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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.
identifying marks is old school
Finally a chance to put my fake tattoo system into production.
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.
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.
tats with UV ink (bonus if it requires certain bands within the UV range)
I sort people by their tattoos all the time. If you have a cute tramp stamp on your hip, like a butterfly or a unicorn, you go to the head of the line. If you've got "Born To Raise Hell" blazoned across your back, you go to the end of the line.
If you have a tattoo of the face of any human, living or dead, anywhere on your body, please step out of line and walk into the sea, because no matter what you think, it doesn't look like them one bit. Instead, it looks like Cliff Howard (unless it's supposed to be a tattoo of Cliff Howard, in which case it looks like a smeared Bazooka Joe).
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm confused. How can this possibly work when every tattoo is an artistic expression of the bearer's unique, individual personality and life story?
I'd go with a QR code that's a SQL string ala Lit'l Bobby Tables.
People don't choose to be black.
People choose to have tattoos,
This. I work IT for a city, and someone thought it was a bug in our system that all of our inmates had tattoos. We did a spot check of about 5% of the inmates, and found that they all had tattoos.
The little darlings certainly look different and special to me. "It's a tribal thing...I have tribal stuff on my face". Yes you do, don't you. I look forward to seeing you hang around train stations in about 15 years begging for spare change when you finally give up at attempting to find a job"
No user serviceable parts inside.
At the bottom of the
What about the Recycle symbol?
My license already says to use my body for science, but hey, that is a cool idea!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
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.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.