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Tampa Police Give Up On Face Recognition Cameras
Saint Aardvark writes "The city of Tampa has given up on their face-recognition system attached to street surveillance cameras."
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If you ignore the privacy worries for a minute the most interesting thing
in this story is that the system didn't work. It didn't work in Tampa,
it didn't work in Pinellas County and it isn't working in Virgina Beach.
So you've got a dud system that's wasting police time. In Tampa they had
a full time officer using the system who could have been out on the streets
in the community that he is trying to protect understanding and interacting
with that community. If you talk to police officers, reporters, or social
workers I think you'd find that they value highly local knowledge in doing
their jobs, not all seeing all knowing eyes in the sky.
John.
that they have lost face?
But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications
I'm sorry, I didn't catch that... how many false positives did you say the system had?
These systems will never work untill they can figure out a way to store such information as faces and other physical attributes holographically. 2D photography won't ever do it accurately enough to make the system functional.
Stupid Humans.....
Facial recognition is such a cool technology. It could have had enormous impact on how we interact with things like ATM machines, computers (don't have to type in my /. password!), and robots. Hopefully someone else will pick up where they left off.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Why not site these cameras at ports and airports as any dodgy people would appear with their faces obscured so you could just arrest them...
The Register has a story here.
Interestingly enough, they mention successful system in Scotland being up to 70% successful in "crowd".
Cameras on every corner. Web based cameras. Pan and zooming cameras... With some recognition software.. We could build something that dispenses beads when it recognizes ... umm...
Or not. It didn't work. No duh. Did anyone really think it would? I always got the idea of the guy selling these was like the monorail salesman in the Simpsons.
I'm completely amazed that the general public has become conditioned to tolerate this crap from law enforcement. Yes, it's nice that it's gone now, but we all know it will be back. And furthermore, the cameras themselves are still there!!! I mean, come on!! We should be outraged enough that the cameras are there, let alone the facial recognition.
Is civil disobedience dead or has civil disobedience become outlawed? What sort of legal/semi-legal countermeasures can be taken against surveillence cameras set up in public places? I'd love to have some sort of laser pointer that I can point at cameras in public areas to break them.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Virginia Beach, Va., installed the software on closed-circuit cameras along the city's boardwalk last summer. That's hilarious, I wonder if ODB ever cleared up his record down there or if he would set off an alarm.
... with more effective pattern matching software watching it: human cops. I think that's a better deterrent to crime than the flaky software they've given up on.
Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
If I were selling you a million dollar system it would work when I showed it off too.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
This news site dosen't seem to be up to the slashdot effect. Heres the text.
Tampa police eliminate facial-recognition system
By MITCH STACY
Associated Press
AP Photo
A surveillance camera is seen in the Ybor City area of Tampa, Fla., in this June 2001, file photo.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Civil-rights advocates celebrated a decision by Tampa police to scrap a highly touted facial-recognition software system that was designed to scan the city's entertainment district for wanted criminals.
But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications and no arrests.
"It was of no benefit to us, and it served no real purpose," Capt. Bob Guidara said Wednesday, emphasizing the decision to drop the software was based on its ineffectiveness rather than privacy issues.
Tampa became the first city in the United States to install the software in June 2001 to scan faces in Ybor City nightlife district and check them against a database of more than 24,000 felons, sexual predators and runaway children.
But critics said it violated privacy rights, forcing Ybor City visitors to be in what amounted to an electronic police lineup without their consent.
Darlene Williams, chairwoman of the Tampa area chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she's glad it's gone.
"People have the right to be anonymous, and not to be put in a police lineup for committing the offense of walking down a public street," Williams said.
"As a culture we have always given police the tools that are deemed appropriate to do their jobs. (But) this was handled without public input or foreknowledge, and that was wrong."
New Jersey-based Visionics Corp. had offered the city a free trial use of a the program, called FaceIt. It was installed on closed-circuit cameras that police used to monitor Ybor City crowds on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
A police officer in a room three blocks away monitored video images and could pick out faces in the crowd to scan and run through a criminal database to search for matches.
Initially, it could be used only with one of the system's 36 cameras at a time, but an upgrade last year allowed use on up to six of the cameras.
Critics compared it to George Orwell's novel "Animal farm" and Texas Rep. Dick Armey, the U.S. House majority leader at the time, called for congressional hearings on the technology. Protesters donned bandanas, masks and Groucho glasses on one busy Saturday night to show their contempt.
Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
Meir Kahtan, a spokesman for the company, now known Identix Inc. after a merger between Visionics and the security technology company Identix, declined to answer questions on the matter Wednesday.
The company's only comment came in a one-sentence statement that seems to suggest privacy issues were behind the Tampa's decision.
"Identix has always stated that this technology requires safeguards, and that as a society we need to be comfortable with its use."
Guidara said the closed-circuit cameras installed in 1997 will remain in Ybor City without the face-scanning capabilities. They are effective as a deterrent and have helped police foil crimes, he said.
Face-scanning technology is still being used in other cities. The airport, jail and jail visitation areas in Pinellas County are using it, but it has never resulted in an arrest, officials said.
Virginia Beach, Va., installed the software on closed-circuit cameras along the city's boardwalk last summer. While it has never produced a hit or an arrest, police spokesman Sgt. Max Hayden said it performed well in controlled tests and may be a deterrent to criminals. Signs along the boardwalk inform visitors of its use.
"It would not be prudent to take technology offline when it's been up and running for a year, based on another city deciding not to use it," Hayden said.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
This has been a MAJORLY over-hyped technology. Facial recognition isn't so hard, but the attentional mechanisms required to pick faces out of a crowd reliably under varying lighting conditions are still iffy at best. Most still seem to rely on skin color detection to pick out candidate areas of a scene, and, frankly, that method is still pretty dicey when used out in the real world.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
This is awesome ... finally I can visit Tampa again!
So what happen to Miami Vice?
Did they catch everyone already?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It's really useful for helping prevent street crime, and catching real criminals. Rather than have dozens of police officers wandering about the streets more-or-less aimlessly, a smaller number can be directed to trouble spots very quickly.
Furthermore, CCTV helps catch vandals where there wouldn't ordinarily be police in an area. Car got the windows tanned? Get the police to check the CCTV tapes.
I don't buy into thie "They're invading our privacy!" thing. If you're walking down a busy street, you are *not* in private - you're in a very public place, which likely doesn't belong to you.
If there are signs everywhere informing people of its use, would a felon really go anywhere *near* the system? Doesn't seem like it. To felons, these signs mean "come walk over here and we'll arrest you." Perhaps this is why it's not working.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
Civil disobedience has always been outlawed. It's definition is to frigging disobey a law you don't agree with.
It's effectiveness is a whole another matter. If enough people are willing to go to jail for their beliefs, politicians usually take notice of them. Just make sure the law your breaking is a misdemeanor and not a felony...felons don't vote.
Peanuts. Discuss.
Or was it just me thinking this story is lacking in substance?
But how paranoid do you have to be? Only criminals have to fear this, and there's no reason a criminals "privacy" should be protected in a public area. Outlawing these cameras would be like outlawing a citizen from calling when they recognize the guy on the street.
Virginia Beach, Va., installed the software on closed-circuit cameras along the city's boardwalk last summer. While it has never produced a hit or an arrest, police spokesman Sgt. Max Hayden said it performed well in controlled tests and may be a deterrent to criminals. Signs along the boardwalk inform visitors of its use.
This reminds me of a DUI checkpoint I saw a couple of months ago. They had not one, but TWO signs 6 and 4 blocks, respectively, that said, "DUI checkpoint ahead". There were plenty of opportunities to turn down another street and avoid it altogether.
Does it really take that much intelligence for a criminal to avoid an area where he/she might get caught? While one might be so drunk as to not be able to read the signs, I think law inforcement in these circumstances is being as stupid as these criminals. Maybe it's that think like your enemy strategy.
----
Squirrel
... because every time the governor and the voting inspection officials walked by, they would be flagged as criminals for fraud and racketeering...
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My first reaction was, did they drop it because of community pressure or because it was ineffective?
But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications and no arrests
Unfortunatly, this is not a victory. When the technology is ready, it will be back.
All your base are belong to us!
Let me ask you this question:
Do you want to live in a state where the infrastructure of a police state is built?
What happens when some crazy maniac buys his way into office?
Many of the persecuted in nazi germany escaped due to the fact that documents could be forged and secuirity inefficiencies.
is most criminals don't like to party. (Ybor has become an area with a lot of night clubs and a lot of insane partying)
They aready know where OJ lives!
That's the great thing about government contracts: it's not whether it works, it's who you know with their face in the pork trough...
Roger that. Lie detectors don't work, have been scientifically shown not to work since sometime around 1616CE, and yet the USG continues to use it as a condition of employment in many areas. Moronic.
I'm just happy that in this case a law enforcement agency actually stopped doing something because it didn't work. That doesn't always happen.
I work for a local CCTV/Surveilance/Locksmith here and we do work for some pretty major companies in the area (Power companies, paper mills, food production facilities, etc).
We put in some incredibly high end equipment and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to match a face to a database. Biometrics has gone pretty far, but to match enough points of a face and have it at just the right angle would be nearly impossible. For even a hand scanner to work correctly you need to have your hand in there just right so it'll read your finger prints.
Eye scanners have a hard enough time with you not doing things just right. It's no surprise that their facial recognition software wouldn't be able to make positive ID's. Besides, it's my experience that people do NOT like to be constantly watched. Privacy rights are going to play a large role in the coming years of CCTV.
According to a radio report on NPR, Tampa did not spend money directly on the system. The surveillance cameras were already in place (and will remain in place) and Identix provided the software on some kind of free-trial or beta basis. Of course, I'm sure a great deal of police time = money was wasted on training, etc.
The reporter discussed the issue of false positives with the interviewee, in a somewhat vague way. The reporter said, sensibly enough, something like "Isn't the problem that if you require too many measurements to match you don't get identifications, and that if you only require a few you get false positives?" The interviewee concurred. I got the impression that the police department might have insisted that the system be tuned to a level where they were not wasting time on false positives, and at that level there were simply no matches.
The reporter also asked (also sensibly) whether the apparent lack of success could have been because the system's installation was widely publicized and the bad guys knew better than to show up in Ybor City. Interestingly enough, the interviewee said something like "If I believed that, it would be a great thing and I'd want to keep the system in place forever." I was, however, left with the distinct impression that the interviewee did NOT believe that.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They should have put CowboyNeal in front of a camera. At least they would have one positive ID... ("hey, that's the f***er who stole all those pizza's and portables last week")
was that they did not want many false positives. So they decided on a very high match before a person was flagged. They did not want a "looser" match as that would give them false positives.
The technology is there to get the bad guy, but we might have to put up with getting mistaken for the bad guy from time to time. We need to decide if its worth it.
later,
epic
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
This system seems to have tripped across a common problem with all id recognition systems - face, retina, voice, fingerprint, whatever. That is that they are used in two completely different modes.
One mode is the verification mode: this person claims to be Mr XYZ: is he? For this purpose, you only have one identity to match. If the answer comes out "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no", you can take another photo/scan/whatever. You can use extremely number intensive checking techniques because you are only trying to match ONE face/eye/... to ONE record. And the people being checked have at least some incentive to help their system (remove glasses, get a rescan when they have hair cut or grow beard). Systems can be made to do this very reliably in this mode - call it mode 1.
You can scale this up a little bit, while maintaining reliability. A car, for example, might recognise the voices of four registered drivers and adjust itself to suit, or a secure area form a few tens of people. Call this mode 1A.
The second mode is when you are trying to detect any one of a large list of possible people in a huge crowd, when they may have changed their characteristics significantly, either intentionalyy or unintentionally. Call this mode 2.
The trouble is that a lot of people assume that, if you can scale from 1 to 1A, the scaling from 1A to 2 will be linear. Which it won't. As well as the linear scaling of vastly more records to match (a linear scaleing), there is the the no-rescan, chjanged face, uncooperative facto, which acts quadratically with the fist. This means the problem explodes uncontrollably very soon.
Some of the people making this assumption should know better.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I think this is a good sign that we generally don't need to worry about systems like these invading our privacy. Whenever cameras are put up somewhere, people often get worried that The Government is going to somehow use it against Normal Innocent People. If that were the government's purpose, then it wouldn't have been taken down. The fact that it was taken down shows that the ostensible purpose, to catch criminals, was in fact the true purpose, and there's no conspiracy behind it all. There's a big difference between invading one's privacy by taking pictures in a changing room (ostensibly to prevent theft), and taking pictures on a crowded street (where you expect to be seen anyway, right?).
This side up.
Oh, that's coming. Not with cameras, but with rfid chips. First on high risk immigrants and former criminals, to better combat terrorism and to be better able to help integration into normal lives. Or some similar constructed reasons. And we won't react too much, because we want to feel safe, and after all, it's not us law-abiding citizens that they're monitoring. And it's just a step up from the monitoring bracelets that criminals serving their sentence at home use, right?
But it won't stop there, I'm afraid.
Ultimately, I fear that the governments' perceived need for monitoring everyone will mean that our descendants won't know a world with freedom to walk around in anonymity and privacy. It won't be 1984 or Brazil, but it will be a very different place.
In the end, the only people excempt from surveillance will be politicians, who need their freedom to better serve the country. Or some similar drivel. If anyone should be monitored, let's START with the politicians. Installing a few cameras that keep track of the very top figures would be a good start -- after all, they have nothing to hide, do they?
Regards,
--
*Art
If you ignore the privacy worries for a minute...
You have no right to privacy on a public street or in a public place.
In Tampa they had a full time officer using the system who could have been out on the streets
in the community that he is trying to protect understanding and interacting with that community.
While the software is a failure, having a single full time officer watching the cameras is a good way to 'patrol' a larger area. Examine the case of having six cameras that scan six widely separated areas in a downtown neighborhood. It would take six full time officers to monitor the area as thoroughly as that one officer and six cameras could. This frees up five officers for use as a response team or to walk beats in areas that are not amenable to camera surveillance.
I dislike the use of "officer" to describe the person monitoring the cameras. Why does the individual have to be a certified law officer? A "dispatcher" would be a better description. They would dispatch the "highly trained" certified law officers in the patrol area to the site of the problems.
My WAG from around twenty-five years of observation is: 90% of wanted criminals at large the police do arrest are discovered in random encounters like traffic stops or from someone that knows the criminal tipping off the law.
You also have a misconception. The police in the United State are under no obligation to protect you. They are there to deter crime and enforce laws. If you are in the process of being assaulted and call 911, you cannot hold the police responsible failing to protect you when they show up 20 minutes to an hour after the perpetrator has fled the scene leaving you in a pool of your own blood. The courts have repeatedly held this to be true. Regardless of what the TV tries to tell you and what some departments paint of the side of their patrol cars, the police have no legal duty to protect you. They only have a duty to enforce the laws by issuance of citations or arrest of criminals. Even their powers of arrest are limited by the risk to by standers. Police cannot arrest a criminal if the attempt to apprehend would pose a danger to the public at large.
Why on earth would people put cameras in private homes? It's one thing to put cameras on public streets, quite another to put them in houses. It's something that works quite well in the UK. Possibly because we're not twitching and quivering at the mention of "terrorism", having had to put up with US-funded terrorism for around 40 years.
30% is abysmal. Utterly useless. For something like this to be useful it has to be better than 99% accurate, much better than 99%.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
They didn't have any positive identifications but do they know for certain that the crimials they were looking for passed in front of the camera? Were criminals aware of the cameras and simply avoiding them?
Not really. It just moves the crime away from the cameras.
So the logical conclusion is cameras don't work? Hmm I add a camera and the crime relocates out of the view of the camera. What if you keep adding camera coverage? The crimes have fewer areas to occur unimpeded. Larger areas enjoy fewer crimes and more honest citizens traffic in those protected areas since they are safer. Since fewer dispatchers can monitor larger areas you can concentrate the law enforcement officers on the beat in the unmonitored areas and arrest more crooks.
You remind me of the people that say mandatory sentencing doesn't work. Funny thing is now we have mandatory sentencing guidelines and put criminals in prison and leave them there, there are people who whine about the rising prison population. No one seems to notice that the crime rates across the US are uniformly decreasing as the criminals are taken off the street for longer periods of time. The cameras work that way too. People like you want a direct effect that is the total solution not a series of indirect consequences that mitigate an essentially us solvable problem.
The history of electronics has been filled with these sorts of duds that later became big deals. Example- the PDA. In the 90s, an early PDA called the Newton had similar software that was supposed to recognise handwriting, but it didn't work too well. Later that decade, everyone who was anyone had a PDA that worked. I think this face recognition technology could become big in the future; just give it some time. Hopefully it will be usewd for good not evil? Just a thought. :)
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
They have been talking about intelligent machines for years, presumably carried away because of their initial success during the 60s. So far, they have yet to deliver something that does tasks, like vision processing, that even humble animals can do.
Unless things change, I see AI turning into a disreputable endeavor, nearly at the same level as psychiatry.
I admit I felt a bit pried upon walking down ybor with all those cameras... Will I go back? Probably not.
The Osprey's shortcomings were over-publicized for the most part. Many new aircraft have significant problems, especially one so radically different as the Osprey. The fact that some officers decided to try and cover up the problems didn't help public perception, but that's just what it was - perception, not fact.
The Marine Corps needs a new medium-lift helo. The CH-46 Sea Knight is entirely too old. Have you ever ridden in one? I have, and believe me when I tell you that we don't call them "Flying Coffins" because we thought the name sounded pretty.
The Osprey isn't perfect, but it's an example of a system that can be great if given the chance.
Not necessarily true. Visionics failed miserably as we all know and fell flat on their faces. However new technologies are being developed that greatly enhance facial recognition technologies such as 2d to 3d facial modelling Cyberextruder, wireless mobile, light compensating camera systems JonesCAM.tv, and high speed database systems. Facial recognition and other biometric technologies are merely in their infancy. Biometrics is at the point where the world wide web was in 1994. Its truly about to explode and privacy issues will come up. But I feel in this day and age with all the acts of terrorisim people will give up a little bit of privacy to feel safer. You will also see the greatest use of the technologies in casinos first and foremost. They have money and a ton less privacy issues.
I was in Ybor City earlier this summer when I was attacked by a mob of homosexual cops because FaceIT identified me as Judy Garland! I still have trouble sleeping at night.
for once. Wasn't Tampa the first city to implement low-power X-rays (aka automatic strip-search) in airport security checkpoints?
It dosen't work today. Horray.
It won't work tomarow. Great.
It will not work 10 years from today. Orgasum.
But....
20 years ago we couldn't stuff a computer into a camra. Couldn't program a computer to track motion using a camra. Couldn't program a computer to record survalence images into a standard file format.
You could 20 years ago program a computer to record images into non-standard images files but they weren't very useful for much.
Now imagin an image proccesor capable of analising 50 to 500 faces at once in 50 giga pixle survalence camras.
We have at least 20 years to fight this let's not drop the ball.
I don't actually exist.
...all the Cuban-Americans look just alike.
Why did they not at least walk a recently caught criminal in front of the camera and see if would work?
The system would have been gone in less than a week.
That is just not true. I've recongnized people at conventions from a photo they sent me by email. Even with old photos I'm able to pick people out of a crowd with little problem (I'm 6'2" which helps ;)).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
In the future, there will be no privacy, because there will be cameras everywhere, and not just government cameras, but private ones as well, and not just corporate cameras, but cameras of individuals as well. This is the technological trend.
We have already seen the use of a personal cellphone camera to catch a criminal. This is only the beginning.
Personally, I'd prefer a country of laws where we could have cameras everywhere (including viewing our elected officials!), and people wouldn't be afraid. Our laws should be in tune with out society, and laws should be limited to truly odious actions.
I have a lazy eye. I do not see things in 3D. I see things with one eye.
Do I still store things in 3D? I don't really have much of an issue recognizing friends and people I just met ( though I have a problem with names, but that is another issue).
Try this, cover one eye, and then without opening it, try to touch a pen tip at arms length by comming down on it vertically. I bet you you miss. This is my life, and how I operate on a day to day basis. (not seeing things in 3d)
I am not saying your wrong, in fact, you are most definately correct. But I get along just fine with only one eye functioning.
Blah Blah Blah.
If there are enough data points on carpet fibers to determine that they came from a given location or manufacturing lot, there are enough data points on a human face to determine uniqueness. The problem is having efficient enough sensors to accomplish this. Your assertion that we're "not unique enough" is asinine. There's plenty of variation, we just won't have the tools to evaluate it effectively for many more years.
Darth Ashcroft: I find your lack of commitment to the War On Terror troubling...
[DA raises hand, makes choking motion]
Tampa Pig Moff: : *choke* *wheeze*
Of course, it doesn't work...
The CCD needs to be of high-resolution (greater than 15 megapixels) alongside with zooming lens and a 24/7 staff of camera operators in order to garner sufficient pixel details necessary for adequate facial resolution.
Don't forget, the best evasion technique against this cutup is a simple New Orlean masquerade mask.
Oh yes, want night-time survelliance and target-elimination? Don't forget a infrared laser with remote-control software-adjustable variable beam-width lenses.
Come on... Slapping a 2 megapixel and a fixed lens together isn't going to cut it.
Not necessarily true. Visionics failed miserably as we all know and fell flat on their faces.
Ba dum bump.
Thank you, He'll be here all week. Try the veal....
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
you said: If they were the same quality cameras they use in say convenience stores ....
and if they aren't?
You have made a very broad assumption here with absolutely no information to back it up.
There is no expectation of privacy in public now because the current perception is that your actions in a public place will be observed. So, in any given public place, you can't just start vandalizing and stealing stuff and expect nobody to see those actions.
The same perception used to (and to some extent, still does) surround the presence of your data in a particular vendor's database. I give my ccn to vendor A in order to buy a product; I used to expect that ccn to stay in vendor A's database, or possibly to be destroyed immediately. That expectation is now gone; data can be shared, and data mining is both extremely lucrative and extremely effective. Scattered bits of data about you in databases around the world can be combined to form a very accurate picture describing all your online activities, and quite a few of your offline ones.
I have a point. It's this:
Cameras in public places have the potential to become data mining tools as well. Camera footage is data when you get right down to it. It's data that's first available to whomever is operating the cameras, and then to whomever they trust with that data, and eventually to whomever they sell that data to. It can be mined, by correlating the data from multiple cameras; already, virtually every commercial space is watched by cameras. If the same state of affairs starts to apply to public places, cameras will be watching us every hour of the day.
Anyone who sees that data can use it to track our every movement. We have no legal protection against being spied on in this country (anti-stalking laws aside) but only because the government has no imagination.
Imagine criminals doing data mining on camera data to find out the routes of armored cars without ever having to be in the presence of said car. Imagine corporations buying this data and spying on all of their employees to ensure they uphold moral standards. Imagine a number of other abuses I can't imagine, but someone with a criminal mind could probably come up with to con, to oppress, to discriminate.
Don't underestimate the power of cameras in public places to destroy our rights.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
Guess they had trouble with the smoke blowing away and the mirrors getting dirty in the real world.
J
According to this story
During [Aurora, CO's] annual bluegrass festival in 2000, officers posted signs saying "Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead" and "Narcotics canine ahead". They then hid on a hill, clad in camouflage, and watched for any people who turned around or appeared to toss drugs out of their windows after seeing the signs.
Stephen Corbin Roth, 60, was pulled over for littering after he threw out what appeared to be a marijuana pipe. Police found a marijuana pipe and mushrooms during a search of his car and he appealed his conviction on possession of drug paraphernalia to the appeals court.
Under the procedure that day, an officer down the road would be told by radio to pull over any vehicle seen littering while an officer on the hill would run down and find the items thrown away.
The appeals court ruled drug checkpoints are illegal because motorists are stopped at random and without reasonable suspicion of committing a crime. However, in Roth's case, the court concluded that finding the marijuana pipe gave the officers probable cause to stop Roth's vehicle.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
then why didn't London pull all their cameras out years ago...
.. this appears to be another case of "just because we can doesn't mean we should" i for one dont' enjoy having my every waking moment recorded for closer scrutiny later to see whether or not I was being a Good American that day according to wahtever ashcroftian dictates are laid out...
you know here in indy there are cameras on top of every new (traffic) light that is put up which 0 mention of what theyr'e for.. i'm assuming they're for traffic accidents but that doesn't make me like them any more
could such a technology be used in, lets say, cancer research? use the crude image algorithm to apply to dna, and viruses to find an outpatient cure for cancer and related dieses?
just a thought.
You know from the bill of rights.
Unfortunately most citizens are trading their intrinsic human rights for a false feeling of safety and only seem to want to protect some of the rights inherent in the human condition which are only reaffirmed in the first ten amendments to the US constitution.
Remember your First Amendment's rights only exist if you have your Second, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Amendments' rights.After 10 beers, I too have given up my "facial recognition" system.
So many false positives, so many regrets, so much itching and burning....
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The problem with the Tampa system, or an airport system or any other public environment is that they are all transient in nature. An airport has millions of people going through every year, with a pretty good chunk in a hurry to catch a flight. Many of these people will never pass through that given airport again. You also have a much larger database of positives to pick from. The Tampa system had 30,000 mugshots to base from. There were simply too many out of control variables for the system to be effective. In essence you are looking at a system that doesn't deal well with transient environments. Now let's compare this to casinos where the technology was developed and you'll soon see the flaws with the Tampa system.
The casinos in Vegas have an official "black book" list of only 38 people they are required to keep out, Atlantic City has 173. In addition to this most casinos partake in a mutual database of people that they know or suspect are cheats. From these sources you have a listing of some 3000 - 5000 cheats (source being techs from Vegas I worked with for a while, can't find link to verify) that they want to look out for. They also have something more important. They have an environment where people enter and tend to stay for a few hours. They also have a lot of high quality video cameras from many angles, and have a fixed viewing area. Translation, they don't have nearly as many people to look for, can view a relatively stationary target from multiple angles, and have a lot more time to compare a picked out face to a database, and no security needs that an airport would have that dictate immeadiate detention.
The reasons this works in casinos almost all stack against this working in a public environment like a city center or an airport. The question is, how long until technology improves before such systems would be considered to have an acceptable false positive rate? Standards are also needed for compensation for people who are falsely picked up and miss flights, hotels and the like. A missed airplane flight can be thousands of dollars, what is the appropriate compensation to the poor detained soul that is not in fact a terrorist or criminal?
Fact is, there are several researchers investitgating that right now. to store images or some other type of information holographically does not nessesarily mean "3D". What it does mean is that the WHOLE image is stored, Facial shape, nose shape, mouth width, eyes (color, iris detail), and body shape. Case in point, freind of mine's wife, works in a bank, recognized the man who held her up as a man she went to high school with, and she was a year behind him in school. She knew who he was, and he was wearing a full ski mask, and all she really got a good look at as his eyes. But he had gained around 40 lbs, and had his nose broken sometime in the past. The fact is, holographically stored information is not just 3D, it is the whole image itself. You would recognize your mother in a large crowd, but you wouldn't nessesarily recognize a long lost chum in the same circumstances.
The concept of holographic memory is not a new one, but it is being more thoroughly investigated as there are other things that can trigger memory, scents, light conditions, spoken words, sounds. Ask any combat veteran. Nobody really knows what can cause an event to be retained in memory, Some people can remember things from being a toddler long into old age. But those same folks cannot remember their aldolescence or childhood. Alzheimers patients often forget everything but their childhood or some other period in their lives, and many of those memories are never remembered untill the desease starts doing serious damage to their brains.
Stupid Humans.....
I wouldn't say that was pretty intelligent, sounds more like entraptment. Here's a couple of perfectly legit reasons why you wouldn't want to have your car searched on that highway: 1) a throural search can take a very long time and 2) the traffic congestion would have been enourmous. You would have been stuck there for hours. As you said, the cops weren't really searching cars, they wanted to give out tickets for u-turns. But they created the situation in the first place; they *wanted* to make people turn around.
I hope most of the ticketed people got off, and the cops got a good ass kicking from the judge.
CCTVs in public are no different than having a cop on every corner as long as people are aware that the camera's are there.
I remember hearing that argument in the discussion of the cameras at the Superbowl. Except that if you don't stick out in his mind, you'll be gone from the cops short term memory in a matter of seconds. If the camera footage is archived, you might as well consider it a permanent record of where you've been.
By duty I was referring to what they are supposed to do not what they actually do.
Lifted from an ad for a POLICE / FIRE COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
THE POSITION
Under supervision, receives and dispatches emergency and routine calls for police and fire service; operates a variety of communications equipment including public safety radio, telephones and recorders; determines nature, priority and disposition of calls using a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system; maintains radio communications and status of police and fire field units; and does other work as required.
The Combined Communications Center is a 24-hour facility located at the Police Department. Incumbents must be available to work weekends, holidays, call back, standby, and rotating shifts. The current shifts are: Day Shift 6:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; Evening Shift 4:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.; and Night Shift 9:00 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. Shifts are rotated every 12 weeks (from day shift, to evening shift, to night shift); there are no exceptions to shift work.
EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS
Ability to: Follow oral and written instructions; learn police and fire radio operations and procedures, local streets, police beats, fire districts, the classifications of crimes and recognition of common police and fire codes in order to obtain information from the public, initiate a response, and accurately record information; remember instructions and information; clearly and tactfully communicate factual information to citizens; question callers while simultaneously typing information into a computer terminal.
Skill in: Operating a computer terminal; listening and speaking clearly and responding quickly and accurately to emergency and routine requests for assistance.
Desirable Qualifications: Spanish-speaking skills; experience/training as an emergency communications operator, dispatcher or similar position requiring knowledge of emergency medical or public safety operations; coursework in criminal justice or communications; prior computer-aided dispatch (CAD) experience.
Typing Certification of 30 net w.p.m. is required. You must submit a copy of a typing certificate of 30 net w.p.m. (gross words-per-minute minus errors) with your application. The typing certificate must have been obtained within the last twelve months. The City does not give typing tests.
EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS
High school graduate or equivalent (myemphasis)
Lifted from an ad for a UNIVERSITY POLICE OFFICER TRAINEE
REQUIRMENTS
University Police Officers meet the highest police standards in New York State.
To become a University Officer, a person must:
be 21 years of age
be a New York State Resident
have completed 60 college credit hours(my emphasis)
possess a valid New York State drivers license
pass a written Civil Service examination
pass a medical examination
have binocular acuity of 20/20 corrected or uncorrected, and no less than 20/100 uncorrected
pass a physical agility test (includes testing for cardiovascular and muscular endurance, strength, and flexibility)
pass a psychological examination
pass an extensive background investigation
pass 16 weeks of basic training administered by SUNY at the New York State Police Academy in Albany.
complete a probationary period of employment.
Median Police Salary $ 36964
Median Dispatcher Salary $24299
I remember 20 years ago the father of a friend of mine claimed he had hardware/software that could identify faces. It was all over the TV and newspapers. Nothing's changed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
They'll be sitting there on capitol hill (or where ever they're housing the TIA junk), scratching their asses, and drawing the same conclusion- that the implementation of technological means to invade the privacy of American Citizens, putting them all under suspicion, DOESN'T WORK.
The problem with facial recognition is not privacy. The problem is not immature technology. The problem is mathematics. Facial recognition can never possibly work as a tool against terrorism, at least in the United States.
Let me explain the mathematics. Suppose for the sake of argument that 1 in 50000 people are terrorists (this ratio is absurdly high -- it implies 6000 terrorists in the US). Also suppose your facial recognition system is correct 99% of the time (again, absurdly high). You might think this system would be pretty good at catching terrorists. Well, you're wrong. This system would catch 500 innocent people for every terrorist it caught. The reason is that the mistake ratio (1 in 100) is much higher than the terrorist ratio (1 in 50000).
Lowering the numbers to more realistic values only makes the performance of the system worse. The conclusion, dictated by the mathematics, is inescapable: facial recognition technology would have to be absolutely perfect in order to be of use against terrorism.
In any event, kudos for a governmental entity deciding something didn't work, and that therefore they shouldn't waste any more time and/or money on it.
If only every governement agency could be this honest with themselves about use of their resources (including the human kind)!
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
Millions saved; donut sales increase.
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Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
"Though," Guidara elaborated, "We did think it odd that all of the test subjects had barcodes tattooed across their foreheads."
--
When they tested out the system at Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa, and it didn't pick up Ray Lewis.
...this is also excellent news! Now I can go back to Ybor on a Saturday night and enjoy the corporate facade that has largely replaced the once-vibrant subculture there, and get vomited on by drunken frat boys without fear of Skynet targeting me for termination! Delightful!
Seriously, I'm happy about this victory. Now we just need to get rid of the damn cameras! (I wouldn't mind the Gestapo Cops leaving too, but one step at a time.)
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
"All your face are belong to us"?
There's no entrapment in busting someone who has already broken the law.
Entrapment isn't arresting an innocent person a crime they didn't commit, entrapment is when the police arrest you for a crime they encouraged you to commit. IANAL, but if I were one for those drivers I would argue that creating (or threatening to create) a traffic jam just so you can ticket people for making u-turns as 'encouragement'.
they had public announcement television spots (and signs on sight) a few times, explaining that turning around raises suspicion.
If the cops had sat outside the concert passivly and watched to see if anyone made u-turns and then handed them tickets, that would be fine. But they weren't sitting passivly, they were deliberatly creating a situation were a lot of people would want to turn around and go the other way.
Calling the police often gets the victim arrested.
In my travels I see cameras being installed literally on every street corner. Welcome to 1984.