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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.
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.....
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
... 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 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
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.
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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.
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
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.
This is a valid point.
How many times was there a false positive identification made and some innocent person picked up or questioned by the police? How many manhours were wasted on these false positives?
Zro . two
"I come from Canada...they say I'm slow....eh?"
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.
The logical extension is cameras in homes. Get robbed? No problem, the police have all your video on file, and can just pull up the footage to see who broke into your home.
Or maybe there are pesky political demonstrators marching down the street, interrupting traffic. With the cameras in place, it will be easy to convict them for something to shut them up for a while.
It's not as much what their doing now, it's that the same arguments for what they are doing now can be used to justify real loss of freedom.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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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!"
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.
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.
How much of a victory is this? I think we should be very careful about celebrating when something bad fails due to technological constraints. We of all people should understand that is only temporary. People always talk about unenforced laws being no problem. Well, they can be enforced selectively in a way that basically amounts to tyranny, like the Texas anti-sodomy law. Similarly, a law that cannot be enforced is still a problem if the law could someday be enforced. Then we'll have tons of people saying, "Well, it's been legal for years," not realizing that its fundamental nature has changed.
In this case, if you are in public, you don't have a right to privacy. Fine. But it's one thing for your girlfriend's mother to see you going into a seedy motel and telling your girlfriend about it. That's just coincidence (unless it's stalking). But it becomes an entirely different thing when it's systematized. If we feel content and victorious that this failed due to technological reasons, we'd better get our acts together, because the tech is not going to hold still. Fundamentally, privacy against Big Brother is a social problem, even if its invasion is by technology. This doesn't solve that; it only delays it. This is a temporary victory. Don't get complacent. We need these things to fail because people don't want them. That's the battle to win.
You have a choice: tax and spend Democrats, or borrow and spend Republicans. Choose wisely.
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.You have no right to privacy on a public street or in a public place.
While you are technically correct, I (and several others in this place) make a distinction between casual observation and active surveilance. I accept that I have no right to privacy in a public place to the degree that it is inevitable that people will see me. However, that does not mean that it is acceptable for someone to follow me around and closely watch my actions. Remote surveilance is even worse, as it denies me both the opportunity to know that I am being watched and to confront the watcher.
(I suspect that this distinction is recognized in law as well. If you catch a glimpse of your 19-year-old neighbor standing nude in front of an open window, I would expect that you have committed no crime, but if you set up a video camera in hopes of getting her on tape if she does it again, they'll haul you away.)
[The police] only have a duty to enforce the laws by issuance of citations or arrest of criminals.
No, they aren't even required to do that. It's called "selective enforcement" and the courts have consistently gone along with it. That's why the cops sit there watching everyone go by at 10-15 mph over the speed limit, waiting until they see someone they feel like pulling over before carrying out their "duty to enforce the laws".
Corollary: DO NOT call the police unless there is something that they can/will actually do to help you. IMO in most cases calling the police exposes you to an incredible world of unexpected possibilities. Twice recently in Denver mentally challenged people have been shot and killed by police after police were asked to intervene in a domestic situation. The families end up angry at the police. The police have no choice when a mentally challenged person charges them with a knife. Avoid these situations whenever possible by taking as much responsibility for your own circumstances as possible.