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US Military Seeks Non-Cooperative Biometric Tracking Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Interesting article on the upcoming efforts of the Department of Defense biometric capabilities and the ability to non-cooperatively tag, track, and locate individuals from a variety of military UAV platforms. Quoting Wired: "[The] Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot 'adversarial intent.' 'If this works out, we'll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas', says Dr. Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts. 'A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we'll know it was the same guy that went in.'"
It's really scary!
Sounds like tortures or unlawful inspection.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I worked on a facial recognition biometrics project in grad school as a research assistant, the leading platform we found to compete against was Pitt-patt and even it wasn't suitable for this application. This research area is flooded with research, and most people are not taking ground-breaking steps.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
'A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we'll know it was the same guy that went in.'
I guess until they all just wear mask... Got to love multi-billion dollar systems that get defeated by a $3 piece of clothing.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Scary question: at what level of certainty do they let the guy piloting the UAV push hellfire missile button based on this platform's "identification" of an enemy?
It's for military combat only. We'd never use it on our own people*
* unless those people are assembled in mass numbers representing a potential for threatening movement or when regarded by law enforcement as a public safety concern or causing a public disturbance.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Fun times ahead for the Faceless Men!
Valar Morghulis.
The only difficulty is that you are limited to Black& (titanium) white for optimum effectiveness.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/makeup_to_fool.html
When it comes to the military industrial complex, there is never enough money that can be dumped down the hole.
And from the right-wing lovers of the constitution, and haters of government spending: Complete silent obedience.
All wearing the same mask? That sure would be stealthy and make it easy to blend into a crowd!
Shop here for that mask!
Now put it in the trash.
Anyone reminded of the little flying robots in HL2?
I guess we will all have to live underground to avoid detection from Big Brother! I believe North Korea already have underground cities.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
see subject!
They use a pagerank like algorithm to analyze the person's social network (links in an out) and the person's actions (page content) and then compute a "TerrorScore" much like a google "Page Rank". They then knock these guys off one by one with UAVs. The whole thing runs unattended. Nobody knows exactly why people get killed, that's just the algorithm. They can't turn it off either unfortunately, because then the terrorists would win! Quick, somebody write a screenplay :).
You have to be happy that the probes don't use lasers (remember, sharks).
that would be one way to deal with lost hampsters.
when the commies were interested in tracking their citizens, and they were evil because of it. Today it is my country that wants to track me, and make sure I have my papers (real-id) on me at all times. The innocent get rounded up first (because they are docile and easy to tax and catch). The real criminals are the last to go, as they are dangerous and powerful.
-Help fight homelessness, Send everyone to prison 2012. Just because the guy next to you looks innocent, doesn't mean he is. He could be a pedophile, a terrorist, or a thought criminal (probably a thought criminal). He deserves incarceration. The only way to keep society safe, and protect the children is to send everyone to prison. There they can be monitored, and protected.
A programming glitch swaps the 'Dangerous/Auto Kill' tags in the hunter/killer drone targeting databases using these technologies with the 'Officers/Senators' ones.
Technology, making more high tech ways for idiots on your side to kill you.
Has anybody asked WHY the USA need this technology?
I've been thinking about just sticking some cameras on my property and creating a database of every face they see and when, and every license plate that drives by.
I figure everybody else is doing it, so why not private individuals.
Post it all in one big free database online, and now everybody knows where everybody lives and works and what they're doing. Maybe the solution to privacy is for nobody to have it. Since, right now the only thing I can be sure of is that ordinary people don't have it. Equality would keep everybody more honest. Social norms/etc would just have to change.
That reminds me of a Watchbird by Robert Sheckley - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579
Can we start with tracking you and your family first? If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, right?
Two Iraqi farmers minding their own business :
KABBOOOOM! Flying crops, cows, and Iraqi farmers' body parts.
Sounds like another case where we want machines to do what we don't trust ourselves to do (or more likely, don't want to pay someone to do). Why is this a problem? I refer you to Bostwick's Law (which I just made up). Intelligence cannot create intelligence equal to or greater than itself.
And no, procreation doesn't count. Hey! Is this why gods always create lesser beings for company instead of creating other gods?
I just feel scared. Real scared. Times of free movement (who gives a fuck about suspicion anyway) are coming to an end.
There Are A Few Small Difficulties to be overcome. But if we uniformify clothing, as was done in the Middle Ages, ban bhurkas, head-scarves, turbans and hats, maybe ban clothing altogether, and pass laws requiring each individual to look up every 500 steps, failing to do so being grounds to presume the person a terrorist, we should be able to bring overhead-view feature recognition up to at least 20% accurate.
Accuracy above that will require ordering individuals to adopt and maintain an individual and characteristic locomotion, a uniform individual stride and swing. We'll have to banish actors and make acting schools and training programs "terrorist training" programs...
Wigs and toupés will have to go. We can ban them for security. After all, what is a wig but another form of head-scarf?
How about a security directive requiring everyone shave their heads? We can require tattoos on the shaved heads, different patterns for different cultures, nationalities, affiliations... Maybe country-codes and numbers... Have everyone looking like California Highway Patrol cars, their numbers readable by sat-cams or dronecams...
We will have to deal with college pranksters who will laundry-marker alter the head-tattoos on their drunk friends' heads, so the friend will wake up to find himself being buzzed by confused drones trying to make out if he's wanted. A couple of strikes taking out the kegs at their parties will knock the fun out of that prank...
Whatever, with big enough DoD contracts we can work out any detail.
This is actually quite disturbing, I hope it is used for good only but we need to rid the wielders of power of the propensity to commit violence. Come to think of it, I take great offense to Obama's comment "we will not eliminate violence in our lifetimes". I think he may have shot himself in the foot with that one.. words have power, if you are not bright enough to see how the world could become non-violent then get out of the way for people who can.
A guy can go under a bridge...
If only they could deploy their troll detection technology to the internet...
an embedded IED will blow your face off?
Sounds reasonable to me. Can't imagine why anyone would object.
I work for one of the contract holders developing these biometric surveillance systems. Basically, everything and anything that can be done today is being done today by someone or some group - including all the terrorist scare-the-people crap, plain old dumb spying on innocents by people who shouldn't, as well as the development of every technology that shows any promise at all for pretty much anything. Technology is crazy cheap to develop. The only thing one can do is be knowledgeable about technology, and if possible pursue the areas that trouble you in the hopes of having some, any, influence on such technology's use. I participate by developing biometric surveillance technology personally. We, as a species, are out of control and I have no idea where this is going to end. I suspect it not going to be pretty...