Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects

Posted by samzenpus on from the standing-out-in-a-crowd dept.

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.'"

5 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Wonder who it *did* recognize by SpectreBlofeld · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Gotta wonder if it picked up matches for random people who are wanted for one thing or another, and if there will be follow-up investigations on those leads.

    And if so, if crowd-scanning will become a precedent...

  2. Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    We should petition the whitehouse to include all the victims of the bombing without health insurance to buy into medicare/medicaid or federal employees health insurace scheme. The premia to join may be paid from the general accident victims compensation fund or through donations.

    BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  3. Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If Dzhokhar is deemed an enemy combatant, all the victims would lose their health insurance coverage. Most insurance does not cover Acts of War. When Bush declared 9/11 attacks as an act of war in his original speech, insurance companies invoked the exception and refused to pay WTC building insurance. Then they claimed both plane crashes actually constitute a "single instance" and reduced the claims by half. So don't put anything past our vaunted private health insurance companies.

    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.

    In health care, diabetics, heart disease patients, cancer surviors, transplant recipients know how much they are going claim for sure. So does the insurer. Free market will force companies to refuse to insure them. People without chronic condition will refuse to buy policies.

    For health care, single payer is the only system that will work. The savings from paperwork and preventive treatment will be enough to pay for the people currently without insurance and to contain the growth of health care costs.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  4. Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't shop around for Healthcare because I KNOW IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE. Thanks to Insurance all medical costs are A: More or less the same no matter where I go and B: Completely obfuscated from the consumer.

    Without the insurance regime I know in advance that healthcare is my responsibility and I do what most people use to do: I find myself a good GP who doesn't cost an arm and a leg long before I'm ever in crises.

    Just because things are this way now does NOT mean this is the only way things can be.

  5. Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I imagine that someone waking up with their legs blown off might have more legitimately selfish things to worry about than catching the bomber such as whether they were going to live, how long they were going to be in hospital, or mourning all the favorite activities that would not be possible for a long time to come - if ever at all. I'd argue that for someone in that position to wake up and immediately want to talk to investigators is heroic. He may not have made a heroic choice to be involved in the situation to begin with, but his actions afterwards likely helped identify the bombers. At the time, the internet was still arguing about that poor dude in a blue jacket and his friend, or the group of middle-eastern looking dudes looking suspicous by being middle-eastern-looking, all of whom were simply enjoying the spectacle of the Boston Marathon. No one had posted photos that identified bombers, even after the FBI had announced that they were looking for a guy with a white baseball hat turned backwards. It wasn't until after the FBI had released the video that some photos showed up with the suspects _possibly_ appearing in them. Rumors of video showing the drop haven't been confirmed by the release of such video yet - maybe the video exists and is being held back to prevent prejudicial tainting of the jury pool, but even if that is the case I am sure that that FBI would have been very glad to have witness confirmation of the suspect.

    Remember the bombers were positively identifed as suspects, not as 'persons of interest'. That solid identification might have saved many more lives.