FBI Developing Software To Track, Sort People By Their Tattoos (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) investigation, the FBI is working to create software with government researchers that will allow law enforcement to sort and identify people based off their tattoos. The advanced tattoo recognition technology aims to determine "affiliation to gangs, sub-cultures, religious or ritualistic beliefs, or political ideology" and decipher tattoos that "contain intelligence, messages, meaning and motivation." Such research first originated at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2014, and used a database of prisoner's tattoos. The technology developed by NIST would "map connections between people with similarly themed tattoos or make inferences about people from their tattoos," the EFF reports. What some may view as even more unnerving is that the EFF investigation claims the researchers disregarded basic ethical government research standards, especially those relating specifically to prisoners. The obtained documents reveal NIST researchers sought permission from supervisors only after they had conducted their initial research. The EFF argues that a database that sorts citizens based on their tattoos may or may not reflect their religious or political beliefs, social affiliations, or interests.

Comments

Fuck FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

The advanced tattoo recognition technology aims to determine "affiliation to gangs, sub-cultures, religious or ritualistic beliefs, or political ideology"

Yeah, cuz that's any of their business.

Re:Fuck FBI

[BradleyUffner]

By PAYING someone to put a tattoo on a part of your body that is fully visible while walking around it public, you MADE it everyone's business.

Re:As my father who was a cop for twenty-five year

[Anonymous Coward]

Cognitive bias, he only remembers ones that enforce his belief, and also many people have hidden tattoos.

There is also potential that he never stopped a person without a tattoo that wasn't a criminal.

Your dad only stopped criminals, good luck.

Re: As my father who was a cop for twenty-five yea

[Bing Tsher E]

People don't choose to be black.

People choose to have tattoos,

Re: Not really all that mundane

[fyngyrz]

Who needs proof when the process is:

o Throw as many charges as possible at the victim
o If actually guilty, main charge sticks, plea bargain others off
o If not guilty, main charge dropped if you plea bargain to lesser thing
o or, go to court, be tried by (annoyed) judge, guilty of lesser thing and max penalty unless apply $$$
o or, go to court, be tried by (REALLY annoyed) judge + and jury, take chance with Gaussian landings on your Kardashian-fed empaneled, ignorant of their rights and powers

Speaking as someone who's been through the process several times from several different angles, and spent well over six figures on lawyers, I can say with authority that this is how it actually works.

The justice system is at best a parody of itself. It is almost entirely constitutionally bereft, hugely prone to sway by money, back-loaded by the plea bargain mechanisms, cops toeing the "blue line", prosecutors whose only goal is "winning", regardless of how well a case was brought, race, income, religion, dress and schooling considerations, astonishingly powerful old-boy networks, almost entirely ineffective public defenders, all driven by a huge corpus of absurd laws with even more absurd punishments.

If you believe even for a moment that any of this is inaccurate, you will be hugely disadvantaged when you find yourself caught in the gears of the legal system.