Slashdot Mirror
Your Face Is Not a Bar Code
Phil Agre has a solid essay opposing automatic face recognition systems in public areas. These uses are only going to increase, because the technology is cheap (enough) and appealing to authorities everywhere; it's good to have some arguments to hand for opposing the spread of the cameras.
The cameras are not going to be used as a definitive identification device. There is a margin of error with all forms of identification. Eyewitness accounts have been proven to be inaccurate numerous times in the past. The cameras are simply a tool to help law enforcement officers perform their job more effectively. They are NOT the judge, jury and excecutioner. They ARE an effective method of helping the police identify possible fugitives. I think anything that takes some of the strain off of law enforcement officers and increases police efficiency should be embraced with open arms.
The cameras aren't infringing upon anyone's rights. You ARE NOT entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are in a public place. You ARE entitled to privacy within the confines of your home or private property. But that's not the issue. I don't understand how you can possibly be upset about someone taking your picture in public. If you've done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide, and applaud this system for making the streets safer for our children.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
Totalitarianism in this century is going to be a lot easier because the government won't have to employ tons of informants and security service personell. They can just use face recognition to watch everybody and find out who the dangerous people are or who the leaders of insurgencies are and then locate them and eliminate them efficiently without disrupting the daily lives of everybody else. Running a good security service was possible in low tech times but was a tremendous economic drain on any totalitarian country and required executing a lot of uneccessary people just to keep people on their toes.
We are seeing this put into practice, for better or for worse, in Israel. Let's ignore completely who's right and who's wrong in the whole thing (I don't want to get off topic). The Palestinans are still low tech and have to rely on generalized terror of the old inefficent kind that brings a lot more condemnation on them then they would like because it often kills people who are not involved in the conflict per se. The Israelis on the other hand have very good intelligence, possibly even face recognition that lets them locate leaders of insurgency groups and meticulously pick them off.
So in the future the world will enter an era of permanent stablity, for worse no doubt, because if you get out of line you can be effciently eliminated.
The only solution I can see to this is to put this kind of technology into the hands of civilians. Put together a big network of civilian owned face recognition systems and feed into them the faces of politicians and then watch what they do.
A security guard recognises a criminal from a mug shot on one of his cameras. He might be right, or mistaken. He'll have to check to be sure.
A piece of software flags a person as a criminal. It might be right or mistaken. It will have to let the security guard check it out to be sure.
The only difference is now one guard can handle more cameras better. The same with finger print software. You can check more fingerprints faster. The crime labs have used those for years. A human eye must still be the ultimate authority, the computer narrows the field a bit.
-Bocaj