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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."
If any missing children show up at the school, we're covered.
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
not a joke or anything but does it mean sex offenders are not allowed into schools??
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.
If these "missing children" are "entering the office" - how missing are they really?
Do you need a camera to tell you that the kid has been found?
...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.
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!
Let this be a clarion call to all those Phoenix middle school students out there: Print out a photo of Jeffrey Dahmer and tape it to your backpack. Fun for the whole class!
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
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
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
People complain, but what's the real problem here? Why are people so afraid of image recognition cameras if their picture is not in the database?
With these systems, you picture will be in the database. You just won't have any data in the "offender" field.
I've never molested, assaulted, or robbed anyone. I know my picture is not in the database. Is yours?
Are you sure? Do you have a drivers license? Ever gotten a security clearance for a job?
Sex offenders. Most known pedophiles have court orders barring them from approaching a school, let alone entering one, but how about when they move to another state and try to become a teacher at your kid's school? Is that funny? It happens.
Better background checks.
When they want to put the camera in my home, I'll be worried.
Ok...everywhere except actually inside your home. School, work, your car, pointing at your front door.
I'm sure you wouldn't mind a camera pointed at your chair at work, just to make sure you're doing nothing wrong.
My old high school now has a cop on duty everyday during school hours. I hate to see it. I don't know if it's necessary. But as for this alternative, it seems to me that every machine has its limits, either in tech or programming. Once you learn what the thing does and how it does it (what's being monitored, where), you can find a way around it.
Humans adapt on the fly, and can also make good (of course, also bad) judgment calls. If I had to choose one, I'd rather have the human.
How about we give each sex offender a GPS device, so we know where they are 100% of the time. It can be a condition of parole. If they ever get stopped and do not have it, they go back to jail. If they go within a certain distance of a school, they go to jail.
It would provide a much better system. Not only would you protect the kids better by knowing where all the sex offenders are, you would not force the rest of us to have to submit to an invasion of privacy for a system that does not work.
I also hate the idea of teaching kids that getting photographed everywhere is okay.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
A teacher at my elementary school was kidnapped from her classroom at gunpoint one day by her estranged husband. One possible use for this would be to feed his picture into it and when he showed up, the cops could have been called before he even got to the door.
1) Do you want to enter all the "estranged husbands" into the database? How do you define "estranged"? What if he has a kid at the school?
2) The police wouldh ave been called WHEN he got to the door and ONLY if he entered the principles office first to say "hi". Assuming the outlandish, that he DID go to the office to announce his presence, he would have then proceeded to the classroom and pulled his gun. The cops would have showed up 2 minutes later and a) there would have been a shootout b) he would have escaped and kidnapped her anyway or c) he would have surrendered at gunpoint in front of a bunch of kids.
Wow... sounds GREAT.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
...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?
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.
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.
Isnt great that technology is yet agine being used to replace human effort at the expense of quality and reiablity
I don't usually post anonymously, but this time I will. And it is obvious why: officially I am a sex offender. Realistically that means nothings. So let me explain.
When I was in college I went to a party. I met someone there. They looked about 20-21. They said they were 21. And unlike most of my life, this geek got lucky. Not once, but several times over the next few weeks. You think I wasn't in heaven?
Then one day this person visited with a friend. While the friend kept me busy in one room, this person stole a spare set of keys to my car. The next day I woke up and my car had been stolen. I went to the police and filed a report. Several hours later my car was totaled in a 4 car accident with the friend driving and this person in the car. The friend told me if I pressed charges there would be trouble. I pressed charges and there was trouble.
For despite what I had been told, despite what the ID this person had stated, they were only 15 when I met them and had only turned 16 the week before. And this person and the friend then told the police what had been going on. I was searched, arrested (and beaten during the arrest, my nose got "accidentally" broken) and spent a week in jail.
I was then indicted and convicted of a felony. I spent 6 months in prison and was also given 5 years on probation. I now have a felony record and little hope of a decent job. In fact I lost my union job when I was convicted. My car was totaled and the police refused to press charges because this person told police I let them borrow it. My insurance was cancelled and I now am high risk despite never having a ticket or accident ever. My future, my career and my life was destroyed because I was lied to.
That same year 3 other guys at college had similar things happen to them. One went to prison for six years because they drank beer before having sex which meant a triple sentence.
So before you make blanket statements such as "those people are the scum of the earth" remember guys, this could happen to you! And then you are marked for life and the alarm will go off when you pick up your kid. And your face and personal info will appear on the online database. And your neigbors will judge you. "Corruption of a minor" looks pretty bad on that screen when you don't know the facts.
Fortunately I met a wonderful woman who will soon be my wife. She also had a brush with the law because she dated a 15-year-old sophmore when she was 18. They broke up and he told his parents they had sex. She was arrested but charges were dropped later. So she has an arrest record for a sex offense. We do intend to have children. But I guess we'll have to send grandma to school to pick junior up. We are after all, "sex offenders". We paid for it in so many ways, but the stigma and the nightmare never ends and before I met my fiance, suicide seemed like a possible solution. I just hope it never happens to any of you "scum of the earth" people who stand in judgement of us.
Gawd, now I'm depressed, guess it's time for a beer...
If it didn't work for Tampa police (http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0803/21tampa cams.html), why would it work better in this application?
After 2 years it yielded no positive identifications.
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."
that the justifications for the cameras are for public consumption only and have nothing to do with the real reasons for the cameras - which probably have to do with self-absorbed administrators who are incompetent or perhaps budget squandering.
This sort of thing is ubiquitous in the public schools - not to mention a lot of other places. It's not necessarily a grand conspiracy but it IS symptomatic of the state of mind of educators in this country.
And of course the politicians and the cops and the secret police love this stuff as well since they don't even have to mandate it to make it happen.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I wish nobody wore clothes...
Some more than others.
The cameras aren't the important part of the system. That's just what they're telling you. In fact, the cameras are really just empty camera housings like they have on buses and such.
The important part is the office secretary who's paid to notice people who squinch up their face to fool the cameras.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Could we trust our governments if we knew everything they were saying and doing?
To equate exposing the inner workings of our governments and their intelligence services to the loss of privacy for the individual is disengenuous to say the least.
I have heard the argument that it is equivalent (Open government and loss of personal privacy), usually with the Monica Lewinski scandal as an example, but I cannot justify the actions of a media that would target Clinton over a blow job yet participate in hiding from the public what is known to have happened in Iran-Contra. The one is an issue between a man, his wife, and his mistress, the other is the direct defrauding of the American taxpayer, the breaking of federal laws that were implemented by the persons who later broke them, and justice for the people whom the funded acts of terrorism were committed against.
We, as citizens, should demand openess of our governments operations, and we should insist that this cannot be coupled with infringement on our own privacy. As taxpeyers, we have a right to know when our tax payment is funding wars that were social engineered into existance by our tax-supported intelligence operations for the benefit of intelligence community associated businesses (the Curry Company, the Carlyle Group, Haliburton, Wackenhut Services Corporation, and thier subsidiaries).
This is not the same as requesting that the private occurances of our individual lives be exposed to public scrutiny, although those who work directly for, or have contracted themselves to, the intelligence agencies and thier contracting companies might see this differently. IMHO, those who have made a decision to work in such feilds have traded away thier right to privacy as soon as their own actions and the actions of thier employers no longer are in support of the public good.
Privacy creates suspicion and mistrust.
Secrecy creates suspicion and mistrust. It is not privacy that is the issue here. The issue is that the lack of privacy is already here, and it is those persons who are using thier (government granted) access for profit that make arguments such as yours, as they are enjoyoing a limited monoply on thatr information. They publicly advocate privacy rights while supporting implementations of technology that will both eradicate privacy for private individuals while limiting access for those same people to information about the actions of government and large companies, such as centralized databases for our personal information.
Those same persons oppose the use of technology by private individuals to protect thier own privacy, such as the use strong encryption and PKE for personal communication, usually using "terrorism" as the catch all boogeyman in support of eradicating the privacy in our "private" lives.
Yet I agree with at least part of your facetious statements, in that I do believe that society would be better if government, law enforcement, and intelligence community actions were fully open. Those who chose to make thier living in those fields are in need of a little scrutiny (as is demonstrated by the last fifty years of U.S. history) by the people who's interest they are pretending to protect, and who's will they are pretending to represent.
Read, L
Let's give paranoid fantasy a chance.
No one anywhere can argue that easy access for sex offenders is a good thing. No one can argue that missing children should remain missing. So cameras in schools are a really good thing. No one in his right mind can argue against them.
Yeah right.
The problem with transparent access by power or authority to the new security technologies out there is not that they will do good things like preventing crimes like kidnapping and murder or stealing a pack of gum. The problem is that, the ability to not be watched or spied on, or informed on, privacy, is a form of wealth that gives us freedom of thought and action and the technology in question robs us of that wealth.
The extent to which the value of privacy seems lost on Americans today is disturbing.
Privacy is power. Privacy is the ability to make practical use of Games Theory. It is the ability to engage in transactions with both players starting on a level playing field with incomplete information. It allows the individual to act as an individual on so many levels that it is difficult for many people to frame questions about privacy effectively.
Our society is a hierarchy, a heap, with a broad base and a narrow tip and the erosion of privacy destroys freedom of action in the classic slippery-slope scenario where those at the top of the hierarchy have access to information about those below where that information increases their ability to wield power over them. Cameras and software combinations allows people at the top of the heap to gather information automatically, circumventing the provisions of the classic judicial process in which you must actually *DO SOMETHING* to garner the attention of authority, which then investigates and then prosecutes and punishes.
Classically, jurisprudence and enforcement is retroactive in that it only steps in after the fact, allowing free individuals the choice to do things from 'stretching-the-truth,' to commiting actual crimes or not. Modern security technology is working to allow law-enforcement, and other powerful organizations, a greater and greater ability to be *proactive*--providing a scenario where society has access to information which improves its ability to prosecute or to make decisions in a way which works to remove choice from the individual at the same time as it improves the position of those in power as games players.
Technology which is ostensibly there to protect children can also provide evidence in a fraud case, or in a burglary case, or in a drug case, or in a civil matter like a divorce, and there no provisions for any device ostensibly put in place to perform one security task to not be bent to the service of others.
The cameras are put there to keep track of the children and to make sure that a database listing of pedophiles, but cameras you know about prevent more than just access by pedophiles: they prevent you from thinking that you are not watched and they work to prevent any and everything that those who are not watched might want to do. You pretty much sum up the phrase, 'chilling effect,' with this scenario.
In the end, the answer to the real question of these technologies--from the rings of databases that know your bottom line and whether or not an insurer should grant you a policy that might provide medical care that will keep you from dying--is not to be found in engineering, but in literature: It is the substance of the title and central metaphor in Anthony Burgess's, 'A Clockwork Orange.'
The central question is not 'can be breathe easier because, in this one place, pedophiles and missing children will be automatically detected,' but whether or not anyone can meaningfully be said to be an individual in society with the human capacity for choice when, for all intents and purposes, he lives his life handcuffed between an accountant and a policeman.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."