The end is near: $1 billion face recognition system across America

[13Gigatons]

New Scientist reports that a 2010 study found technology used by NGI to be accurate in picking out suspects from a pool of 1.6 million mug shots 92 percent of the time. The system was tested on a trial basis in the state of Michigan earlier this year, and has already been cleared for pilot runs in Washington, Florida and North Carolina. Now according to this week’s New Scientist report, the full rollout of the program has begun and the FBI expects its intelligence infrastructure to be in place across the United States by 2014.

Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, adds to NextGov that investigatorspair facial recognition technology with publically available social networks in order to build bigger profiles.Facial recognition "is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots," he says. When these files are then fed to law enforcement agencies on local, federal and international levels, intelligence databases that include everything from close-ups of eyeballs and irises to online interests could be shared among offices.

The FBI expects the NGI system to include as many as 14 million photographs by the time the project is in full swing in only two years, but the pace of technology and the new connections constantly created by law enforcement agencies could allow for a database that dwarfs that estimate.


“Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not,” US Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law earlier this year. “Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online.”

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My guess would be that 90 percent of Americans will in the database by 2015. Goodbye privacy.

http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-recognition-system-ngi-640/

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[Nebor]

This is a very cool system. I don't think there's any expectation of privacy in public anyway.

 

[TallBill]

Didn't read because of bolding.

 

[olds]

I was just at a tech conference.
We were told the special forces have facial recognition software coupled with an eye piece "hud" that can identify people. If you show up green, you're good to go. Yellow, you get detained. Red, shot on sight.

 

[Engineer]

WHERE'S MY MINORITY REPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1984 is a little late...but it's coming.....Comrade!

Since we are broke, maybe we can get the Chinese to build and monitor it for us.

 

[BladeVenom]

I wonder if wearing masks in public will become fashionable.

 

[13Gigatons]

I wonder if wearing masks in public will become fashionable.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/pussyriot082012/p14_RTR36UAK.jpg

or

 

[sixone]

Duckface: not just for Facebook, anymore.

 

[Miramonti]

How to hack a $1B facial recognition system:

 

[Nebor]

I was just at a tech conference.
We were told the special forces have facial recognition software coupled with an eye piece "hud" that can identify people. If you show up green, you're good to go. Yellow, you get detained. Red, shot on sight.

Allow me to point out that that is in no way true, and no one in their right mind is going to place their lives\freedom in jeopardy by relying on such a system in a remote, hostile environment.

Unless you're talking about Robocop. I think Robocop may have that.

 

[lxskllr]

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yay for a police state.

Chances are they'll make wearing a mask in public illegal to prevent people from trying to get past the system.

 

[Hacp]

There are a variety of ways to combat this. Makeup and plastic surgery are two simple ways to chance your face.

 

[sixone]

There are a variety of ways to combat this. Makeup and plastic surgery are two simple ways to chance your face.

Don't forget face putty.

 

[Bateluer]

There are a variety of ways to combat this. Makeup and plastic surgery are two simple ways to chance your face.

I'm not sure I would classify plastic surgery as 'simple'.

Easier to throw a wig on, wear facial accessories, or slap on some Halloween store prosthetics.

 

[olds]

Easier to cut someones face off and glue it on.

 

[Sonikku]

Hardly any Patriots in here at all. This system can only help in keeping us all safe from the terrorists.

 

[13Gigatons]

Hardly any Patriots in here at all. This system can only help in keeping us all safe from the terrorists.

Maybe they could put one in every home?

 

[Nebor]

This won't just help locate and track terrorists, but fugitives as well. And since it can track movements, you can track suspected terrorists\criminals in order to put together the patterns that establish criminality. It could seriously dampen meth cook's ability to purchase different ingredients at different places, for example.

 

[lxskllr]

Which brings us I will admit to back to this question of anonymity, or rather, personal autonomy. One of the really problematic elements in teaching young people, at least the young people I teach, about privacy, is that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things. Privacy means secrecy, sometimes. That is to say, the content of a message is obscured to all but it's maker and intended recipient. Privacy means anonymity, sometimes, that means messages are not obscured, but the points generating and receiving those messages are obscured. And there is a third aspect of privacy which in my classroom I call autonomy. It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communication.

There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth. It isn't because bankers live there. Bankers live there because cities are engines of economic growth. The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumer, is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being. Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm. "How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?" was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States. The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living. We are closing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8

 

[Triumph]

so this system browses the web to look for faces, not the street corner, right?

yet another reason not to have facebook.

 

[JulesMaximus]

WHERE'S MY MINORITY REPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1984 is a little late...but it's coming.....Comrade!

Since we are broke, maybe we can get the Chinese to build and monitor it for us.

It's for the good of the country! As long as my daughters can't get abortions and I can haz guns u can haz my vote!

 

[shortylickens]

Nobody who is alive today ever had real privacy. Get over yourself.

 

[JulesMaximus]

I'm wondering who is paying for that. Gotta cut education and social programs so we can pay for the monitoring of the populace... God forbid they ever get wise to our plan of divide and... well, who cares, as long as I get rich.

 

[lxskllr]

so this system browses the web to look for faces, not the street corner, right?

No, they'll be using public cameras also. They'll also be tracking your movements via license plate scanners, and if they feel like getting your cell data, they will. It'll all go into a neat little database, so they can keep track of the whole population, and refer to it at any time.