Face-recog tech spots US fugitive wanted for 14 years ... from a photo The US Federal Bureau of Investigations says it has captured a fugitive who has been wanted for the last 14 years on child sex abuse and kidnapping charges, and it credits modern face recognition technology for the arrest. The accused, Neil Stammer, originally of New Mexico, was arrested in 1999 but released on bond pending …
In that case the only reason he'd have to go back to the USA is that no other country would accpet him with a false passport. If his pasport had been valid he would have been able to go anywhere. The Nepalese wouldn't have put him on a plane, it's not like being denied entry at immigration and being sent back to where you came from.
The FBI has every passport photo already in the facial recognition database but not wanted posters. I get they were looking for passport fraud but they missed this guy's fraudulent passport and only caught up when pictures of known fugitives were put in. Does that strike anyone else as a bit backward?
If he is Stammer, and he abused the children, then he should go to jail for a long time.
On the other hand, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Maybe he really is Kevin Hodges, and just happens to look similar to Stammer 14 years ago. The information released so far does not offer any corroboration.
Whatever the result, this case is likely to be quoted as a statistic in favour of deploying more facial recognition, and false positives will be ignored or downplayed.
My immediate thought upon seeing this story was that it was a blatant (but utterly predictable) attempt to gain acceptance of a potentially very intrusive and privacy-wrecking surveillance technology by promoting a story that associates it with the capture of everyone's favourite bogeyman du jour, paedophiles. Expect a similar one to pop up in the near future describing how the technology helped the US capture a leading terrorist
Better still... anyone who opposes these technologies supports paedophiles and terrorists... in fact, they're probably one themselves!
Expect them not to play up the power this gives them- or any political regime- to spy on and control any elements within the population that they don't like, which I don't trust *any* government not to misuse. Expect them not to publicly acknowledge the potential for misuse that this gives them from the same regime whose college-age NSA employees use their power to spy on and lech over private selfies:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/17/snowden_says_analysts_swapping_sexts_at_nsa_seen_as_a_fringe_benefit/
Creepy f***s.
Russia, America and the UK governments all use the same excuse to spy on our every move, "We are just keeping you safe from terrorist and protecting the children from paedophiles." Of course we have nothing to fear, no one has ever been unjustly persecuted by any of those governments.
governments all use the same excuse to spy on our every move
The worst part is that everyone else who has all the pictures of largely innocent people from passports in their facial rec. databases is now frantically importing all the pictures of felons and fugitives they have while saying to themselves "why didn't we think of putting the bad guys pictures into the database before?"
Arsehats, the lot of them.
that joke up put on tweeter about blowing up somebody + an amail refferance to how good looking some frends childeran are + 4 words in a phone conversation about the govenment being corrupt = fbi arrest warrent valad nealy every were in the world.
Thank you IT comunity thank you very bloody much for making this possible
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