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."
not a joke or anything but does it mean sex offenders are not allowed into schools??
How many sex offenders could possibly have been on the grounds of that school? Apparently, that occurs frequenly enough to warrant this...
But why would there be enough non-faculty, non-parent adults entering a school that they would need something like this?
I'm assuming that the children aren't sex offenders.
Hey! come on! try dividing it by anything!
I hate to sound like a privacy activist, but i would feel somewhat uncomfortable having my face scanned *anywhere*. Maybe, instead of trying to create things to stop known offenders, we should focus more on preventing the offences, through education and rehabilitation. Not to flame, but if the US government spent more of its budget on the countries own welfare, instead of destroying other countries, it may prove a more worthy cause.
Hi there
Now this is so cool its scary because of the types of abuses that can occur with the chip. Now reason for bringing this up? BOP, and DOD were looking at the chip. DoD as a method of replacing dotags, BOP (Bureau of Prisons...? Puzzling considering these chips are implantable.
Sex offenders? They should have something like this, but at the same time they shouldn't. If they've done their time, they should go through a vigorous psyche exam before being released. Why punish them twice if they've served their time. Now I think they're the biggest scum on earth, but at the same time you can't have your cake and eat it too...
What? The chip to replace the Social Security card? Scary thought... but in a way freakishly cool...
MoFscker
my highschool had one of those. He sat in a chair by the office near the front entrance for the busiest part of the day. I think he also did work with parole officers for the trouble-kids and worked with DHS sometimes on cases involving kids at the school. He knew all the kids by name. I never talked to him, but he knew me. He must have studied yearbooks.
In all, I found him creepy. I would rather he wasn't there, but seeing how I lived fairly close to Columbine Highschool, I'm sure all the soccer moms couldn't sleep without knowing our school basically had a tax-payer provided armed guard.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Wow, sheltered much?
It does happen that a child will be abducted by a parent who, for one reason or another, does not have legal custody. Because the child is with someone who is their parent, they will not necessarily know that something is wrong, apart from what lie the abductor told them and that they might have no reason not to believe. They could be moved to another state or country, sent to school, and go about their life. They would still be "missing", and could still be in danger.
Face scanners failed miserably in airports AFAIK, so why do they expect them to work in schools. And besides, for almost every adult in america, there's probably at least one registered sex offender out there who bears a striking resemblence to them.
Just give out photos of missing children and local sex offenders to several staff members and save a fortune.
Who says they should get a second chance? If you harm a kid, that shows the person is not human, they are an animal. Also, research shows these people can not be rehabilitated. They will commit the same crime over and over and over again. We have a right to protect our kids. Parents have a right to know if the person who moved in their neighborhood has a criminal history. That is all public record. Now I disagree that these camera's in schools will work. But I do agree that protecting kids should be more important than giving a convicted sex offender a second chance.
Okay, it was 20 years ago, but even then it was on the edge of questionable. This dodgy-factor was from a few students, though, and not from unwelcome visitors. The school is in an older part of town in a fairly high-traffic area (it's on 19th avenue, a major thoroughfare) but it is by no means an "inner city" school. Back then the school itself was surrounded by chain link fences and all classrooms have windows, with no hallways. Perhaps they've had these bad characters sneaking on to campus, but I would be surprised if they would go to the front office from there.
Unless something has changed, this school is two fences and a concrete walkway away from the district office. Maybe that has something to do with the selection of the location.
Sheriff Joe always seems to come up with new ways of raising eyebrows here in Phoenix. If you look him up on google, you'll find he also had cameras pointing at prisoners, he makes people wear black-and-white stripes in jail, he feeds then the bare minimum for food sometimes, and he has this "tent city" that I hear is not a fun place to visit at all. I expect we'll eventually have to start carrying our identification papers if he stays in office.
I work in a computer vision lab. Face Recognition software plain does not work.
If your in a good enviroment with perfect lighting and good segmentation, you can get 100% accuracy.
Using lame cheap security cameras pasted all over a campus with varying lighting, very low resolution samples, faces at any random angle, and huge numbers of faces at once, your not gonna detect jack shit. Face detection does not work. This is stupid and should not be implemented if only to save the campus money.
No. Certain predatory pedophiles, yes. But many sex offenders are not. Some have their own kids. Some recieve probation-only sentences. Some are on a lifetime registry for something they did as a teen dozens of years ago.
Don't ask me why or how or what... I don't know, nor do I care to try to read the minds of the people who come up with some of it...
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
There is a SciFi 'Computerworld' which on the cover reads "Ultra modern science fiction for the post 1984 era" (Daw Books, 1983).
On the backpage: "... Newspeak has been replaced by the new language of the programmers and computer microchips, and the prospects of the years to come have a more sharply defined and less human form".
You might argue about VAN VOGT, but this one is quite anticipatory.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I'm not familiar with schools in Phoenix, but no school I know of lets unauthorised adults wander around freely. If they're seen alone away from the office they get sent there.
> As far as I know, there are laws in many states prohibiting the photographing of
> children without the parent's permission.
> Am I wrong?
I do believe that is wrong. If anything, maybe change 'many' to 'a couple' because alot states that I know of have no such law, and it doesnt seem likely that more than one or two states would agree on such a law really.
> In addition, there are regulations about how someone's photograph can be used
> without that person's consent?
Yup, I believe it falls under copyright law to be honest.
When someone else takes a picture of you, that other person owns the copyright to the picture itself, but you as the person in it have some additional rights that you can use to limit the copyright owner in their use of that picture.
Basically you dont have copyright over it so you cant just take the picture and use it as you wish, but you CAN veto the copyright holders choices in distributing it.
In this case, the pictures are not distributed, and most likely are not even stored unless it thinks it found a match, and even then its most likely only stored until someone human can verify the machines claim.
Its possible they store the pictures, but as long as they don't give them to anyone, they should be fine.
> Can I go around tape recording people in public places to try and pick out
> criminals? That's illegal, right?
Nope, perfectly legal, with the same restrictions as above.
Don't go giving the tapes/soundfiles out to anyone else and your 100% in the clear legally.
I think this whole system is stupid for many reasons, but not this reason.
I mean, what gives you the right to try and dictate to me which photons that bounced off of you and entered my eyes I am allowed to realize I see?
If you dont want photons to bounce off of you and enter my eyes, I would suggest the laws of physics instead of laws of government.
As I said, I forget the exact ages... it may have been that he was 12 and she was 13 or whatever, but the point still stands that he is legally considered a paedophile, risk to children, etc, even though the girl he found sexually attractive was older than he was.