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FBI Can Access Hundreds of Millions of Face Recognition Photos (eff.org)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via EFF: The federal Government Accountability Office published a report on the FBI's face recognition capabilities that says the FBI has access to hundreds of millions of photos. According to the GAO report, the FBI's Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) Services unit not only has access to the FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) face recognition database of nearly 30 million civil and criminal mug shot photos, but it also has access to the State Department's Visa and Passport databases, the Defense Department's biometric database, and the drivers license databases of at least 16 states. This totals 411.9 million images, most of which are Americans and foreigners who have committed no crimes. In May, it was reported that the FBI is keeping information contained in the NGI database private and unavailable. It argues in a proposal that the database should be exempt from the Privacy Act.
"It argues in a proposal that the database should be exempt from the Privacy Act."
Which is a blatant admission that they are currently violating it.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Cameras can't keep up with this. They don't even want to.
Don't get a passport or join the military.
We found the government agent!
Please keep bombing other countries so you will have an endless litany of excuses. We never really wanted our freedoms anyway. Thanks.
:T:R:A:N:S:
If they, or a sister agency that they could rely on, didn't have that capability, people would question their competence and use of taxpayer money.
What happens when someone who's not on a watch list commits a heinous crime on US soil, and law enforcement can't identify the person, unmasked, in good quality surveillance footage?
Citizens would say WTF. We can't even start our investigation.
ID your "remains" when an IED has reduced you to a smear.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There is absolutely, unequivocally and beyond any measure of certainty that this will ever be abused.
Here's a selfie of me reading between the lines. And a video of me wondering why nobody else is thinking about the COST of the "social media revolution"
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
word salad much?
will that help them prevent homo muslims that massacre homo non muslims in a video game fashion?
because it doesnot look like it will, they are pretty clueless
So what? Facebook has a billion photos, google has another billion, and I have a couple of million. Maybe you should hide yourself in a cave.
Just look at paypal, google, kickstarter, uber, etc.
Most of their business models were thought of long before they became popular. For the ones where the available technology wasn't an issue (IE needing cheap data service to make it worthwhile) most were thought of in the 90s and tossed out due to the regulatory oversight, fines, or civil/criminal prosecution that was expected to happen if those businesses were actually deployed.
Instead we've seen that if you get big enough and are willing to throw enough money away in restitution (but not anywhere near your actual profits) you can get away with all sorts of paradigm changing businesses that either skirt or outright flaunt the law, just like the government has been doing as well.
It really is time to put a fork in it, because America is done.
your 2500+ dollar fee in order to voluntarily renounce your US citizenship so they can't come after you legally as a US citizen for any acts you commit that may be legal where you're living but the US doesn't like. Why so much? Because assholes who renounce it to dodge taxes shouldn't be allowed to without paying a penalty. (LOL! Go look at post-citizenship US tax requirements. You're supposed to keep filing for *10* years after you leave the US. The only thing those filing/renunciation fees affect is the little guy trying to get out because the US has stopped being somewhere 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' is possible while also enjoying your constitutional freedoms to any believable levels.
Who got curbstomped and then had their photo taken with the bookheel of a whileman holding their head down.
Only difference today is whitey, blackie, brownie, and yellowie all get the same treatment.
you know how they say "she has her mothers eyes". That plays in here. They have 100's of millions of actuals, and from them can determine relationships. They don't need pictures of your kids. They can determine who their parents are their pictures. They know not only who their parents are, but who their friends are.
The FBI not only spies on grandma, but also on her grandkids. Who knows what they will grow up to be like, and you always want to have data "just in case". That is what the founding fathers considered "innocent until proven guilty" - the presumption that the guilty will come and you have to have proof. Nope, it isn't but that is how the government treats it.
Power corrupts. Look how well it has worked.
Now just wait - they will give the keys to some strange folks here shortly. Just watch.
So what, they were supposed to spend their entire budget on stocking the coffee room and purchasing sensitivity training materials? The bad guys have just as much data as they do, so why should it be a surprise to anyone that the FBI is bringing their digital assets into play in this day and age?
Is anyone else troubled by the automated border gates that have blossomed at Western (UK, US, AU, in my experience) borders recently?
I am shocked that everyone will choose to submit regular "perfect" photos for a facial recognition database. It doesn't even matter if the algorithms aren't ready now, once they are perfected these databases will provide the training images and raw data to feed the machine.
And for what? It feels extremely unbalanced. And they know it's murky, since children aren't allowed to use the gates as their images are legally protected in different ways to adults.
Last month in Australia I was told I "must" use the gates. I told them no I do not, and after a brief exchange I joined a queue with the families.
The double-think is especially strong, since in our "terror gripped" world one would expect stronger borders not "more convenient" ones.
People really are fucking stupid.
In May, it was reported that the FBI is keeping information contained in the NGI database private and unavailable. It argues in a proposal that the database should be exempt from the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution.
ftfy
Government can more efficiently search government records (legally obtained in this case). You submit passport photos and police is legally within their rights to take mug shots when they arrest someone. I am confused about why this is an issue. Even if they use it to search for a face captured on some camera during a purported crime, isn't this why these records are kept in the 1st place? Or is it ok if a victim looks through 20 folders of mugshots, but not ok if a computer looks through the same records based on an image from a store cam after a store got robbed? Where is the problem?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
For those who don't know, let me clue you in with regards to government policy on information: the government always keeps everything forever. They NEVER throw anything away. You don't have to be a fed to know this. It was taught to me 25 years ago while I worked for a municipal government.
Now, they might run our nuclear defenses with software and data stored on 7 inch floppies, it's true. There might not be any communications protocols at all, so the State might hire people to type into their computers the traffic accident information the city already has stored on its hard drives, which results in an error rate of up to 50% (which I measured personally) for an entire year's worth of traffic accidents, it's true. Municipal governments in the same county and state might use different software and/or databases so all their data is stored in different formats rendering them all incompatible, making inter-city or county wide studies practically impossible, it's true.
But the data remains forever. I'm sure in the 20 years since I swore I'd never work in government again they've worked out at least some of these issues. Then again, perhaps not. It doesn't matter. The data remains forever.
Am I the only one who isn't surprised in the slightest by this?
Of course the FBI/CIA/NSA or whoever will use every possible tool at their disposal. The question of legality doesn't enter into the equation for these people, it's not even a concern unless they think they might be caught. Otherwise it's "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
Seriously, if any of you still harbor the childishly naive belief that the nation's law enforcement agencies are constrained by the law in any way, shape, or form, please contact me as I have a lovely bridge in Brooklyn that I'll sell dirt cheap.
Face facts:
- Your privacy is gone.
- Your personal information is for sale to the highest bidder.
- Your rights only matter if they don't get in the way of "fighting terrorism" or "upholding the law" or "protecting the children" or whatever the slogan of the week is.
- If you have money or connections you can get away with damn near anything, otherwise expect to be fucked, and fucked hard. (Those prisons aren't going to fill themselves!)
Oh sure, you may win some small battles, but that's penny ante stuff. If you get in the way of anyone or anything with moneyed interests, consider yourself squashed, because you will be.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Just microchip us all at birth and be done with it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Analyst Emily Lutella says "Oops, that's very different." It's actually seven million faces with photos taken from different angles. Government experts have a five year plan to identify faces regardless of angle, lighting, makeup, glasses, hats or Guy Fawkes masks.
...omphaloskepsis often...
next thing you tell me, the NSA scrapes social networks for photos and feeds them to their face recognition/big data software...
Suppose I'm in the database, having entered the US on multiple occsions ... what is the false positive rate of the systems, and with what probability can I expect to be confused with some criminal and denied entry/arrested/diappeared off to some island?
I don't think anyone who's dodging taxes will worry about small change like $2500.
However, US citizens who simply live abroad and are cut off from simple financial services (say, a stock market account, loans, savings accounts, certain life insurance policies) in the country they live in due to to FATCA shenanigans - they often don't have $2500 to spend on paperwork. And often they wouldn't even have to pay US taxes due to taxation treaties (you still have to file them, though, and claim the exemptions states in the corresponding treaty).
It's not like there are cameras on every utility pole
search google and/or facebook.
That is hard to believe - they probably committed some crimes, it is as some already shown quite difficult not to and if a trap is laid there is no chance of avoiding it.
So FBI and all other LEAs shouldhave access to all DBs with all data available also IP addresses of all the arses like me who on occasion abuse them verbally.
Didn't the US government mandate that all driver's licenses become a federal identity document? When it happens, most of the country will be under FBI surveillance. Between your phone, car and face, the government will know where everybody is, all the time.
... no sense mentioning I'm sure they've made their own private mirror of every tagged photo from Facebook, Instagram, etc.
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