UK govt steams ahead with £5m facial recog system amid furore over innocents' mugshots The UK Home Office has put out to tender a £4.6m ($5.9m) contract for facial recognition software – despite the fact its biometrics strategy and retention systems remain embroiled in controversy. According to the tender announcement, a company is sought to provide "a combination of biometric algorithm software and associated …
The Home Office meanwhile has continued to spend millions on bodycams for the police, whose images are uploaded to servers, despite there not being any official legal or operational rules in place
Collect it all anyway, then say a few years years down the line that the police depend on it, it'd be too difficult to delete, and some retention rules which mean they get to keep it all anyway. Standard Home Office procedure.
Nothing to hide then nothing to fear!!1
etc etc
Or the reality,
You CANNOT trust any .Gov department or organisation (NHS is a good example) with your data. From staff within the organisations making personal use of the data to it being given out to anyone (people getting databases of gun owners for their own personal use? Handing over medical records to Google?)
How about some more uncomfortable truth, the lack of protection for this data. Contractors walking around with clinical data on USB sticks, laptops not being correctly encrypted (or just not encrypted) to workstations and servers not being patched and running Windows Xp........
On top of that, as was mentioned in the article about mission creep. If the data is there, it WILL be mined and used in ways never thought possible even 5 years ago
Bah! £4.6m does not even get Capita to look at the specs. Simple Capita calculation:
Is contract worth over £4Bn? Yes/No
Will contract period overrun the next General Election? Yes/No
Does the client actually require the contract to be completed? Yes/No
Can we double the cost overrun? Yes/No
Within the NHS, there are differing levels of security on data systems.
All personnel can only log into the system with a valid ID smartcard.
Differing levels of access exist depending upon staff position.
Hospitals cannot access GP data!
GPs' cannot access secondary-care systems!
I have no idea about police access to information, except to note that there are frequent prosecutions of personnel for illegally accessing data.
Both police and NHS systems leave an audit trail, and both are regularly checked.
However: shit ' appens
"request can be turned down if it meets the highly ambiguous and vague standard that retention would serve "a policing purpose." The police themselves get to decide if that is the case."
Not to mention the HO's presumption of "Give us the tools and we'll do the job." Unfortunately in their view (and by "them" I mean the small cabal of senior level Sir Humphries, " and their willing tools, who are behind this) the job is having something so everyone can be locked up.
And the presumption is (and will continue to be) it's better to keep DNA/fingerprints/faces/blood/sweat/tears/whatever forever because to a data fetishist more data is always better
This is also probably related to the problems of setting up the Norther Irish /RoI border-that's-not-a-border-despite-them-being-in-different-customs-regimes. Apparently HMG reckon "technology" will deal with this.
I saw that thing "The Prisoner." I wonder how many of these people growing up saw that closing shot of Patrick McGoohan's facing hitting a set of iron bars and thought "One day all the UK will be like that."
Welcome to HMP UK.
This is also probably related to the problems of setting up the Norther Irish /RoI border-that's-not-a-border-despite-them-being-in-different-customs-regimes. Apparently HMG reckon "technology" will deal with this.
Yeah, that's going to work - a couple of people apprehended crossing the border because they had a 'checkered' past will cause a fury, ending in a policy or implementation rethink, then quietly dropped.
I use to work as 1st line support for Ident1. Frequently requests came in to remove (weed) finger print records which we (2nd line) did. How easy it was to get them removed I'm not sure but there was a process which could be used.
This was however, a UK wide system. All police forces used it so we controlled the centralised storage where they were kept. How you'd get each individual force to remove an image I don't know, I bet few have a process in place for this to happen.
There are two outcomes,
1. The system is completed on time and is a success, the police now have everyone's face print and know where you have been and where you go.
2. The system is a monumental cock up that over runs time and budget till someone decides to just sack it off.
I hoping for outcome 2, the more worrying aspect is who else gets/is getting this data because there are parts of government not so incompetent when it comes to this shit.
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And no detail on false positives.
Someone who is wrongly identified as one of the people on this database will get flagged over and over again. Sometimes without their knowledge - they will get endless problems with no way to find the cause or fix the problem.
Ohh it is way worse.
You, the citizen that has a passport, pays taxes etc, get in the DDBB.
A random criminal is identified as you by the system, and gets charged.
No, wait, YOU get charged, or, worse still, now the police thinks you have been detained X times.
Of course, they would not tell you, and you will wonder why cant you get a new job.. as they are checking your backgrounds and voila!! you have police records!! good luck proving this is incorrect.
"Facial recognition tracking - what if people at the time know about the facial recognition system, and then decide to wear glasses that disrupt the software ?"
Or, better and more weirdly still, straight from your favourite cyberpunk setting; https://cvdazzle.com/
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I could just imagine this as a conversation from "Yes Minister" between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker:
SH: So Minister there are two outcomes to this:
1. The system is completed on time and is a success, the police now have everyone's face print and know where you have been and where you go.
2. The system is a monumental cock up that over runs time and budget till someone decides to just sack it off.
JH: Yes but which one do we expect it to be?
SH: Both, Minister.
JH: Both?! How can it be both?
SH: Well Minister, you see the Government has a track record of not doing well in completing I.T. projects.
JH: Yes I know. So the likely outcome is that the project will not work and be quietly killed off and the police will complain that they cannot do their job correctly?
SH: No Minister
JH: (looking puzzled) So the project will be a success and personal freedoms will be reduced?
SH: No Minister
JH: So what will it be?
SH: Well Minister, the project will be completed, the IT and the technology will work perfectly. But just before the project goes live the Government Accountability Office will question the costing and value of the project and recommends the project shuts down, which of course the Government will take on board and then order a formal review of the project.
In the meantime the Police will have had access to the system and be testing it, oh lets say for the next 10 years, while the review is carried out. By which time the technology will need to be updated anyway.
JH: Ah so the police get what they want, and the public are none the wiser and carry on with life as normal forgetting about the whole issue.
SH: Yes, Minister.
Everyone will be wearing those lovely facial recognition confusing patterns on their clothes
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/04/anti-surveillance-clothing-facial-recognition-hyperface
as well as some interesting make-up styles. I also predict a major expansion in sales of Guy Fawkes/Anonymous masks.
No no no, you have missed the preferred option. Wear a mask of your 'favourite' politician or celebrity to cause maximum confusion.
There will be a small number of people who can go one better if they are part of a set of identical twins/triplets etc....Just think how much fun they could be having with this
Biometrics based on facial recognition doesn't work. Not at the mass consumer scale.
Given which, it is bizarre to berate the Home Office, as ElReg do, for not having a facial recognition biometrics strategy. You might as well demand a horoscope strategy.
Given which, there is no civil liberties problem here. Our civil liberties can't be infringed by a technology that doesn't work.
Both our location and the network of people we contact and who contact us are available to the police from mobile phone records. That's more of an issue. As is the failure of the UK Home Office to obey the law. But facial recognition biometrics? No. The only questions there are why are the police wasting their time and our money.
Mockery is the best response. To throw up your hands in horror at the infringement of civil liberties is to help the biometrics salesmen to make their case.
More amused mockery, please.
A partial database makes it very likely that an innocent person who is on there for whatever reason may prove to be the closest match (because the person who was actually caught on cam isn't in the db).
The police have, in the past (and will in the future) concentrated on suspects who seemed most likely at the start of the case. What tends to happen is that as the case progresses, evidence which tends to make it less likely the main suspect didn't do it is discarded. Confirmation bias sets in early.
This same argument can be made against DNA databases (and was made by Richard Dawkins, whom I stole it from). If you have the whole population and 100s of matches are spat out, you look at other evidence to figure out which person did it. If you have a limited db and 1 match pops out, you look for evidence that confirms that person did it (and even invent implausible theories to evade circumstantial evidence).
So all or nothing.
Or if you have everyone's DNA you select which sequence groups you match on to get a fit on your preferred suspect then go to court and have your pet expert witness claim that the 1 in a billion chance of a match implies that there is a 1 in a billion chance that the person is innocent.
The process is simplified if you contract out the DNA matching to a commercial lab and explain to them that the chance of their contract being renewed is proportional to the number of "correct" matches they find
"That approach was declared illegal by the High Court back in 2012 and Lord Justice Richards told the police to revise its policies, giving them a period of "months not years" to do so."
Perhaps the then Home Secretary should be hauled up for contempt of court for failing to implement this.
But I can see so many ways this can go wrong, now and in future. The government you have today is not the government you may have in 5-10-25 years time. Whatever those governments are like, they will have all this data, and you can bet they'll use it. Sure, they'll say the innocent images are deleted. Nudge-nudge wink-wink. Terrorist attacks are bad, but they don't justify the level of intrusiveness so-called Western democracies are engaging in.
The one with a thumb drive containing "deleted" images in the pocket.
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