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

late to the party

[turkeydance]

identifying marks is old school

And now for my next trick

[laurencetux]

tats with UV ink (bonus if it requires certain bands within the UV range)

Re:Fuck FBI

[Hylandr]

Tattoo's are the new finger prints. Thank you for making Law Enforcement's job easier by self-identifying.

Re:I'm gonna get inked

[TigerPlish]

What about the Recycle symbol?

My license already says to use my body for science, but hey, that is a cool idea!

Re:Not really all that mundane

[fyngyrz]

Law enforcement don't make decisions about guilt or innocence.

Ideally, no. In point of fact, sad to say, they do it all the time. And most of the time, the courts go along without significant demur.

Did you sleep through Civics 101?

No. I have a deep legal background as well. But knowing all three of how it's supposed to work, how they say it works, and how it actually works tends to color what I say. Here, we're talking about how it's supposed to work, and how they say it works, both of which fail to correlate well with how it actually works.