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Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects
SternisheFan writes "ArsTechnica reports: 'While the whole country is relieved that this past week's Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two bombing suspects. "The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post reported on Saturday. Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus "next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states," according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects.'"
If only all those millions of security cameras were as good as they are on TV. But they aren't. The images they produce are shitty and worthless. So they identified the suspects by having FBI agents sitting at a monitor and watching video over and over and over.
But that won't stop the FBI from rolling out yet another billion dollar boondoggle facial recognition system.
Can anyone explain the presence of Craft International (Security Contractors) at the marathon?
Do Security Contractors frequently monitor events like this?
Maybe they were hired by the Boston Marathon. Or maybe your tinfoil hat is loose.
"Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects"
Thousands of paramilitary, guns, Humvees, helicopters, robots, hours and hours of lockdown of millions of people and the suspect went uncaught.
A homeowner on a smoke break finds him.
Who the fuck cares about facial recognition, I say arm the citizens and save money and time.
You should first understand what you mean by "efficiency". Efficiency in private sector is making maximum possible money for private companies. If providing goods and services at the lowest price to the consumer is the only way to make money, they will do so. All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback. In the present private sector health care, people are not free to switch their health care providers, it is being bundled with their employment. The moment the customers are not able to switch the competition disappears. At this point private sector will continually sacrifice service for profits. It is as simple as that.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
tell that to my users, please.
And add that I am not a magician.
I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Really? You are buying private health insurance as an individual? Either you are crazy or you are swimming in money or you are being swindled.
My W2 shows how much my company has been paying for my health care. Works out to 10K a year for a family. My brother is an independent contractor. He cant buy anything for less than 20K for equivalent coverage. By joining some network of independents he is buying it for some 14K.
It is very much possible to buy the same coverage for as little as 8K. But the moment you file a claim, they jack up your rates, and if you have chronic conditions they bump you off and do not renew. All the premia you have paid all these years thinking you have coverage? Sit down, it might come as a shock to you. The private health care companies that you are so vociferously defending anonymously, will dump you in a second.
But I could be wrong. You could be one of the shills hired by the private health care companies to get on early on the threads and defend health care companies. You might simply be doing your job.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is there really something valiant and courageous about ID'ing the person who just turned you into an amputee?
I'm not belittling the man, I feel awful for him as that's one of the most horrendous life changing things I can imagine happening, but I'm not entirely sure what heroic act this man has performed, he's done what anyone in his situation would do - the maximum he can to exact revenge.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but the bravado being shown regarding people who did what anyone would expect them to do between this and the poor MIT officer who got shot dead without being given chance to defend himself strikes me as a little odd.
I would argue, the heroes, if any, are those who rushed to the aid of the injured without knowing if they themselves could become victims of another bomb or attack as they did so, not the poor sods who died or are led in hospital beds - they're unfortunate victims. Is no one allowed to be a victim in America? Must every victim be made a hero whilst the real heroes go unnamed and unknown?
Certainly I imagine that if this is what heroism is, the guy led missing his legs would rather be one of the unknown and unnamed.
Current-generation face-recognition systems have a false positive rate of about 1 in 1,000 even when they have excellent images to work with -- high-resolution, well-lit, full-face frontal photos with no obscuring hats, glasses, etc. So even if CCTVs captured excellent images, if you're searching a database of tens of millions you're going to get a lot of matches. In a case like the Boston bombing it's okay if you get a few thousand hits because there is manpower available to sort through and narrow those down to the dozens which the (much more accurate) human eye/brain can't distinguish, and then there's manpower available to chase down each of those leads.
When you reduce the image quality, though, make it grainy, at an angle, poorly lit, and throw in some baseball caps... forget it. You have to reduce the match threshold, and then instead of thousands of candidate matches, you have tens or hundreds of thousands. For that matter, consider the fact that humans can't deal well with those constraints, and we're social animals who devote a significant portion of our enormous brain capacity to exactly this task.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Health insurance will not work in a free market. Insurance works only when the claimants and the insurer does not know who will file a claim and whose policies will expire without any claims. You don't know when/if your house will burn down or your car will be totaled. Nor do insurance companies. This model will work in free market.
They may not know when your house will burn down, but by using statistics, they know the risk of homes like yours burning down.
I think you severely underestimate the usefulness and effectiveness of the actuarial sciences.
The insurance companies are so sure of their statistics, that they only thing they buy secondary insurance for is natural disasters.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What people don't understand is that for facial recognition software to work you have to have good quality cameras, images, a more static environment. This is why you hear about it being used in casinos is Las Vegas and elsewhere. In those environments you have high quality cameras with close range and good angles working against a smaller set of good pictures in a relatively static environment (people in casinos tend to congregate and not move around a lot). You also have staff with a distinct vested interest in watching out for their 'bad guys'.
In a place like a large public venue you have lower quality cameras, far more people running around, worse angles and range and the environment is far more transient. The tool is being used in a completely different environment with far less support and far larger data sets to work with.
It's like taking your Rav4 off-roading the Rubicon trail and coming way with the conclusion that off-roading is a bunch of hype. You've taken the tool (grocery getter) and put it to use for a job it was never meant for. Meanwhile your guy with the old Jeep knows for a fact that his tools works for the job because he uses it for that job on a routine basis, however he would be just as foolish to except his jeep to work as well as a daily grocery getter as a Rav4.
Until the tools are put into environments that allow them to succeed, and with the hardware that they need they will continue to fail. You could call it a failing of the tool, however the tools and hardware are immature. Give it another five years and this would be a very different story. It's just technology advancing and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it short of getting hold of your politician and demanding reforms or limits on it's use.
So everybody over in the UK and other countries in Europe are paying enormous sums because every Tom, Dick and Harry is going the the doctor every time they get a sniffle? So that's why their single-payer health care system runs a little more than half of that in the US as a percent of GDP? Shill.
Insurance works, only when it is operating on large sample sizes and liklihood estimates and expected values and statistics. If it is specific and individualized, they stop working. A diabetic knows exactly how much his insulin is going to cost. And will buy insurance only if the premium is less than the expected claims. The insurance company will not insure him for less than the cost of claims known `a priori. This is a deadlock.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or you could be informed... and look at reality. Highest cost as percentage of GDP in the world, coverage of 2/3rd the population? Yay US! I've got private healthcare (it's often a job perk in the UK), but I also know that if I lost my job tomorrow, had some chronic illness or something that wasn't covered I'd still be fine. I get taxed for it, but I still feel more 'free' than I would were it necessary to be employed or maintain a private health insurance policy for coverage. Also we get much more holiday over here, no worries about random gun violence - our police are generally unarmed because they generally don't need to be armed, and you get all the rain you can complain about.
All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback.
This is the biggest myth about health care: That people make "rational, informed" choices. They don't. You don't have an appendix attack and shop around to a few hospitals to see who has the best rate: They put you in the ambulance and you go to the closest place with a resource available to save your life. As for a "free market" in health care, that's an interesting academic discussion, but certainly isn't something that will ever exist in the real world.
There is a massive barrier to entry in providing services: You can't just up and become a doctor. There's licensing, education, and liability insurance premiums. In a "free market" new providers would rush to provide the service that has become so rare that the price spiked. But that's an 8-12 years pipeline to add new doctors, and a 2-6 year pipeline for new RNs, MSNs. And all of that adds up to this: It isn't really a free market, and there probably isn't much hope of it ever becoming one because sick patients will always be mostly frightened and want the first option that saves their lives. Our society will never allow any random to person to just say "I'm a doctor!" and provide medical care. So we're stuck: We can't grow the supply of doctors and high-skill nurses fast enough to provide care for all the sick people, and we can't get sick people to say "fuck you! I'd rather die than pay that much!" (yet) so that's where it stands.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
Who did what now?
And second, for people whose insurance is tied to their employer via a group plan: that people make "rational, informed" choices about their insurance. I've never been able to choose my insurance -- the people in the HR department are the ones making the choices, and the only plans offered to the HR department (by the insurance brokers) tend to be the low-deductible, high-monthly-cost plans suitable for group insurance: precisely the opposite of the catastrophic insurance that I, myself, would prefer to purchase.
The current US insurance system is so far divorced from anything resembling a free market that single-payer would be an improvement. If you have no choice in your insurance provider (your employer chooses one for you), and no choice in your health care provider (your medical needs determine the closest one), single payer has an enormous advantage in that it eliminate the middlemen. No HR departments, no insurance brokers, no insurance companies, all duplicating each other's paperwork, and not a single person in that entire ecosystem has ever, or will ever, provide care to a single patient.
I recently had to turn down a job. It would have been about an 18% raise for me, around $10k. Unfortunately I would have taken a pay cut on my take home, all due to the price difference between insurance for small businesses and insurance for large businesses.
Lack of single payer is hurting the economy. How many people do you know who hold onto crappy jobs in order to keep the insurance? How many people that could be starting the next Google, or contracting to other companies that need part time expertise? It's really a shame.
Cheap storage VM.
License plates are a special case. They only have letters and numbers on them. The resolution of a camera may be too low for image processing software to extract an arbitrary image from it. But the fact that it is a license plate gives the algorithm prior knowledge which may help it extract the most likely plate number even if an arbitrary image can't be recognized.