The FBI's Newest Tool — Google Images

lee317 writes "The FBI recently used a photograph of Spanish politician Gaspar Llamazares as an example of what Osama Bin Laden might look like today. According to Reuters, Special Agent Jason Pack said a forensic artist had been unable to find suitable features from the FBI's database of photographs and used a picture from the Internet instead. That photo turned out to be one of Llamazares, who apparently looks strikingly similar to what the FBI thinks Bin Laden would look like with a few extra years on him. 'I am stupefied the FBI has used my photo — but it could have been anyone's — to compose a picture of a terrorist. It affects my honor, my own image and also the security of all us,' Llamazares said."

Comments

Terrorists!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

We should constantly live in fear of tribal men in caves 8000 miles away at all times. It's the new American way.

Re:Terrorists!!!

[QuoteMstr]

Because we've always been at war with Eurasia?

Re:Terrorists!!!

[daseinw]

It's like we're living in "1984" and news just gets erased from the collective mind.

This whole article is odd in light of the fact that I'm pretty sure the FBI knows that bin Laden is dead. I mean the man was once releasing more videos each week than Tupac until he started toting that kidney dialysis machine through the mountains. Then... nothing.

After all, the FBI's counter-terrorism chief, Dale Watson, also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2135473.stmadmitted to believing that bin laden was dead eight (8) years ago.
Wait... and didn't Afghanistan's current president, Hamid Karzai, http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/10/06/karzai.binladen/admit to believing the same thing 8 years ago?
Wait... and didn't Israeli Intelligence also http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2002/me_terrorism_10_16.htmladmit the same thing 8 years ago?

But I guess if you can keep the myth alive, then it becomes that much easier to keep support going for spending money on the current military action in Afghanistan.

Re:Terrorists!!!

[_Sprocket_]

After all, the FBI's counter-terrorism chief, Dale Watson, also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2135473.stmadmitted to believing that bin laden was dead eight (8) years ago.

"Is (Bin Laden) alive or is he dead?" Mr Watson said. "I am not really sure of the answer... I personally think he is probably not with us anymore but I have no evidence to support that."

Wait... and didn't Afghanistan's current president, Hamid Karzai, http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/10/06/karzai.binladen/admit to believing the same thing 8 years ago?

"I would come to believe that [bin Laden] probably is dead," Karzai said on CNN's "Late Edition" on Sunday.

"But still, you never know. He might be alive. Five months ago, six months ago, I was thinking that he was alive.

Wait... and didn't Israeli Intelligence also http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2002/me_terrorism_10_16.htmladmit the same thing 8 years ago?

The Israeli sources said Israel and the United States assess that Bin Laden probably died in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan in December. They said the emergence of new messages by Bin Laden are probably fabrications, Middle East Newsline reported.

Oh, yes. The damning evidence is just piling up.

Re:Terrorists!!!

[CAIMLAS]

C'mon, man. Osama bin Laden is like... oh, Santa Claus. He's the guy who keeps on giving!

We've killed his #2, what, 10 times by now? Granted, they were different #2s, and were probably the #1 of some Taliban group not OBL's #2, but yeah, it's been a couple times by now.

Re:Terrorists!!!

[Corbets]

But I guess if you can keep the myth alive, then it becomes that much easier to keep support going for spending money on the current military action in Afghanistan.

If the FBI has reason to believe he's dead and is still "keeping the myth alive", I'd guess the reason is much simpler. They're covering their own collective asses - if it turns out that he's not dead, and he pops up again, someone's going to get fired, at best. So it's better to keep going through the motions.

So many people here forget basic human nature when it comes to large organizations.

Re:Terrorists!!!

[jonbryce]

No. We are at war with Eastasia. Do keep up. Eurasia (Russia) are our allies.

Indeed

[copponex]

But, Señor Llamazares is a Commie

Fortunately for him he lives in a society where you can formulate political opinion from a variety of sources and not resort to a childish game of name calling and vague nonsensical grandstanding. In many parts of the world, you can call yourself a communist or a marxist or a socialist and then have a discussion about what that means.

Stateside, I bet many people would consider calling the police. But such is the state of our populace: hysterical cowards and uneducated drones, ready to plead fealty to whatever entity promises them the most convenience and security.

Re:Indeed

[aurispector]

Our populace has many kinds of idiots, including those that think the only reason communism has failed everywhere it's been tried is because the right people weren't in charge.

Re:Indeed

[Nikkos]

"Where it has been tried except in tribal communities and modern days communes?" Well, if it didn't work in either of theses cases, nor in any more modern country, where exactly is it supposed to work - if at all? Please show me a society in which no participant has any desire for power, money, or both. Capitalism isn't great, but Communism has only served those who've used it to gain power and money.

Re:Indeed

[dgatwood]

The same can be said for capitalism. Indeed, all economic systems inherently favor those who exploit flaws in the system to gain power and money or goods. Even the barter system. Short of having so much abundance that everyone's needs are fully met, there will always be people who are willing to abuse the system for personal gain. It's not even clear that this would go away even with such abundance.

Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible. All economic systems require someone to have power to maintain order the system, whether it's the judges in a tribal barter system, the leaders of Russia's communist party, the heads of corporations, etc. Therefore, abuse of any economic system is guaranteed, given sufficient time.

Re:Indeed

[wizardforce]

Where people know each other and are in a group where there is significant trust involved then Communism might be viable to a degree but the problem is that a lot of people mistakingly extend the concept to large, inhomogeneous groups that are nothing of the sort. Small groups sure, whole countries? No.

Re:Indeed

[dunkelfalke]

Oh, that wasn't the only reason. Add trade embargoes, cold war, foreign intervention and so on - every time a communist country emerges suddenly half of the world tries to destroy its political and economical base.

Re:Indeed

[paeanblack]

not that it can work on the scale of a country...

No pure ideology works on the scale of a modern country (pop > ~1,000,000)

Pure democracy doesn't work for anything larger than Ancient Athens. Democracy still has pretty good ideas that are worth implementing in a system to govern a large populace. Communism is the same thing.

Just because the US was in a 40-year penis-waving battle with a country that claimed to be communist doesn't mean anything. Open Source certainly borrows much of its core ideology from communism. Linux, Firefox, Apache, etc all seem to be working quite well for me.

You see the same thing with Socialism. "La-la-la, health care, Obama, socialism, I can't hear you!". We've had socialist fire protection service in the US for 200 years. Everybody pays, everybody is covered, and that works much better than the alternative systems of the past.

Communist. Democratic. Socialist. Capitalist. Fascist. Republican. Anarchist.

Why worry about the labels? Take the best ideas from all of them and mix them to make a system that works.

Re:Indeed

[maxume]

That's a bunch of people taking a vacation together, not a viable self supporting community.

Re:Indeed

[diegocg]

That's not really communism, that's collectivism. Collectivism fits quite well with capitalism, if it's people who decide themselves to share their private properties with other people. In fact this is the basis of family, the key structure of our society. Buying shares of a company is also a kind of collectivism.

Communism is a completely different beast. Communism thinks that today's human beings have been poisoned by our ugly ugly ugly capitalist society, so our society needs to forget all the bad things it knows, and be re-educated to be good socialist. That's why a dictatorship is needed (well, they don't call it dictatorship, of course) - people should not have freedom until they are reeducated, becase their minds are poisoned. Even when they think they're being good citiziens (say, you contract a worker, and pay him well), they are being opressors. It's neccesary to take away their freedom, so that they don't make bad things like that. Once the state (ruled by a few intellectuals who know what should be right and what should be wrong in a perfect socialist world) has reeducated the society, the central state can disappear (or not: Marx did not really tell what would happen then, because nobody would know how that world would be until it is created).

Of course, our society is not really broken, and the perfect socialist men does not exist. Childs who were educated to be a perfect socialist man happened to have the same defects we, the poisoned capitalists, have. In fact, those childs usually ended up being more anticommunist than the rest of people. That's why communism has always failed and will always fail, it always fails to reeducate the society, and the dictatorship which is supposed to be temporary never disappears.

Collectivity inside capitalism? I think that's a good thing. In fact, it's the one kind of collectiviy that I can imagine. There're indeed many ideas that could be tried, which don't even require to change any law. Communism? No thanks

Re:Indeed

[dunkelfalke]

It looks like you have heard something about Marx' works, but not much and all of it pretty distorted. Never heard of the dictatorship of the proletariat? This is how the transitional state was called by the communists themselves. The rest of your assumptions is equally distorted.

You also refuse to see that the modern society - with all its workers rights, 40 hour week and so on - was allowed because of the fear of communist revolution. Because in the 19th century working conditions really sucked and the society was quite broken.

Re:Indeed

[jo42]

On this topic, my favorite saying goes like this: "In Capitalism, Man takes advantage of Man. In Communism, it is the other way around."

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

What a coincidence that the Rainbow Family has been the most successful in the US... a nation that is not communist. Also consider the nature of communism and National Government. They don't mix well. When you do mix them, you end up with some kind of feudalism. Communism only works as intended in communes..small communities. Guess what? North America was colonized by communes. Our founding fathers set forth the framework of this Nation, the USA, not to uphold Capitalism, but Freedom. Our founding fathers saw Freedom as the natural order of things and vice verse. To have a society of free people, you must have a free market. Capitalism is the usual, natural culture of a Free Market. However, a free market does not exclude nor prevent the existence of a commune or communism. A free market is the only place true communism can thrive.

Like so many things, it is not pure, true, or real if it is forced.

That being said, No, our Great Experiment is not turning out well. We are slowly but surely slipping into some kind of feudalism ourselves due to a pop-culture of ignorance, entitlement, complacency, and popularity.

Re:Indeed

[GiveBenADollar]

Look at Russia. They went from a monarchy where the ruling class lived in luxury while the peasants lived as peasants. Then they moved to communism where the ruling class changed, but now they also controlled every aspect of society 'for the good of the people' while the workers lived as peasants. Then they changed to democracy. Wohoo. Now the ruling class was still living in luxury, the common citizens were still living in the same general conditions.

The problem comes when the ruling class in whatever form of government uses their power to keep themselves as the ruling class. In a monarchy you kill anyone who opposes you. In communism you kill anyone who opposes you and teach everyone why you are doing everything for their own good. In democracy you enact laws to keep yourself and your buddies wealthy and in positions of power.

Democracy != Capitalism that's the problem. Look at the RIAA for example. The free market and capitalism dictate that the RIAA should not exist anymore. Their market strategies are outdated, they overcharge for their product, and they tell the consumer what to purchase by controlling what reaches radio. They survive because they have laws enacted to protect their wealth. When people/companies use the government to be their strong arm to squash the competition everyone loses.

Out of all of this, only democracy gives the citizens a voice to change the ruling class, all other forms of government require revolution. And although much bad is said about capitalism, name me another system where at it's pure form the individual is rewarded for productivity and punished for laziness.

Re:Indeed

[radtea]

Therefore, abuse of any economic system is guaranteed, given sufficient time.

Indeed, which is why inherently limited systems like social democratic or liberal democratic are vastly superior to either communism or capitalism. The only people who claim otherwise are the corrupt or the ignorant.

I used to be one of the ignorant, of the capitalist variety, so I have some sympathy for the species, but anyone who reaches the age of thirty or forty and has not become either a social or liberal democrat (I'm a lib dem--those capitalist roots die hard!) is just a lamer.

It is a measure of how utterly the corrupt have captured the mainstream political discourse in the US (and to some extent Canada as well) that most people couldn't even tell you what a social democrat or liberal democrat is (the former believe the state should yield to the market where there is a clear public-policy reason to do so, and the latter believe the market should yield to the state when there is a clear public policy reason for doing so. They both reach a similar middle ground, but from different ends and with different biases.)

Re:Indeed

[Corbets]

No pure ideology works on the scale of a modern country (pop > ~1,000,000)

Pure democracy doesn't work for anything larger than Ancient Athens.

I dunno, it works pretty well over here in Switzerland, population somewhere between 7 and 8 million.

Re:Indeed

[MPAB]

May be so, but here in Spain what you cannot call yourself without being frowned upon is "right winger". And that includes anyone that doesn't agree with socialism. Once you get branded as a right winger, conservative or economically liberal it's down the inevitable slope to being called fascist and then ostracized.

Re:Indeed

[Nathrael]

Fortunately for him he lives in a society where you can formulate political opinion from a variety of sources and not resort to a childish game of name calling and vague nonsensical grandstanding.

Heh, I wish.

Yes, it's completely true that communists (and all of them, including Stalinists) aren't inherently despised and feared here like they are in the US, and that they openly discuss their political believes without facing extremely strong opposition. In exchange, however, many people in many European countries despise neocons, strongly capitalist conservatives and libertarians (moderates and Ayn Rand-ite alikes) as "American scumbags" (or, if they are pro-military as well, "fucking Nazis"). "Free Speech? How could you *possibly* defend these racist fuckers? The government is right in censoring their hate speech!" Europe is just as extreme in many regards, it just has different "enemies" and acceptances.

Re:Indeed

[Idiomatick]

Someones sig on /. says:
In communist Russia the government controls the corporations.

Re:Wait, what?

[ccguy]

You must be American.

They used it in another picture as well!

[Anonymous Coward]

Something must be quite wrong when a forensic artist uses google images to find suitable features.

But it is even more worrying that they used Llamazare's features for another picture!

They took the Spanish PM's eyes and hair again for an image of a _different_ wanted terrorist:
http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2010/01/16/internacional/1263662696.html
http://www.rewardsforjustice.net/index.cfm?page=atiyah_abd&language=english

One wonders about the reliability of such wanted pictures, when it seems they serial produce them, cutting and pasting from the same image...

Re:They used it in another picture as well!

[md65536]

One wonders about the reliability of such wanted pictures, when it seems they serial produce them, cutting and pasting from the same image...

... unless they were looking for very general-looking features, that display a recognizable trait. They don't need to be precise to be reliable. Consider how we can recognize caricatures of celebrities from very stylized cartoon drawings.

But that makes it even more disturbing that they'd use a real and recognizable person, without his knowledge. It's not that his features matched exactly what they want, it's that they feel he has some generally useful features that can be used in a variety of composites. They're taking a person and turning him into clip art. Callous.

You wouldn't use pictures of yourself to make composites of wanted terrorists. You wouldn't use family or friends, or probably even a citizen of your country. But if you don't give a rat's ass about other people in the world, you can do whatever you want with an image of one without feeling a shred of shame. Worse yet, if there are people you don't like but you can't attack them with legitimate arguments, why not try to associate them with bigger enemies? What better way to do that than to use their image to create pictures of terrorists? You could implicitly say "Here's you as a terrorist" while explicitly saying "The image was used randomly for its general features and is not meant to be identified with the original subject."

It's outrageous, egregious, preposterous.

Next stop- no fly list

[jvillain]

How long till Gaspar Llamazares ends up on the no fly lst because of this?

Re:coincidence?

[maxume]

I've never seen George Walker Bush and Barack Obama in the same place at the same time. I've seen video purported to show as much, but we all know what they can do with that these days.

Get used to it, halfassed is how we do things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't have a good picture of your target?
Don't have enough description to draw a picture of your target?
Don't worry, just use someone else's photo from the internet, it's not like they'll notice...
After all, actually having a picture of the correct target is less important than being able to tell your boss, "um, yeah, we did a forensics pic of the terrorist...".

Terrorists!!!-Butterfly Effect.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the tribal man I fear. It's the crazies who listen to him, strap a suicide belt on and go blow innocents up.

Genetics

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue it is an inherent flaw in humans.

Males are aggressive and their whole purpose biologically is to spread their seed and they have some traits to make sure it goes beyond reproduction which is arguably a little weaker. So the ones who succeed in the pursuit of power likely will spread those traits on at least as well as normal. Anyhow, I think biology encourages the traits that pushes males to hurt the system and in a more obscure way, society.

Women I've not seen or read about behaviors that add to the problem; however, I have seen plenty of promotion for their offspring over others for those who strongly associate their child's success with their own or at least make it extremely important their kids get above the others. In this sense, they are every bit as bad as the men with the same mentality (other than the two act it out differently.)

Many legit religious figures such as nuns who live a communist lifestyle do not procreate- so unfortunately, the trait most desirable they may have is not spread. Perhaps they should... and the rest of us should just adopt their babies. Seriously think about this concept. So--- why is it ok for 100s of years to fool with animals for traits but not with humans? (keep in mind "race" is more about simplistic appearances than actual genetic backing.) Ok... now you thought about that--- what about the stupid people breeding so much? genetically diseased people? should we draw a line?

Ok-- so-- we don't draw a line right? Well, then what about the big elephant in the room: overpopulation is the biggest problem in the world today. Limit reproduction, regulate it-- and we bring up similar issues again or at least the prospect that they influence the decision on who is allowed to reproduce. think about it.

Re:Wait, what?

[Eudial]

Ignorance and stupidity aren't exclusive American traits.

When it takes the form of McCarthyism, it invariably is.

Logic 101.

[TapeCutter]

Are you aware that you shot down your opening statement by linking to those stories?

And what about capatalism?

[SmallFurryCreature]

The free market, how does it stand with the US economy in tatters, the banks going on as if nothing has happened, 10% unemployment, a national debt that can never be paid off.

What is most amazing about your kind is that you never can admit that your system has been failing rather badly as well. Americans are like the british, still proud of their empire, long after it crumbled. Nero playing emperor while Rome burns.