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

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: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.