Submitted by Darren Smith, Guest Blogger
Recently the FBI’s “Next Generation Identification” project was funded by congress to bring significantly enhanced identification and recognition capabilities to government agencies. The system relies for the most part on individual data collected from local law enforcement and state departments of motor vehicles or licensing, that is fingerprint, booking photos, and most recently driver license photographs.
With the advent of greater storage, computational, and recognition technologies the ease of facial recognition has increased. Coupled with the impetus on the federal level, reportedly, to identify terrorists and criminals the technology is now being utilized under a fundamentally different approach.
Identification data has historically been collected for decades by local law enforcement agencies and jails and forwarded to the U.S. Government. Most of this has traditionally been fingerprint cards. The cards formerly were classified by general fingerprint characteristics and then a paper hardcopy was kept on file. The AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) later enhanced this ability by permitting individual fingerprints to be both categorized uniquely and stored electronically.
The main limitation on whether a latent fingerprint submitted for analysis was whether the matching person had been previously fingerprinted either for a crime, had applied for a security clearance, for a position as an employee of a government agency, or had been arrested for a criminal offense meeting the FBI’s submission requirements. Other factors are a measure of time and quality of the latent print submitted.
When the primary identification was persons’ fingerprints it was effectively impossible to identify an individual who was merely in public view. The ability is now there by simply photographing the face of this individual. But rather than collecting fingerprints, of certain security cleared individuals or arrestees, all persons subject to having a driver license or state ID card now are to be gathered.
One facet that needs to be understood is that there is a general disconnect between federal and state agencies. Presently, the federal government only directly collects photographs on individuals when they apply for a passport, an immigration card, military, government employees, and a few others the general public is not subject to requirements of. Yet, the individual largely has photographs collected by state departments of motor vehicles or licensing.
Another example of a disconnect was state governments did not often collect social security numbers for driver license data that the federal government had. The federal government mandated the states collect social security numbers for each driver license applicant. This had an auxiliary (or intentional depending on opinion) benefit of states being able to have social security information for parents absconding on child support and provided linking information for the federal government to state licensing data.
State governments have comparative advantage and resources to collect driver’s photographs the federal government lacks this but has vast funds and resources to process these photographs.
Looking at the laws of one state as an example, Washington provides for a facial recognition matching system to be operated by the Department of Licensing.
Pertinent excerpts of the subject code (RCW 46.20.037) are as follows:
(1) The department may implement a facial recognition matching system for drivers’ licenses, permits, and identicards. Any facial recognition matching system selected by the department must be used only to verify the identity of an applicant for or holder of a driver’s license, permit, or identicard to determine whether the person has been issued a driver’s license, permit, or identicard under a different name or names.
(4) Results from the facial recognition matching system:
(a) Are not available for public inspection and copying under chapter 42.56 RCW;
(b) May only be disclosed when authorized by a court order;
(c) May only be disclosed to a federal government agency if specifically required under federal law;
The purported reasons for gathering facial data for all persons applying for a driver license or identification card is to ensure that an individual does not fraudulently apply for a driver license assuming a false name or identity.
Yet one could ask if there was more to this system than meets the eye.
One system could instead require citizens to provide a biometric retina scan, unique to each individual, to ensure the person applying for or renewing a license is the intended applicant rather than a publicly recognizable datum such as their entire face. Would the retinal scan suffice for the purposes of driver license security or could it be more all-encompassing?
We could look at what a state agency is required to comply with to obtain a recognition metric: a court order. A court order would have to comply with a narrow tailoring, specific to an individual for a specific purpose as required by any other court order such as those for search warrants and the like. Yet, with regard to the federal government it is construed broadly where the requirement is simply “federal law.” Could this be that the requirement is the United States Code or could it be administrative laws such as agency rules? Under the Revised Code of Washington it is open-ended because the federal law can simply be enacted to require “All licensing photographs of all persons must be submitted to a designated federal repository.”
A short primer on facial recognition might be helpful to understand what is involved. An image of a face is sent through an algorithm to locate certain aspects of a human face, such as proportionality of eyes to nose size, color of eyes, facial structure and such. This data is hashed into a string of data that represents the structure of this face. This creates a framework where using other matching algorithms can be used to compare a subject face to a database of hashes to determine probability of match between persons having similar hashes. The complexity of which can grow with time and accuracy will improve, even accounting for noise such as blurriness of the photograph, and various positions and attitudes of the image.
There might also be differing encoding systems that could produce hashes or data types. Using different systems could produce artifacts between each other where a person might match one set of criteria but not another in a different system. How is the system going to protect the individual against false positives or negatives?
As media and data collection increase the accuracy and prevalence of systems will increase sharply as Moore’s Law has shown through computational power generally. The technology will eventually come to fruition where a federal agency can take images, either as video or digital photographic in nature and place these into facial recognition software for quick identification of each person in a crowd.
It is rather easily understood the system is being created that can have the ability to take gigapixel photographs of large crowds of people and identify nearly every person in the photo having their face visible to the photographer. Is this something a person should have to be concerned with? It can be argued does the government have a true interest in identifying each person in a crowd of persons, whatever lawful activity they might be engaging in? Could this be a chilling effect?
The U.S. Secret Service routinely takes extremely detailed photographs of crowds of people who attend speeches and events their protected persons are hosting, such as presidential addresses and such. The service attempts to scan these crowds for persons who have made threats to presidents or provide security risks. That same practice can be greatly enhanced by the facial recognition system that can identify most of the persons in the images and analyze the names of who has attended and look for patterns with other events.
Our society is going to have to ask itself some fundamental questions on the role of government and how much citizens have liberty and privacy when our government has made a significant effort to obtain the likenesses of every person possible. Do we as individuals want to be held to draconian standards where persons could be questioned for “why were you here” or “why were you talking with X”?
Formerly it was a common Hollywood movie saying to “round up the usual suspects”; that is criminal elements likely to be involved in a particular crime. Are we as citizens now collectively “the usual suspects” since we eventually can all be identified and tracked? It will certainly be useful to apprehend actual criminals but watching the watchers is going to be more important as well.
Sources:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/fingerprints_biometrics/ngi
“Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the…” — Justice Holmes
Completing the thought eight years ago:
Thanks Darren.
The work we have to do is more in the area of replacing the antisocials in our governments with social personalities. Its an uphill battle, but winable if you understand the technology of the antisocial/social personality. Meanwhile, we can acknowledge the self-sacraficing heroes of this world like Edward Snowden, & note the evil enemies of the people like Barack Obama, the biggest servant of the Illuminati since Herbert Walker Bush. We can also realize that vets & servicemen, though not badly intentioned in the main, are serving the enemy of the people instead of the people of America, except in a few rare cases, such as domestic emergency assistance.
Gene,
Absolutely nothing is foolproof when it comes to Mother Nature. Not even DNA. Consider the human chimera. Eyes can be multicolor, and under ultraviolet you may be able to see the Bands of Blaschko. Most important, a chimera may have two different blood types and two different DNA signatures. Wonder how facial recognition would deal with a person who looks like this picture?
http://timenolonger.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/human-chimera-brown-hazel-eyes.jpg
Sometimes even a single iris can be multicolored.
http://mythortruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Human-Chimera.jpg
pete,
“maybe i’m paranoid but i worry sometimes about anonymous being co-opted and used as a false source.”
Not paranoid in the slightest. False flag operations are a high utility tactic in counter intelligence.
Darren
good post. i remember not long after 9/11 they announced they would be using facial recognition for the crowd entering the stadium at the super bowl, also with random cameras set up in orlando.
my understanding at the time was that they had a lot of false positives but that was 10+ years ago.
OS
liked the link about anonymous stealing the e-mails. maybe i’m paranoid but i worry sometimes about anonymous being co-opted and used as a false source.
Larry:
I searched the data of the original patriot act and it mentioned more fingerprint technology, I wonder how it or some consequent legislation might have been amended or further broadened to include facial reco.
See Section 1008 of the act in the following link:
http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/patriot_text.pdf
It seemed to be more related to Immigration issues and consular services.
Mike:
When I was in college we learned of an incident that fostered embracing fingerprint usage many decades ago. During that time many years ago a man was arrested who’s profile matched the rudimentary identification system that was used at the time, in fact the two, the actual suspect and the man mistakenly arrested, looked almost like twins yet were unrelated. It was a significant event but I don’t remember the details.
There was an incident back in the 1980’s where a deputy I worked with had investigated a residential burglary and recovered a latent print on a window. He submitted the latent to the state crime lab and it came back a month or so later with a positive match. It was HIS. (it came from the Identification section when he applied for a law enforcement job with the state patrol.) It made for a few laughs at the sheriff’s office. But, there was one event where a similar situation went bad for one particular officer:
Officer Mistakenly Arrested
In the link, it shows how blindly relying on technology can lead to obvious errors when regular investigative work would rule out such false assumptions.
And you are correct about accusations of sedition, it is often used for dissent.
Mike,
Identical twins have the same DNA, but not the same fingerprints. Fingerprint patterns are determined by minute difference in the in utero environment. Retinal patterns are unique. Iris patterns are not, but the chance is so remote of the pattern repeating (something like 1 in 10^78) that it might as well be unique.
Welcome to guest blogging Darren and you’re off to a running start. It certainly raises some questions in my mind.
1. As Justice Holmes alluded this technology could also be used to manufacture evidence of a person being at an event.
2. I remember but can’t cite at least one instance wher two discrete people had the same DNA profile. There have been also more than a few cases where fingerprint “experts” misidentified prints in a capital case and the wrong man was arrested and convicted even though he had a solid alibi proving he was nowhere near the crime scene. Is the science behind the “uniqueness of the retinal scan foolproof?
3. Suppose someone in government decided that opinions we express in guest blogs are seditious and decided to track our every move. They make us aware of the tracking to produce a chilling effect on our writing. Since you and I have both worked for government entities we know that in some cases the orders that come down can be intemperate. I don’t think we really would want to grant individual government officials this power.
The counter-argument, which I personally reject is that this technology is only being used to protect us.
I fear, as you allude, that the genii is alresdy out of the lamp.
almost forgot to also mention the fact that we are at the least 40 yrs behind the military and government when it comes to technology the only reason they are allowing this to be leaked is because they are already on to the newest system of keeping the people enslaved…Also i agree with Puzzling most will on on the fema train headed to re-education camps before it really hits them with the truth of it all…. so i guess we should now smile everytime we have to renew any type of picture id….
you can hear those who still bite into the domestic lie of enemies we supposedly have. will clap their hands for this type of breach of privacy. im so sick of hearing the lie. the government is doing this to protect us. not even thinking of accepting the fact that the “Corporation” known to some people as the government is the worse enemy we have. Thank you Mr Smith for giving me something else to study up
Good job Darren and welcome. This facial recognition could be used to further erode our right to privacy. I wonder if the Patriot Act as amended allows the federal agencies to access the state information without a court order.
Great video links OS.
There is good reason to believe the government is combining the use of facial recognition technology with Trapwire. That is the data mining technology uncovered when WikiLeaks released the Stratfor memos. Here is a segment from The Young Turks. You can find more by Googling “Trapwire.”
Good start…
If they can tell you are there can they put you there if they want to? Am I paranoid? A few ears ago I would have said–you bet! Now I would say anything is possible and there are no limits. As a result when it becomes technically possible, if it not already so, they will.
Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the……
Darren,
Let me offer you a big welcome aboard as our newest Guest Blogger.
This is a great subject. The good news is the technology has bugs and glitches in it. The bad news is they are fixing it. I have been reading about this for quite a while. I see that several state and country law enforcement agencies are setting up for using it. Not only that, but private business is beginning to use it. For one thing, your face may become your password for all your digital devices, from your phone to your computer.
Not surprisingly, people are trying to figure out ways to beat it, the most bizarre being weird clown-like makeup. So far, that doesn’t work. Infrared LEDs on glasses are also being tried, in an effort to blind digital cameras. The “arms race” in facial recognition has already started.
We no longer have any secrets.
puzzling,
Because every phone can’t be specifically linked to an individual. Phones get lost, stolen, lent and some people use burners.
Darren,
Excellent first at bat. Welcome to the world of guest blogging.
Why bother to scan faces when the government knows the identity of every phone in the crowd?
Society can pretend to have an argument about where “the line” is regarding government surveillance and privacy. The reality is that by the time this society wakes up to put on the brakes we will be so far past the stop line that fate will be entirely out of the hands of citizens – if it isn’t already.
Think of where science and identification was just 20 years ago. Who knows how soon the technology will exist to continuously identify everyone in every public location at a DNA-level of precision? And that those whereabouts will all be logged forever? Do we also not expect children to be scanned for the necessary biometric information at birth for the government to track them for their lifetimes? We’re already doing or working to these things. I would rather spend time considering how society will change as a consequence, as I see no prospects that our government can or will be stopped by new lawmakers, aware courts, or constraints of technology.
The Bill of Rights is in grave danger.