Fugitive Child Sex Abuser Caught By Face-Recognition Technology

mrspoonsi sends this BBC report: "A U.S. juggler facing child sex abuse charges, who jumped bail 14 years ago, has been arrested in Nepal after the use of facial-recognition technology. Street performer Neil Stammer traveled to Nepal eight years ago using a fake passport under the name Kevin Hodges. New facial-recognition software matched his passport picture with a wanted poster the FBI released in January. Mr Stammer, who had owned a magic shop in New Mexico, has now been returned to the U.S. state to face trial. The Diplomatic Security Service, which protects U.S. embassies and checks the validity of U.S. visas and passports, had been using FBI wanted posters to test the facial-recognition software, designed to uncover passport fraud. The FBI has been developing its own facial-recognition database as part of the bureau's Next Generation Identification program."

Comments

It's tinfoil time!

[mythosaz]

There's been a lot of 1984-esque technology stories of late, each of which has been tied to catching a child predator.

The tinfoil crowd sees this as how "the man" intends to deliver all of these intrusions to us -- by showing how they stop kid touchers.

Me? Meh. Neat that we're cross-referencing FBI wanted posters against passports. Seems a good use of the technology -- better than tagging people on Facebook automatically, I guess.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[93 Escort Wagon]

What we really need - but will never have - is some sort of independent civilian oversight group designed to make sure these sorts of programs operate within some specific narrow parameters - with effective enforcement power.

Looking for passport fraud? Go ahead and look through all the passport pictures... as long as you immediately discard every single one that doesn't match.

Looking for a stolen car? Go ahead and use that vehicle-mounted license plate scanner... But you can't store any of the non-matching plates for even a second.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[mythosaz]

Cross-checking the FBI wanted list against passport photos (or driver's license photos for that matter) doesn't disgust me.

To each their own.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[Ralph Wiggam]

What we really need - but will never have - is some sort of independent civilian oversight group designed to make sure these sorts of programs operate within some specific narrow parameters

That's what the Judicial Branch is supposed to do. We don't need an entirely new structure. We just need better execution from them.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[rmdingler]

I know of several people who were dismissed as tinfoil hatters prior to the Snowden revelations.

just saying.

Facial recognition programs on 300 and umpteen million folks(Your Metrics May Vary), to rightfully monitor 10,000 with legitimate probable cause? I'd rather be free than that safe.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[mythosaz]

Police, I suppose should wander the streets with blindfolds on, only removing them if they get within 20 yards of an out-of-bounds ankle bracelet or a ringing alarm. :/

If you add "automation' to existing processes, freedom isn't necessarily lost.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[c6gunner]

I know of several people who were dismissed as tinfoil hatters prior to the Snowden revelations.

I strongly suspect that those people can still be safely dismissed as tinfoil hat wearers. When you spit out a hundred different conspiracy theories every day, one of them is bound to be right eventually. That's the magic of probability and large numbers.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[c6gunner]

All of this automated surveillance has gotten out of control, and allows the government to oppress people more efficiently than ever before.

Kinda funny, then, that bankrupt regimes with 1980s era electronics are orders of magnitude better at this "oppression" thing than our own high-tech governments.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[AmiMoJo]

There are a limited number of police officers, and they are human beings so at least in theory can't easily be ordered to break the law or do unethical things. An automated face recognition system can be cheaply deployed almost everywhere, and can be used for nefarious purposes simply by adding the faces of a few people the authorities don't like to the list of suspects. "Sorry, false positive" is going to become a new way to harass innocent people that those with authority don't like.

The system will also be abused for data collection, if it isn't already. Used to be that they only had a record of people actually going through the border checkpoints, but now they can just sprinkle cameras around the general area and see who accompanied them. Cops can't identify everyone they see, but a computer can. Even if it doesn't have a name, it can create a record and spot when the same person visits another place with facial recognition. The NSA already scans the internet for public photos to build a database of known faces.

Privacy and freedom are most definitely lost.

Re:It's tinfoil time!

[Shortguy881]

Hmm let me try:

People are listening to all our internet traffic - Cisco router back doors
All our online searches and emails are filtered for "illegal content" - Google turns over suspicious emails to government officials
Our cell phones record all our conversations - all cell companies have huge data stores of every phone call made for at least the last decade
Toll cameras track our movements by license plate - Shown to be true via the state of new york
Our cell phones are used to track our location - Federal government has put out several notices to local law enforcement to deny such claims
Facebook turns over all personal data to law enforcement - These reports are just scarily detailed
Our cars monitor our movements - onstar
The government is building a huge database of potential troublemakers, "terrorists," and including all their friends and relatives on that same list by association - NSA
Facial recognition is monitoring our every movement through controlled areas - see this article

I must be f*ing nuts

We Are All Under Suspicion Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Scanning travel documents for hits in criminal (or other databases) is yet another case of data being re-purposed for uses other than the original intent. It is the same problem I have with things like Visa selling lists of what people pay for using a Visa card, Verizon selling a list of what addresses I travel to and what websites I browse and my pharmacy selling my prescription information.
 
Repurposing of data for unrelated uses is deeply corrosive to the trust that society needs to function. It keeps us all metaphorically looking over our shoulders, wondering in the back of our heads just how this information generated by going about our normal every-day lives might end up harming us. Even if one in a million times it helps catch a pedo, that still doesn't justify the damage it does to a free society.
 
There will always be crime, even in the most authoritarian of countries. But copious amounts of dignity and privacy are necessary for a healthy society - when you constantly have to second guess yourself it makes you less willing to be open and honest with others, makes you less willing to take risks, to be unconventional. Just compare the amount of creative development in the west to that of the USSR in the same time frame, or even North Korea now. Every time a database is repurposed, our society gets a little bit less robust.

Re:We Are All Under Suspicion Now

[jklovanc]

I don't think using facial recognition to verify the identity of someone using a US passport is re purposing data.

Even if one in a million times it helps catch a pedo, that still doesn't justify the damage it does to a free society.

How will these identity verifications damage a free society? The will definitely impact passport fraud.

Re:We Are All Under Suspicion Now

[redeIm]

Sorry but everyone on earth is a potential criminal. I don't care how many times my finger prints (they were taken for a background check) are compared because I have never committed a serious crime (I have a few speeding tickets).

Agreed. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. History confirms this.

Re:We Are All Under Suspicion Now

[Algae_94]

The government already owns the database of passport photos. It's theirs. Every person who has a photo in there gave it to the government. In this case the FBI did a cross reference between 2 databases owned by the government. They did not force or coerce any private entity or individual to divulge private information to them. They weren't using any sort of real time or recent time surveillance. I don't see how you can make any rational suggestion to stop this situation short of abolishing passport photos and the subsequent database of them.

You may not like it. You may think this is another step on the slippery slope, but what specific part of this do you recommend be changed?

Should the government not be allowed to look at their own data? Do you think government agencies should not be able to share data? Do you think passports should not require photos? If you can come up with a way to stop this you can work on changing things. Otherwise, you're just whining about things.

This Juggler's Only Crime

[Anonymous Coward]

Was for juggling balls before they dropped

Re:This Juggler's Only Crime

[Wraithlyn]

Oh lighten the fuck up, we are laughing at some clever wordplay, not because we think child abuse is funny.

Re:Where?

[rmdingler]

When an American citizen seeks political asylum in Russia,

well,

it's time to take a good look at ourselves.

Whenever it's advertized like this, then it is bad

[gweihir]

If they trot out the child abusers (usually carefully selected so that nobody has any sympathy), what is actually announced is really bad for individual freedoms. Expect this to be used against you on a traffic ticket in 5-10 years or to identify people participating in lawful demonstrations. That is a sure way to a police-state and that one is universally followed by totalitarianism some time later.

Re:Where?

[gweihir]

The idea of a police-state is that you cannot hide. Sure, for really bad crimes, it is fine for the state to throw a lot of resources at it, bit what they did here is cheap and can be applied universally. That the index case seems to be somebody carefully selected so that nobody has any sympathy is just a propaganda trick. I bet they had at the very least several hundred hits.

And if you think a police-state is not so bad, after all it just mercilessly enforces the rule of law, here is news for you: 1. "The law" and morality, ethics and what is right are two different things. For example, the killing of the Jews in the 3rd Reich was legal. 2. A police state is universally followed by totalitarianism, because at some point all opposition can be silenced legally.

Re:"The FBI has been developing"..

[gweihir]

Indeed. And now they are ready to break it to the public and have searched for a nice, repulsive individual for a few months, ignoring countless others where the public might have noticed how bad the technology actually is for individual freedom.