

How Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Spy on Thousands - fizl
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/beantowns-big-brother

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veidr
I've been trying to beat this drum for a long time, sometimes on this very
forum.

Face and gait recognition really is the scariest thing going on these days. I
don't like the NSA snorting _all_ the phone calls and the emails, either, but
there are reasonable countermeasures.

To avoid this shit, you can't go anywhere, ever, unless you're in disguise and
you breakdance/shuffle down the street.

It's a short jump from license plate recognition to face/gait recognition.
Sure, the software isn't as good yet as it is with license plates (near
perfect), but everybody on this website knows it will get there. And 'they'
will be able to do all the same things they can do with license plates.

Not only track where you are and whether you go to this place or that place;
they can decide _ten years from now_ to find out _where you went over the past
decade_.

And, they don't need a black budget and the complicity of major corporations
to do it. In this case, _they_ can be the Sausalito police, Starbucks, or your
local shopping mall.

~~~
uesername
> To avoid this shit, you can't go anywhere, ever, unless you're in disguise
> and you breakdance/shuffle down the street.

Make no mistake: in a world with that breed of surveillance, not going
anywhere or breakdancing down the street in disguise will be guaranteed to
flag you as "interesting" and a good candidate for "special" investigation.

And that's a feature.

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uptown
This is happening in NYC too. Over the past couple years, they've installed
cameras just past each subway turnstile which are perfectly positioned to
capture an image similar to the one shown in this document. Link that data
with the swipe-data from your metrocard, which is more-times-than-not
associated with a credit card, and you've got a pretty good way to not only
pair a face with a name, but also follow somebody around the underground.
Additionally, subway stations are gradually adding cell service, providing
additional vectors for use in monitoring using Stingray or some other tracking
technology.

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datasmash
What's astounding to me here is not that they're doing this kind of
surveillance, but that they uploaded everything to an unsecured FTP server.

~~~
HCIdivision17
That's really the galling bit, isn't it? There's a lot of [imho] justified
outrage about the liberties taken by government enforcement groups, but that
they also seem to be lousy at it is unsettling. On the one hand the
carelessness is worrying, but on the other I feel reassured they'll never get
their act together well enough for a full MiniLove. There's a terrifying
potential for finesse in oppressive targeting - and reports tell of it
happening - but it seems to botch and backfire enough to keep it public and
exposed. At least, some industrious reporter or watchdog hacker will spot it
and publicize it.

So perhaps we just need to get better at exploiting that propensity to screw
up. Though it's a bit worrying incompetence is one of our checks and balances
on the government.

~~~
bdevani
^ this. so now we know the govt may not be on top of it enough to really
utilize this info, but it is all out there..and when these activities get
privatized, there will be a larger cause for concern

~~~
chimeracoder
If you want to talk about private companies already conducting appalling and
creepy levels of tracking, look no further than downtown Palo Alto - Palantir
has got you covered.

~~~
datasmash
Shhh! They're listening!

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kens
Once facial recognition technology is deployed on a large scale, it can be
leveraged in some scary ways.

First, when it's tied into a network of surveillance cameras, the cameras
become useful for tracking a person rather than a location. They could easily
search for any video caught of you, forever.

Second, when you have a network of cameras you can track everyone's location
at a very fine resolution, orders of magnitude better than tracking via cell
phone towers. (And the cell phone tower data can be used to help with facial
recognition since you can narrow down candidates of who might be in the
photo.)

Third, once you're tracking locations in a network, the accuracy becomes
pretty much 100% since you just need to match an unknown person once and then
you can propagate their identity as they move around.

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theg2
"Spy" on people at a public event where there are thousands of people taking
pictures and posting it online. Also, it was IBM doing the test, the BPD just
let them run the test and evaluated it for the future. BPD is not using this
system yet as it not yet released by IBM.

~~~
hackuser
> "Spy" on people at a public event where there are thousands of people taking
> pictures and posting it online.

The people in those pictures are not being identified, and it's not being done
by a law enforcement agency (or being considered as an option by a law
enforcement agency).

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plorg
Seems to rely heavily on the following source, including subsequent parts of
an ongoing series of articles:

[http://digboston.com/boston-news-opinions/2014/08/boston-
tro...](http://digboston.com/boston-news-opinions/2014/08/boston-trolling-
part-i-you-partied-hard-at-boston-calling-and-theres-facial-recognition-data-
to-prove-it/)

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tinalumfoil
> We really need to get a handle on what exactly government agencies are
> doing. Not just thinking about it, but actually acting on public concerns
> about how this technology is going to be used against us, and actually
> passing laws that restrict some of the ways.

Ever since the ruling shooting videos in public is a constitutional right is
going to make this extremely difficult. Especially so when you consider human
ability to recognize people has always existed meaning this is only a more
efficient version of what police/private businesses can already do.

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mschuster91
Sounds like always wearing sunglasses when in public should be a basic measure
of getting privacy from the government.

Creepy shit.

~~~
hackuser
> Sounds like always wearing sunglasses when in public should be a basic
> measure of getting privacy from the government

I've heard about that solution, but I wonder if it really works. For example,
using just the shape of your sunglasses and the shape of your chin, probably
you could be uniquely tracked if not identified. To identify you, other
physical features may work (nose, chin, gait, etc.).

~~~
Torgo
Biometric ear recognition. Google it, there's plenty of research in this area.

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waylandsmithers
Liberty or security. Choose one.

