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

And now for my next trick

[laurencetux]

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

I'm not gonna lie

[PopeRatzo]

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).

Re:are fbi badges coprighted?

[DivineKnight]

I'd go with a QR code that's a SQL string ala Lit'l Bobby Tables.

Re:I'm gonna get inked

[edittard]

No user serviceable parts inside.

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.