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Face-Recognition Software Fingers Suspects
eldavojohn writes, "In Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts, the police have a new member on the team. It's facial recognition software that will mine the 9.5 million state license images of Massachusetts residents. From the article: 'Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.' The kicker is that this system been in use since May and has been successful." An article from Iowa a few weeks back mentions that software from the same company (Digimark) is in use to catch potential fraud in applying for driver's licenses in Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Texas. But offering the software and photo database as a resource to police departments raises the stakes considerably. I wonder what the false positive rate is.
Yeah, but futhermore wouldn't it be safe to say that they don't just go indict someone with charges without a gumshoe comparing the photographs themselves? I mean, theres go to be some sort of human involvement. Lets say the have a CCTV image of a buglary suspect and they use this software to scan the DMV photos for a match, and the software returns 1 or more matches. They don't just throw the match(es) in jail right then. I think its a safe bet that law enforcement would use their own peepers to compare the DMV photographs with the CCTV to see if its close, and then go about questioning the match(es) for their whereabouts..etc..looking for other evidence before going ahead with prosecution. It's obvious that this system is meant to give leads rather than 100% solve cases. Sure there are going to be false positives, it's a computer look for matches. It's more than likely that it's designed to be liberal with its matches simply to give detectives a list of a dozen possible suspects rather than the entire population of a city/town etc. Regardless, I can't say I'm entirely surprised that a slashdot editor took this chance to stir the pot on something that for the most part is cool, useful, and manages to assist law enforcement without trampling our privacy.
mmm...muffins
I can see this system playing havoc with people too. I have met people with no connection to each other but who nevertheless look virtually identical.
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This article is a great example of what you've described,
http://nebraska.statepaper.com/pages/drudged/inno
In summary: There are two girls that look nearly identical. One of them committed a crime, and the other was put in jail for a week. There are photos in the article.
>I wonder what the false positive rate is.
It will be like the Do Not Fly list.
Years ago, Scientific American had a story about a prototype system for facial recognition created of students at Brooklyn College. They had a database of about 1,000 faces, and they showed the 2 most similar and the 2 most different. The 2 most different were very different. The 2 most similar were so similar, I couldn't tell them apart. So back-of-the-envelope, I'd say about 2 faces in 1,000 will be so similar you can't tell them apart.
(Surely on Slashdot somebody must know the current research.)
So if there are 300 million people in the U.S., and you have a common-looking face, you'll have a close match to 300,000 people. Or 8,000 people in New York City.
(In New York a popular Catholic priest was arrested, based on a victim's identification, and charged with rape. His parisioners couln't believe it. Finally the cops found another guy, and charged him with the rape. Finally, they found a *third* guy, and he seemed to be the one. The newspapers published the 3 pictures. They really looked alike. Funny thing was, they were different racial types, too. One guy was hispanic, another guy was Italian.)
"Face-Recognition Software Fingers Suspects"
Oh, that's just great. First face-regonition violates our privacy, and now it's violating our orifices!
There is no false positive problem. Police said so on TV!
Explanation: I was flipping through channels and landed on one that was following a Los Angeles SWAT team. They were serving a warrant on an apartment based upon a tip from a confidential informant that there was a gun in the apartment (and I think that drugs were sold out of the apartment -- I missed the start). Nobody answered the door, so the SWAT team battered down the front and back doors, broke a window to investigate a room that was locked, and ransacked the entire place. They found no drugs and exactly one "weapon": a pistol-shaped BB gun. The conclusion from the SWAT team leader: that the confidential informant had proved his worth *and* that their destruction of the apartment had shut down a drug distribution center.
I wish I were making this up. Sadly, this is probably typical of cases that Radley Balko has cataloged.
Those "thorough" background checks scan data from a multitude of companies and are a result of court runners who are human and can be incompetent. The last background check I had ran on me shows me as a multi-state offender in California, which scares the living bejebus out of me. Unlike a credit report where I can file a dispute, there is no easy way to go and clear this up.
People have misdemeanors show up as felonies, expunged records show up, completely false records, warrants listed that are invalid, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
If we are to rely on them then they need to be 10000000% accurate, and if an inaccuracy shows up we need to be able to quickly dispute it (resolutions of 3 days because a job or even freedom may hang in the balance).
And to quote my brother who was a guard at an institution in Tennessee.... The only difference between us and them is they got caught.
Either way I'm getting fed up living in a near police state.