwood, was apparently able to quickly pull her bank records and demonstrate that Lipps was conducting normal daily activities in Tennessee while the bank thefts were happening in North Dakota. As Greenwood put it, speaking with the media: “Around the same time she’s depositing Social Security checks … she is buying cigarettes at a gas station, around the same time, she is buying a pizza, she is using a cash app to buy an Uber Eats.” Lipps, meanwhile, in her GoFundMe, describes finally meeting with police with her attorney for questioning in mid-December, saying “It took five minutes for the whole thing to fall apart. Five minutes.” It was the first time in the entire process she had even been asked to answer questions. Days later, the charges were dismissed, and Lipps was released from jail in North Dakota on Christmas Eve, forced to try to make her way back home to Tennessee during the holiday.

The lack of answers to obvious questions here is again galling. Shouldn’t police in North Dakota, for instance, have had access to the same bank records that now have seemingly provided Lipps with an exculpatory alibi? Is no one checking that sort of thing, just as police there don’t seem to be checking whether the people they’ve issued warrants for are actually in custody? And for that matter, what the hell was Lipps’ court-appointed attorney doing during her 108 days sitting in a Tennessee jail, if the woman’s seeming innocence was this easy to ascertain by her lawyer as soon as she was in North Dakota? Why can I only find one reference to Lipps even having a lawyer at all in Tennessee, and why does it say that “her court-appointed attorney told her she would have to go to North Dakota to fight the charges”? Where were the adult children of Lipps during all of this? Can anything in this story please make a little sense?

One certainly does get the sense that Lipps’ lack of resources may have been a major factor in what ultimately kept her in custody for more than five months–if she had access to better legal representation, faster, then surely the case would have arrived at this conclusion more quickly, without the woman needing to be extradited more than 1,000 miles. It raises the frightening visage of how AI-powered tools such as facial recognition software are likely most dangerous in the hands of police when directed at low-income individuals, who are so often failed by the overburdened legal system. Lipps has subsequently said that the five months of her incarceration essentially cost her everything she had in Tennessee–her rental home and car both gone, along with all her physical possessions and even her dog.

North Dakota police, meanwhile, have sweatily admitted that they’ve identified a “couple of errors” in how the case of Lipps was handled, although they’re of course refraining from issuing any kind of formal apology because of the still-pending threat of a civil lawsuit–one can’t help but be reminded of fellow Tennessee resident Larry Bushart, who is suing a local police department for civil rights violations after he was jailed for 37 days for posting an anti-Trump meme. In particular, the recently retired Chief David Zibolski seemingly admitted that his officers had used facial recognition matches based on the fake ID, rather than surveillance footage, saying the following: “They forwarded that information to our detectives, who then assumed wrongly that they had also sent in the surveillance photos with that photo ID.” Despite this, the official stance of the Fargo PD remains that the case is open and that Lipps is still technically a suspect–because the case was dismissed without prejudice, they’re maintaining that the charges could still be refiled at a later date.

The Angela Lipps story is basically the opening moments of Terry Gilliams Brazil, and it’s just as depressing.

Going to list the GoFund me

www.gofundme.com/f/innocent-g…

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— Strawbat.art (@strawbat.bsky.social) Mar 17, 2026 at 7:52 AM

Reading a story like this, you may find yourself wondering if there’s no end to the ways that commercial artificial intelligence can make all of our lives worse on a daily basis. The technology is being linked to everything from reducing human empathy and willingness to take responsibility for their own actions, to outright cases of delusion, such as a recent case where an AI chatbot sent a man on criminal missions to find an android body for the chatbot to inhabit. The same tools are infiltrating the world of published fiction and getting journalists fired, not just because AI is replacing the viability of writing as a profession, but because AI is sabotaging writers by inventing fake quotes that are inserted into their writing. Do the tech bros really want to argue that the ability to generate sexualized imagery of your favorite anime characters is a boon that outweighs all of the technology’s glaring flaws?

Sadly, not even refusing to participate altogether means that we can now avoid a life inextricably tied up with AI. You can be sitting at home in Tennessee, babysitting, when teams of armed men show up at your door to arrest you on little more than the word of a hallucinating computer program. When a piece of AI-powered software decides to frame you for a crime, here’s hoping you don’t have to depend on a harried public defender who can’t even be bothered to pull your bank records.