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ACLU Examines Face-Recognition System
nate_drake and others wrote in about an ACLU report on face-recognition (PDF) (see also their press release and an MSNBC article). We've posted several previous stories about the Tampa police using face-recognition systems at the Super Bowl and on the streets of Ybor City.
all this means is the companies developing this stuff will have to improve their face-matching algorithm and then we'll all be back at square one.
It's worse than that:
How long until these companies start lobbying the gov't for mandatory inclusion of, say, license photos in the pool of database data so that people can be picked up as soon as they do something?
I used to park my bike in the garage beneath my work. The bike rack was about 3 meters from the attendent, and covered by a video camera. I had a cheap lock, but Ithought I was safe.
One day, I came to the rack to find my lock cut and my bike stolen. The attendant refused to talk to the police. But that's OK, I had the perpertrator on camera.
After getting the tape from the building security people, I took it to a camera shop. We sped through it to find the point where, sure enough,m you could see a guy walk up, try on my bike helmut, and ride off with the bike. Due to position, you could not see him cut the lock.
I say him because I am pretty sure that it was a male. That was all I could tell from the poor quality of the tape. I could not tell skin color, clothes, hair color, or enough facial features to recognize.
I don't think the best AI added to this image would have been able to do anything as far a facial recognition.
I wouldn't want to be the attenandt working that booth. After they find his mangled corpse (ala Fargo) the police will tell his widow, "Sorry Ma'am, all we can say for certain is that they were in some sort of automiblie. We think a sedan, but we don't know for sure."
Facial recognition is going to be even harder than this. As a programmer, you have two choices , go with an algorithm or try to use a neural network.
Most of the weaknesses in the algorthim approach are what the ACLU document was complaining about.
A neural network may work if you are looking for a specific person. The problem is that to identify two things as being different, they need to be as orthoganl as possible. To separate the sea of faces into two groups those we are loking for , and those we aren't based on a series of images is going to be nigh unto imposible. Certainly not with the amout of computing power per camera that they would put into it.
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As I understood it, the issue with facial recognition was the possibility of false positives; ie, I'm just trying to watch the SuperBowl. the FR system tags me as a known terrorist (incorrectly :) and the next thing I know I'm being dragged off to the can for some serious interregation (and not only unjustly tramatized, but I miss the game too)
But from the ACLU's press release, there was always a human step in the process, where a real live human being would examine each purported match before anybody got dragged off anywhere.
As such, all the face recognition software is is a _filter_, cutting down on the number of people a human agent must examine. Where's the problem?
After all, law enforcement officers have placed themselves in public places, looking for people they knew, for probably as long as there have been law enforcement officers.
A friend of mine was a sergent in the British Army, and he did a few tours in Northern Ireland. Part of his training was memorizing the faces of a large number of known IRA "players" (and apparently the IRA did the same thing with British soldiers' faces)
How is this any different?
I guess I don't understand the ACLU's beef here.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The ACLU's statement of fact, that face recognition doesn't work, is interesting and useful. It means that more work is necessary for this to be a functional technology.
But I'm not sure how that leads to their conclusion, "the technology does not deliver security benefits sufficient to justify the Orwellian dangers that they present." If the stuff doesn't work, then it doesn't present any dangers.
At least, not any more dangers than the police officer standing out there looking for people. I'm not sure that the ACLU would grant police that right, actually, since it is a violation of what they seem to consider an absolute right of privacy.
In my opinion, a society will always make exchanges of some about of liberty for security. For example, I don't have the liberty to shoot people. The boundaries will always be contentious, but it seems to be as if this sort of absolutism does not comprise a reasonable discussion of where the boundaries are most appropriately set.
All the ACLU wants to do is discredit the technology, not actually find out if it works. Therefore, they're going to adjust their "findings" to suit their benefit.
Just because the technology failed in their "one month study" doesn't mean it's not a success. How many criminals could be walking down the street of NYC right now without anyone even noticing them? I'm sure there are plenty! Even if you have the person's face plastered on every telephone post, could you with 100% accuracy point your finger and say "THAT IS THE GUY IN THE PHOTO!". I know I couldn't. How many times have people misidentified criminals... seeing someone and saying it looked like someone else... then when the police did looked into the suspect, found he or she was not guilty? This happens all the time. So to say that the technology is flawed because it picked up innocent people is just dumb.
The other point made was that was made in the MSNBC article was that the system failed to point out someone with a 15 degree variance in the image they had compared to the person being compared... or if the lighting situtation was different. Unless you know someone and you see them daily, can YOU tell a person by their profile view when you only have picture of their face? No, you can't. If it was dark, could you tell? No.
Another point, that the system was gender bias... well, I know several people who could go either way sexually... and if you were to look at someone with long hair and lipstick, wouldn't you consider them female? All the guys who pick up drag queens accidently in NYC everyday surely couldn't tell the difference between male and female!
ACLU is making lame points and has no real evidence. Then again, I haven't seen any university studies or other non-biased studies on this situation. The ACLU claims Tampa police have abandoned the technology, which seems to be an all out lie. It's all a bunch of bullshit, and that single item is the proof.
You don't know about biggERING? I guess you never read Dr. Seuss' "The Lifted Lorax" as a kid. Biggering is what happens to EVERY government everything...and many corporations as well. See, they're not happy being the size they are..so they bigGER. If you have one employee working for you, now you want two. Then two becomes four and so on and son on and so on. This police chief is the perfect example. he wants a biGGER police department. More toys = more employees needed to install, run and maintain the toys. Now he can say: Hey, I now run a 100 person dept. (as opposed to a 40 person one five years ago) I need a BIG raise (after all, crime is mostly down everywhere so he surely needs a biGGER dept, now doesn't he?)! And on it goes. Read the Lorax. You'll understand.
Your local convenience store can't detain you.
Well, technically they can. But the public, including that rent-a-cop in the convenience store, can only detain a person 1) if they witnessed a crime and 2) to turn them over to a sworn police officer at the earliest possible time. If either piece is missing, you can nail them for "false arrest." This is an important thing to remember if you're ever (wrongly) accused of shoplifting - demand a real cop, *now*, to either arrest you or release you. If they refuse to call the cops... life will soon get *very* interesting.
Even those bounty hunters have limited rights. They can detain someone who signed the bond papers, but there are some well-documented cases where the bounty hunters were prosecuted for kidnapping after detaining the wrong person and failing to exercise due diligence in verifying the identity of that person.
But sworn police officers can detain people even if the officer didn't witness a crime. They can detain people even if there's no witnesses at hand, e.g., if they reasonably believe that the person is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by another jurisdiction.
The cost of a false positive in a convenience store is minimal. They think you're a shoplifter because of their face recognition software? Fine, you walk away and shop at another store where they're more careful with their accusations.
But a false positive with a police officer may have you arrested, at gunpoint, and detained for hours or days until you can prove that you aren't the escaped mass murderer you resemble.
(IANAL, but this is stuff that should be required knowledge for a walking around on the street!)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Remember the good ol' days of th'Internet, where no one could possibly track you and where anonymity was technologically "guaranteed"
My point is, that arguing the TECHNICAL weaknesses of this, or any other privacy-infringing item/product/software/etc. will only result in TECHNICAL innovations that make it more effective.
We must argue the LEGAL weaknesses - the 4th amendment. We need to argue that no person waives their constitutional rights simply by the virtue of entering a commercial, travel, or other legal relationship with any other entity. (unfortunately, I fear we lost this one a long time ago)
We need to argue against clickwrap agreements, and their cousins:
Our legal rights are important. The details of whatever technology the FBI, CIA, or any other no - such - agency uses in an attempt to violate those rights, are less so.
Don't Frustrate their efforts. Fight them head - on!
The ACLU apparently isn't happy with the Idea, not the technology. They are using the primitive technology that is currently in place to discredit the "Idea" the Idea is superb. IF we can have monitoring stations around that can succesfully detect wanted criminals it would be very useful and an extremley powerful aide against crime. The technology doesn't store the faces anywhere, unless you're a criminal. The ACLU bitches b ecause our freedom and privacy is at risk. What Privacy? You're in a public area, an area which is under patrol by cops. If you do something illegal in this area you can be arrested. The lives of other citizens are also in this public area. Likewise you're freedom isn't hindered by this system, unless your a wanted criminal. This monitoring idea isn't bad and it doesn't infringe on your rights. You're in public. You're not in your house. The ACLU as with many other traditionally leftists organizations like to screw the betterment of mankind over with ramblings of Constituitional rights. When they know damn well that its simply not true. Its not like these things are being placed in your homes.
Pardon the bad grammar. And most likely spelling I just woke up and hung over
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
I can't wait for the surviellance society.
Pretty damn quick the powers that be will learn that people believe one thing Sunday morning and a completely different thing Friday night.
There's a reason Playboy and High Times stay in business -- although they don't freely admit it, people like sex and drugs. Just imagine our moral leaders' dismay at having their noses shoved in that nasty little fact with corroborating statistics. And the realization that you can't legislate human nature.
According to the report, it almost doesn't work at all. Other installations using face recognition have degenerated into checking out the girls. I understand; it's gotta be boring as can be after the first 50,000 false alarms.
It seems to me that this software isn't really an invasion of our privacy. The cameras themselves may be, but if we accept the cameras, we can't really quibble about the face recognition software.
It's time to reconsider our concepts of privacy, anyway. Read David Brin's The Transparent Society and see if you don't come up with a new view.
I think the cameras should be everywhere... especially the police station. And we should all be allowed to watch them. It would certainly make everyone think twice about their biases before taking drastic action.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
It strikes me that there is a pretty easy test one could give to these machines. They talk about the database of millions of photos (of criminal, hopefully). Why don't they compare each of the photos to the others in the database? If there are many hits it's obvious that there is a big false positive problem....
Or, it might find that some people believed to be different people are actually the same person.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
As a private (not public) citizen, the use of such face recognition systems inherently means they record my likeness.
In theory, under time-tested requirements for media recording, they cannot use my likeness without my permission.
Yet they are.
I did not grant usage to them, when I walked on the sidewalk. I did not sign a contract granting them usage in a film or TV show.
They stole my copyright!
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?