Slashdot Mirror
Phoenix School to Install Face Scanners
I'm Spartacus! writes "CNN reports that a Phoenix middle school is intstalling face recognition scanners to help locate missing children and identify sex offenders. Civil Libertarians are justifiably concerned."
Two cameras, which are expected to be operational next week, will scan faces of people who enter the office at Royal Palm Middle School. They are linked to state and national databases of sex offenders, missing children and alleged abductors.
Easy, if you're a sex offender (or a missing child that would like to remain missing), don't enter that school. They were nice enough to warn you in advance!
everything in moderation
...between this and a cop with a really good memory standing around? Other than the cop would probably have a better hit (less false positives) ratio.
The reason civil libertarians are upset is not that a school wishes to protect it's kids, but that this can serve as a precedent for other such actions in more public places.
Read this and tell me if it doesn't turn your skin:
CNN reports that Phoenix City Hall is intstalling face recognition scanners to help prevent tax evasion and identify those misusing building permits.
Sure, it's well down the road in terms of "extreme privacy invasion"... just short of the face recognition cameras installed on city streets (wasn't that tried already somewhere?)
Since when were face recognition scanners accurate enough (and the databases complete enough) to expect to identify a stray sex-offender?
What is a sex offender anyway? A kid I knew in highschool was a registered sex offender because he kicked his little brother in the balls while they were wrestling and they decided to go tothe doctor to get him checked out. The Doctor said he was obligated to report it to social services or he could face charges himself. Social Services reported it to the police and they convicted the high school kid for Sexual Assault on a Child (because he DID exactly what the law defines - to intentionally touch a child's groin area). He's now a lifetime registered sex offender (as is mandatory under the law) and he's on probation for 10 years.
I can't wait until they put these things in the airport! *scoffs*
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I don't really recall hearing about lots of pedorapists stealing children from schools. Am I just not paying attention or is this a solution looking for a problem?
So if a former sex offender takes the time to visit the middle school, goes into the principles office, and doesn't come up as a false negative, you know they are a sex offender and can watch them more closely. Then, if they leave with a child (which might, incidentally, be their child) you can give them a huge paperwork hassle on their way out. Is it my imagination or is that about the extent of the good a system like this can do.
Do a lot of middle school kids get snatched out of the principles office without anyone noticing? Or do these people regularly make visits to the principles office without someone spotting them?
What problem is it that they are trying to fix?
Also, what are the error rates on this system? False positives and false negatives? Is this really accomplishing anything at all?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
We called them "teachers." They were given some subroutines for face recognition during the first few years of their construction in order to recognize individual students and reject those who didn't actually go to our school. Apparently these had some other function as well, usually, but I forget what it was. Something about information transfer, I believe.
The advanced model of these, "administrators" also had some programming for student retrieval (of outlier students with difficient programming, leading them to go to well-traveled entertainment locations rather than going to the school). Administrators were also programmed for information retrieval, augmenting their face-recognition and reasoning skills - allowing them to run intrusion-detection hiring subroutines with heuristics designed to limit the presence of malicious entities at the school.
Is this a new model of administrator? How does it stack up to previous versions?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Not only because of the privacy concerns but because the technology SIMPLY DOESN'T WORK! The department of homeland security trialed some of the best available systems and the error rates were WAY too high.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The whole "no sex offenders within xx distance of school grounds" is a joke. Sure, maybe it's necessary and a good idea, but it's still a joke.
I've read more stories about guys being arrested for shopping at a store that happens to a lot behind a small daycare center getting arrested and thrown in jail for 5 years... I've never read about one wandering the halls of a school. Maybe there are some stupid enough to do that... but... sheesh. We need $10,000 machines to tell us there's a man wandering the halls who isnt' a teacher?
Oh... you know what just occurred to me... sex offenders ARE allowed to have kids, right? Are they not allowed to go talk to their kids' teachers? hmmm....
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Well, sorry to break the news to them, but it DOES NOT EXIST! I'm familiar with a lot of research that takes place in my university and I know how imperfect the best systems are. (unless the military developed something amazing and decided to share it with the company that sold this school their system.. methinks that's balderdash). Just being able to get a proper face from a crowd is a big deal right now - even with faces aligned properly w.r.t the camera, face recognition is pretty crappy at the moment.
But of course, even if the system doesn't work, I'd be very concerned if my face was scanned into some government computer that is accessible to umpteen departments and might end up being used for god knows what!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
So these cameras are being placed in one school with the hope that funding will show up to place them in other schools, at $3K to $10K per installation with the sole justification being "If it works one time, locates one missing child or saves a child from a sexual attack, I feel it's worth it," . The article does not state that this is an ongoing problem -- rampant missing children or sexual attacks on campus. But the article does not contrast the time (money) spent on false alarms vs. spending funds for additional law enforcement personnel -- instead of paying for more unproven face recognition systems.
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
so I'll just reply here.
Probation conditions often include a "no-go". For thieves/vandals, it's often the area around a store they've targeted, so as to prevent either striking again or hassling (or threatening) those storeworkers who testified against him/her.
For sex offenders, a no-go for schools, daycares and the like is not at all uncommon.
No-go's can be an infringement of rights if they are overbroad and interfere with a place the individual needs to go. I've seen a no-go that covered several blocks and included the pro-b's workplace -- obviously he had to violate it, challenge it, or lose his job (and guess what -- if a parolee instead, often he/she is under a condition to maintain employment).
If the pro-b has a kid, then things get complicated. Is there someone else who can pick junior up from school, meet with the teacher if need be, etc? If not, then conditions need to be worked out, like having to call the school first to announce he/she is coming down.
I know this will strike many as being contrary to the idea of justice being served, but this is what probation and parole are all about -- we consider the person rehabilitated and/or a minimal risk to society, provided that certain rules are observed -- if we allowed for no risk, we'd be keeping people in prison that may present no danger -- if we allowed for more risk, we'd see more paroles and pro-b's re-offending (often in exactly the same manner as their previous crime) and there'd be hell to pay, as there is when such things happen. We can't know what's in a particular person's mind, so we draw the line at some hopefully non-arbitrary point and call it fair enough.
I would add that if this seems unfair, consider the position of the sex offender who gets their name, address, and face plastered all over every neighbourhood they move to. This strikes me as completely contrary to justice, in that it:
a) invites vigilantism,
b) denies any realistic second chance (if their compulsions are a way of dealing with things, how will this contribute to straightening out?),
c) completely contravenes our ideas of having served time for the original crime and having been rehabilitated.
In the school example, the courts are trying to minimize risk without keeping people locked up indefinitely. In the post-your-face example, it's denying the person the second chance they're supposed to get, and certainly not contributing to the pro-b turning over a new leaf.
Imagine if we did that to convicted thieves? (of course, much less stigma, but imagine) If no one was willing to employ them, what options would they be left with? Yep. Way to straightjacket the situation. Great if you're looking for an excuse to just toss them back in.
...I'm perfectly fine having cameras all over public areas to be scrutinized by law enforcement, as long as those public areas include Senators, Governors, and other local elected officials offices where the public can provide oversight. Additionally I wonder if the Civil Liberties groups would be as upset by cameras watching our government officials as they are about it watching the public?
How about "try not being accused of breaking the law"
I'm not the only person I know who's spent time (wrongly) in jail awaiting trial only to be told "oops, wrong person" and released.
I'm a middle class white american citizen. I can't imagine being a shifty looking black woman. *chuckles*
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Maybe you're trolling, maybe you're just pretending to be George Carlin, but I'll bite heh.
Get rid of privacy and you'll witness the slow death of individuality. Peer pressure and groupthink are powerful enough without the fear of your life being an open book for anyone to read/judge. I'm sure you'd have the best intentions, but many folks out there don't. For example: no matter how open you are willing to be, your government will remain just as secretive and private as ever (i.e., Bush administration). I hardly see that as an improvement.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
It's more meant to come into play in a sitation where a child is kidnapped in New York (for example), then is taken to this Phoenix school and registered under a different name (not real hard to do). In a situation like that, there would be no real way to track down the child without this camera system. Of course, this requires that the system work flawlessly. A false positive means a visit from the Feds to the parent/parents of the child flagged as a match for a missing kid (with ensuing investigations and picutres in the paper and whatnot - possible life destroyer there). A false negative means an abducted child stays abducted, and everyone assumes the tech knows what it's doing, therefore never questions it. Both are VERY bad.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
It doesn't matter that the technology doesn't work well currently, what matters is children grow up with RFID, face scanning, retina scanning, bio this electronic that and they get used to it, they get chipped/printed/scanned because our "culture of fear" (see Bowling for Columbine)requires it. Once they grow up with it and are used to it, they (the parents) see no reason their children shouldn't have the same. Over the generations it becomes as common place as vaccinations, or the Nike swoosh (talk about being a tool)
We can not change this, the momentum that exist will carry this type of technology thru any protest, you can't convince a worried mother that it's better her baby isn't chipped because the technology may be abused.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."