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EFF and MuckRock Need Your Help Tracking Biometric Surveillance

Posted by timothy on from the dear-sirs dept.

v3rgEz writes: Police departments are increasingly tracking your face, your fingerprints, your tattoos — and even your DNA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock are working to uncover how local agencies are tracking you and bring some much-needed transparency to the murky world of biometric surveillance through a free public records audit: Just put in some basic information about an agency near you, and they'll publicly file a request to see what vendors your city is using, how they protect your privacy, and more.

3 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. Thank you EFF by buck-yar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You guys do a lot of good work.

  2. Re:At least on one area.. by Virtucon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    last year a Virginia court ruled that if you use biometric locks you can be compelled to unlock the device. So no I don't use them.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  3. Re:At least on one area.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder if any researchers have ever tried to turn the IAFIS fingerprint database on itself to see how many fingerprint "matches" they get on sets already in the database. I know a while back some researchers interested in the DNA side of things did something similar, taking several DNA profiles from the system and turning them around and throwing them back at the system to see if how many false positives they would get. Allowing for damaged evidence, lab mess ups and other possible sources of error they were getting several hits in a relatively small database, that is before the FBI shut them down, threatened them, and threatened anyone else against doing any such research. People seem to have an overly rosy view of how unique biometrics are, under perfect lab circumstances with limited sample sizes matches could very well have very high accuracy. In the real world with damaged evidence, poor lab procedures, forensic "scientists" less interested in science and more interested in getting the "bad guy", huge sample sizes and incorrectly collected specimens they are far less accurate.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html