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Florida Surveillance Cameras Claim a Victim
kris_lang writes: "The St. Petersburg Times has an article that describes how an innocent man was tracked down because he was used as a "demo" face for Visionics Face-It face recognition software with their on-the-street video surveillance system in Tampa's Ybor City district. The "demo" image was printed in the St. Pete Times, and then sold to U.S. News and World Report which used it in an article. A USN&WR reader in Oklahama misidentified the face as being that of her ex-husband wanted on felony child neglect charges. The Tampa Police tracked him down to his job site and interrogated him. Now here's a question: how did they identify him in the first place to be able to track him down? Well, Florida has also been using digital photos for their newer driver's licenses. So they already have a handy-dandy database to work with."
Policemen torturing people for protesting on public property is a sign of an oppressive state. And the fact that no criminal or civil charges ever actually stuck in court is a confirmation that the state approves wholeheartedly of their actions.
Free Hans!
Yes, it is not the fault of the software, but the Florida surveillence cameras did claim a victim. Stop and think about it for a second. We have surveillence cameras pointed at ordinary, presumably innocent citizens. Combine constant surveillence and the fact that people tend to be stupid and stuff like this happens.
What happened was this:
1.Cops wanted publicity for shiney system, press wanted photos.
2. Some photographer took a photo, and the AP or some news wire requested it. It got sent, correctly captioned as saying "this mas is not a suspect".
3. Some intern at US News pulls the photo from the wire (I used to do this job in a major newspaper, stuff like this does get overlooked from time to time), redoes the caption, or perhaps forgets to include the caption, and it is sent to layout people.
4. Layout people redo the caption to suit space requirements and the focus of the story that accompanies it. They change the headline to the sensationalistic "You Can't Hide Those Lying Eyes in Tampa." and put the dudes face below it.
5. Magazine is published and read by an idiot. She calls cops.
I have not seen the caption of the photo, but I assume that the part about the dude being free of all suspicion was dropped to conserve space.
No matter whose fault it is, this still happened because we have cameras in public places, face recognition software enabled or not. This is a shining example to show to the people who support invasions of privacy what kind of harm they can really do, and it does a good job of eroding the "Well, if they aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about" argument. This kind of crap is wrong, and the fact that the mistake was made by human eyes and not a digital ones does little to fix it, and little to sooth my worries
If Officer Friendly misidentifies me as a wanted felon, if the case proceeds to trial I'll get to examine him on the witnes stand and test his powers of face-matching.
Who do I subpoena when Amalgamated Profits, Inc.'s latest Eyewitless XP software flags me as being a bad guy? Can I have design docs and test records introduced into evidence? Can I make the prosecution track down every developer and engineer and bring them to the stand?
It's bad enough when cops with no understanding of physics are given radar guns and the ability to hand out tickets. (Did you know that radar waves won't reflect from a stationary metal surface, only a moving one? That was the testimony of a Baltimore County cop who ticketed me last year.) Now cops with no understanding of software failability are being given buggy software and the ability to drag people off at gunpoint based on its output. The fun's just getting started.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Privact issues aside, A woman misidentified a photo of someone as her exhusband, who was wanted by police. Police want to use software to match mugshots of wanted crooks against surveillence photos off the streets. If a woman couldn't correctly ID someone she knew, how can the police expect an automated system to do the same?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
In the United States, there is a presumption of innocence. Face-recognition systems assume the opposite: you are a wanted criminal and only a null result on their database search proves you are NOT, in fact, a criminal. It's hard for us to be critical of these systems because, superficially, we don't want the bad people to get away. The pro-surveillance arguement is something like: "Well, if you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear". But it's not that simple: I have a right to expect that I am assumed to be an innocent civilian until proven otherwise. I should not have to prove my innocence on a daily basis. These things should be ruled unconstitutional.
IANAL, of course
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Because different states have different laws. Secret cameras can record you in public while you are in Florida, but you cannot secretly record police when they pull you over in Massachusettes. Its not a double standard because the laws were passed by two different legislatures and affect two different groups of people.
I can tell you first hand how much controvery this has spurned in the greater Tampa Bay area. The cameras were installed quite awhile ago, and have been used as passive crowd surveilance to help the police monitor and track criminal activity on the busy streets of Ybor City.
The cameras on the street are not hidden whatsoever, and with the media hype that surrounded their installation, I would imagine the larger percentage of people who live in that area, were aware of them being there.
Unfortunately, mistaken criminal recognition problems are going to arise anytime the only verification method used is cameras in a surveilance environment. I think the main goal now should be to make sure that mistakes are recognized before law enforcement contacts alleged offenders. If there had been even the most minimal of checks and balances involved in the investigation of the gentleman in this article, the problem would most likely have been averted.
- tre
http://piclabs.com
I live in Tampa. Which recently has turned out to be unfortunate. Here are the facts about the face scanning in Ybor City.
First, thus far the system has not identified ONE SINGLE criminal.
The system has falsely identified numerous innocent passers by. However, officers were easily able to determine that the identification was false, without detaining the victim.
Florida driver's license pictures ARE digitized and maintained in a State database, which IS how they tracked down this man.
The Mayor of Tampa has stated that he is not interested in the objections of the City Council or the general public. The Mayor's veto power will prevent the removal of the system. The Mayor has public stated that the system stays!
So, lets see. The system doesn't work. The system falsely identifies innocent people. The city is connecting with other databases such as the states DL pictures to broaden their tracking capabilities. Oh no, there's no problem here.
These are being replaced by the new "Live Linked" or 'SPECS' cameras, they just look like normal CCTV cameras but they grab images based on speed then OCR your plate and automatically drop a fixed speed fine through your door. Not unlike the Gatso's, they're even more fool proof, slowing down for them makes no difference apart from giving them a clearer shot, since they monitor you speed along the route until the camera. Very efficient, well for HM Treasury at least.
They started appearing on the motorways near here. My local authority has also started slashing speed limits across the whole county in anticipation of the new wave of cameras planned. I can name numerous roads which were 60mph 18-months ago, then dropped to 40mph and now 30mph, and in some circumstances I'm talking about straight dual carriageways in the middle of the countryside away from homes/schools etc, they're obviously planning to cash in.
This system was adapted from an anti-terrorist system called ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) used in the Square Mile (aka. London Docklands, the financial district) it logs cars in and out of the The City and checks if they're uninsured, untaxed, not registered or stolen etc. An added benefit is it alerts the police to 'missing' cars, i.e. a vehicle than drove in say 10 hours ago but never came out, it could be another car bomb etc.
I quote from the following Guardian article Anyway, just for cars, the UK is also on the forefront of pedestrian and public surveillance
Long before the superbowl fiasco a facial recognition system has been running the London borough of Newham, it's unfortunately called Mandrake and scans pedestrians faces then compares them to those of known criminals. There's only 140 cameras in Newham linked up to this system, which is an absolute drop in the ocean when you count the number of cameras in the UK, they just look like standard cameras.
More cameras are expected to ensure we maintain our monopoly as the most surveyed country on the planet, as mentioned earlier this is in addition to the numerous new speed cameras due.
There's also huge convergence emerging too, since CCTV/SPECS/ANPR are all basically the same thing but with different backend processing software. Just like the net, the power is in the convergence of many disparate innumerable nodes.
What's going on in the UK is a huge experiment, the rest of the world can learn from it, ether way.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." - Orwell, 1984