Privacy activists sue FBI for access to facial recognition records The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a suit against the Feds to force the bureau to reveal information about its planned biometrics database. The EFF said that it had submitted three Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI last year to try to get info on the database and the agency's use of facial recognition, …
Will it be defeated by something as simple as putting a stone in your shoe and cotton wadding in your cheeks?
I haven't seen any studies that indicate this stuff is ready to be used on such a large scale. Even tiny error rates are going to cause a massive workload sorting out the false positives and negatives. The thing it will be most useful for is going after citizens who embrass people in power.
What separates people/citizens from criminals?, our unique biological markers,
fingerprints and DNA, all of which are stripped from criminals when they are caught
and prosecuted for their crimes. Programmes like this mean that the only thing separating
the general law abiding population from criminals will be the very high brick walls that
the convicts are behind.
I don't know about you lot but i would like to think that i'm one step up from a rapist!
Interesting problem. We can recognize people and often even distinguish identical twins from one another. However, we only get to that point with a few hundred people. With 7 billion people, is facial recognition going to be enough to essentially 'prove' it is you in that picture?
As for trusting the FBI with that database -- not a chance. We need to dismantle and replace entities like the FBI. They have over-reached to the point they cannot operate properly and they are demonstrably incompetent at their legitimate mission.
I imagine that there's an important distinction between identifying people and finding people.
I seem to recollect a test in which a police facial recognition expert was matched against software. The task was to find target individuals in film of a crowded street, and I believe the software did as well as, or better than, the expert.
This sort of capability is obviously quite valuable for tasks like screening air travellers, and the software solution has the enormous advantage that it can be replicated in a way that isn't possible with human experts, and that it doesn't suffer from the fatigue and distraction that I imagine is a problem for them. Humans can then take on the task of eliminating false positives.
Not that I'm endorsing this - I think it sounds quite alarming - though I can imagine situations in which it would be valuable.
Good luck with that lawsuit. I seriously doubt that you will get far with it. The FBI had been using CARNIVORE since 2005 to sniff web traffic. Now PRISM takes care of that and cell phone sniffing as well. This facial recognition system will get a pass as it's going to be touted as "essential to the preservation of national security and prevention of terrorism".
"The law enforcement agency is busily beefing up its Next Generation Identification (NGI) database, which will include biometric information like iris scans, palm prints, face-recognition-ready pics and voice data, adding to its existing database of fingerprints for law enforcement agencies across the US." -- Go back to bed America, you are free to do as we tell you*.
* Bill Hicks
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