Slashdot Mirror
German Minister Wants Facial Recognition Software At Airports and Train Stations (www.rte.ie)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a surprising report from Ireland's National Public Service Broadcaster (based on a report in the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag):
Germany's Interior Minister wants to introduce facial recognition software at train stations and airports to help identify terror suspects following two Islamist attacks in the country last month... "Then, if a suspect appears and is recognised, it will show up in the system," he told the paper. He said a similar system was already being tested for unattended luggage, which the camera reports after a certain number of minutes.
The article reports that other countries are also considering the technology.
West Germany had a lot of this as well,
Just look at the Spiegel-Scandal, Rasterfahndung, especially after the RAF had a couple of hits. Not to the extend of the Stasi, but sometimes not far off. And then there is still the scandals around the Verfassungschutz and the BND.
It's not the first time, that Interior Minister put measures like that on the agenda, but most likely it wont proceed. Some very intelligent people put a lot of thought in Human Rights Conventions and our courts honor them most of the time, beside a lot of pressure build in the press and NGOs. Best example for that is the data retention law, which is already in its second incarnation after the first one got hammered by the Federal Courts, and this one has quite good chances to get hammered, too.
Those were neither islamist attacks nor terrorist attacks, but rampages of two indiduals.
The proposed technique won't help with that.
a) bild am sonntag is not a newspaper for the 1000000th time, its yellow press
b) in the past there have been tests in germany with systems like this, can be fooled easily without much technical effort
c) that guy is a complete tool, he has no cluen what to do. all he suggests is shit others allready failed with (good thing he hasnt heard about rfid yet)
d) there is no way any government agency in germany could impletement and run a system like this (not even with private companies as partner)
The size of the problem space made it impossible. Any margin of error whatsoever, multiplied by the (number of people you're looking for + the number of people passing through the airport) leads to insane number of false positives. The German Federal Security Service did a trial with Siemens' recognizer many moons back, loved the technology, hoped the number of false positives would be small... and were disappointed. Even with an unreachably high efficiency, it kept tagging grandma as a terrorist.
It's like the birthday paradox: with only one chance in 365 of two people having the same birthday, it turns out that with 23 people in a room, you have a 50% chance of two birthdays matching. A 99% chance if there are 75 people. See http://danteslab-eng.blogspot.... As he notes, if you have a system that is 0.999999 accurate (one in a million), we have a 50% chance of a false positive or false negative as soon as we have scanned 1178 people... meaning for about each 1000 people we either arrest grandma or let Osaman Bin Laden stroll through.
They've probably reported that already, and been told "don't worry about mere mathematics, this is politics" (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net