
FBI to launch nationwide facial recognition service - cyanbane
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20111007_6100.php?oref=topstory
======
ck2
Oh this will end well. Nah it will never be abused or have mission creep.

Now the TSA will have a database to use on everyone while they wait in line
for a bus, train or plane.

You protested at OWS? No flying for you. Oh you false match a felon? No flying
for you either.

I wonder when they will just start grabbing people left and right off the
street to do iris scans like the military does to the locals in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

~~~
antics
IMO, that's super myopic. When intelligence agencies do something visible to
the American public that causes any sort of discussion, it forces what they
are doing (which is usually supposed to be secret) into the spotlight, which
makes them generally more accountable. They do not like to do their job with
people looking over their shoulder; they typically avoid this wherever
possible. Besides that:

* Even on a very good day, the government is demonstrably bad at deploying new technology, especially at scale.

* Especially when that scale involves training any personnel at all.

* Especially when people are wary of that technology anyway.

* Especially when they are deploying suspicious technology in a visible arena.

* Especially when this technology will be observing US persons.

It doesn't look like it from the outside, but there is a lot of politics and
bureaucracy in deploying a system like this, not just internally, but also
from places like politicians.

In my experience, people who have never been around an organization like the
FBI seem to have a naive view of what is possible. My recommendation is to
critically evaluate anything that anyone tells you about what goes on in such
places.

~~~
nextparadigms
I think that's being a little too naive. Let's face it. The trend is turning
USA into a police state. How isn't that not clear by now? Every other day they
add new stuff like this, or breach more privacy or expand TSA in other areas,
and so on.

~~~
antics
FUD, [edit:] IMHO. [not trying to be a dick.]

The TSA is not an intelligence organization. Its job is not to secretly
develop intelligence. It does not have the same problem of needing to not be
accountable to the public as, say, the FBI or the NSA.

Second, that claim is a lot stronger than you're pretending it is. If you're
going to throw around a term like "police state", you will need a lot more
proof than hand-wavy "every day they add new stuff like this". Everything in
your argument is attributable to selection bias, and if you're going to level
a convincing point, you will need to do more than appeal to the fact that
people seem to _want_ to believe this stuff. TBH when you say that, it makes
me wonder if you really know what a police state even is.

Third, my point is not that there is no abuse or that the government is
incapable of doing bad things, it's that we should be evaluating pie-in-the-
sky predictions with actual evidence. "We are becoming a police state, DUH" is
not evidence. And neither is the ridiculous claim that tomorrow the OWS people
will be barred from flying.

~~~
sp332
The TSA maintains a secret watchlist and black list. The fact that this list
seems to be arbitrary and disconnected from intelligence agencies doesn't make
it better.

~~~
antics
I totally agree.

------
luu
The only surprising thing about this is that it took so long for them to do
it. I'd actually assumed that they were already doing this.

~~~
mirkules
At the state level, there are some states that have already implemented facial
recognition. I can tell you that even at the state level, integration was not
easy. At a federal level, IAFIS is not limited by capability, but by sheer
size of the database and the number of requests -- this only for fingerprint
packets (I don't remember if they process palm data, but palm data definitely
increases packet size significantly).

The point is, sometimes we are mesmerized by prototypes and applications at a
small scale, but when you increase the scale, development, integration, and
deployment challenges (edit: and costs) increase exponentially.

------
antics
Less concerned about privacy. More concerned about what this sort of thing
means to juries.

A lot of forensic "evidence" is not actually completely conclusive, but people
seem to have a built-in notion of how solid, say, fingerprint and DNA analysis
are. It's sometimes very hard to convince a jury that these things are not
necessarily incriminating, which is very bad because on a surprisingly often
basis they are not strong enough to warrant conviction.

Facial recognition is also not completely foolproof, and while I applaud the
idea that we should leverage technology to catch criminals who would otherwise
go free, I personally am not willing to do so at the cost of innocent
convictions. I recommend proceeding down this path cautiously.

~~~
pavel_lishin
On the other hand, "CSI" has made juries expect hard scientific evidence of
the sort presented on the show, which rarely if ever actually happens in real
life. It's possible that juries will refuse to convict without a positive
identification by this new system - which, like all projects, will probably be
riddled with bugs, and be useless for awhile.

On the gripping hand, you've got your false positives.

------
goodweeds
Do you ever wonder why it is that as a nation, or a species, we have nothing
more creative to do with our monetary and intellectual resources than to use
them for the creation of weapons of war, or to create new means of
imprisonment?

Can't we do better?

~~~
rick888
I wish we could, but the problem is there will always be new forms of
criminals that need to be imprisoned and wars that need to be fought.

What I want to know is why we need to have rapists, murderers, and criminals?
Can't we do better as a species?

~~~
tricolon
> wars that need to be fought

No war needs to be fought.

~~~
positr0n
No war? What would you have done if you were a leader of a European country at
the onset of WWII? Just let Hitler come in and take everything? Or were you
just referring to modern wars?

~~~
goodweeds
Invoking Godwin's law so early? Hitler's rise to power probably could have
been prevented had the EU existed earlier, or had Ford's german subsidiary not
built Hitler's armaments.

~~~
positr0n
haha yes so sorry but it seemed like the best example.

Well of course if you have power to change history you could avoid any war,
but that doesn't seem like it answers my question.

------
ben1040
A few years ago I signed up for a NEXUS pass[1] and was background checked,
fingerprinted, photographed, and had my iris scans taken. I can only assume
that my information had to have been transferred to other databases such as
this as well.

[1]
[http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/trusted_traveler/nexus_pro...](http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/trusted_traveler/nexus_prog/)

~~~
oniTony
And soon you might be eligible to come up as a false-positive for all kinds of
FBI lookups!

~~~
astrodust
One step closer to Brazil.

If law enforcement didn't hold such blind faith in technology I'd be
encouraged by this development. Instead you're likely to get nabbed for the
crime of simply looking like a criminal.

------
zerostar07
I thought it was called "facebook"[1].

[1] [http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-
dramatic...](http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-
cut-agencys-cos,19753/)

------
naner
Facebook's massive identity database with linked photos would be useful for
this service.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I wonder how difficult it would be to write an app that subtly distorts facial
features in photographs, and pass every photo I upload through it.

Is there a point where I would be recognizable to friends and family, and yet
make algorithms choke?

And if there is, I wonder what would happen when my grandchildren are looking
through old photoalbums, and wondering why Grandpa looks a little weird in all
of his photos.

~~~
schwit
Then they will arrest you for interfering with a law enforcement officer. Not
that it will stick, but by the time you get it cleared up you are $100k in the
hole from legal expenses and a message has been sent to anyone else thinking
of doing the same.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'd love to see which specific officer would be named in the warrant.

------
russell
"if you don't come to the attention of law enforcement you don't have anything
to fear from these systems.", Thomas Bush.

What utter crap. Everyone comes to the attention of law enforcement or some
other govt. data collection agency. I was once booked into jail for driving
without a license. I had one, just another state. My son was put in a mental
hospital and booked into jail for assaulting an officer, because he had a
violent reaction to a general anesthetic and the dentist called the police.
Ever had a driver's license or a passport? Maybe they'll even collect student
ids; protect the children and all that.

------
amandalim89
They should use a Facebook api to power their facial recognition search with
the social information behind each face. Wouldn't that be powerful?

------
jsaxton86
Does anyone have another source for this information?

------
cgs1019
A billion dollar budget and 15 minute query times? What happened to the
government having mindblowingly awesome tech?

~~~
sp332
It can take days or weeks to get a result back from AFIS (fingerprint
database). 15 minutes for a national face recognition system _is_
mindblowingly awesome.

