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Facial Recognition Database Used By FBI Is Out of Control, House Committee Hears (theguardian.com)
The House oversight committee claims the FBI's facial recognition database is out of control, noting that "no federal law controls this technology" and "no court decision limits it." At last week's House oversight committee hearing, politicians and privacy campaigners presented several "damning facts" about the databases. "About 80% of photos in the FBI's network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver's licenses and passports," reports The Guardian. "The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are most likely to misidentify black people than white people." From the report: "Facial recognition technology is a powerful tool law enforcement can use to protect people, their property, our borders, and our nation," said the committee chair, Jason Chaffetz, adding that in the private sector it can be used to protect financial transactions and prevent fraud or identity theft. "But it can also be used by bad actors to harass or stalk individuals. It can be used in a way that chills free speech and free association by targeting people attending certain political meetings, protests, churches, or other types of places in the public." Furthermore, the rise of real-time face recognition technology that allows surveillance and body cameras to scan the faces of people walking down the street was, according to Chaffetz, "most concerning." "For those reasons and others, we must conduct proper oversight of this emerging technology," he said.
And the makeup he used worked! It hid the DEVIL!
These images were captured in public where you have no right to privacy.
If you want to be hidden, stay at home or wear a disguise.
I think police should need a warrant to use facial recognition in many cases. I also feel that perhaps searches of electronic devices and online accounts need to strictly limit exactly what is searched for and disallow any evidence of any crimes not listed in the warrant from being used.
The 4th amendment is supposed to make it hard to prosecute certain kinds of crime. In my opinion, the police really have no business going after crime that isn't reported to them anyway, except for a few exceptions like murder.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The FBI then needs to be Disbanded.
I am disgusted at anyone that puts security above freedom, One of the wisest men of our country once said, "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Invest in hosts files. Apps! Luddite.
Good job putting a direct link to the oversight and government reform committee hearing in the summary. Not that most Slashdotters will read the hearing testimony and read any submitted documents from those testifying, but at least the primary source of information on this topic isn't filtered through a publication's editorial slant.
TFA says:
The FBI made arrangements with 18 different states to gain access to their databases of driver’s license photos.
Which states are those 18?
... are most likely to misidentify black people than white people.
Before you jump to conclusions about "racist software," I can tell you that the reason for this is very well known and understood: lighting and contrast ratios. Specifically, you get a much higher contrast ratio of faces with light skinned people from image sensors than do you for dark skinned people unless you have their face very well lit up. Simply put, camera sensors are a poor substitute for the human eye and this is one of the side-effects of that.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...the FBI's facial recognition database is out of control, noting that "no federal law controls this technology" and "no court decision limits it."
And that's just the way they like it, with no pesky "rules" or "laws" to hamper their activities.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The algorithms generally tend to identify an individual based on relative (i.e. comparison-based) facial structure. In order to have a facial structure to measure, it must identify the eyebrows, eyes, nose, jawline, hairline, etc. The way it identifies these features is based in contrast from one element to another; when hair and skin color are similar (such as with a platinum blond like me, or with a dark-haired, dark-skinned individual), there's a lot less contrast there to measure.
Furthermore, with darker skin, shadows aren't as noticeable, so the shadows that would otherwise allow measurement of eyebrow prominence or jawline will also be much harder to identify.
The FBI itself is out of control: https://theintercept.com/series/the-fbis-secret-rules/
The FBI only has a criminal database to look at internally. So that is the color of law talking point if asked about any such photo issues. :)
The FBI has access to a lot of other databases to search for images. The databases do not belong to the FBI so are not considered part of the FBI.
A lot of color of law words and terms are used.
The US face collection is public, mil, private, social media. The talking point on such access is always that the FBI only has criminal photographs in their repository.
Note very careful terms like "repository" are often used. Who owns the database is not really an issue if access is allowed.
If the FBI has access to 18 state databases with face images? Searches can then be run or requested.
Thats access to a larger part of the US population. Who has an oversight on each request or access?
Protections under the Drivers Protection Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?
Other systems are the upgrades to the Next Generation Identification (NGI), and Interstate Photo System (IPS).
Also consider any policy on background check photo submitted around the USA
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... is that the Republicans will create a bill authorizing the FBI to do whatever the hell they want with it and the issue will disappear.
Treat it like a fingerprint. I assume that law enforcement can only access a fingerprint database while conducting an investigation. Treat the laws in a similar fashion. Facial recognition is a visual search. In the U.S. since it is a search it must abide by the 4th Amendment. Specifically, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Is facial recognition unreasonable in public? In my opinion yes there are plenty of circumstances one could provide against it, the most obvious is to oppress a specific demographic or whole of a population. Facial recognition laws can simply be adapted from fingerprinting laws. I think that would work out quite well for both sides, the population and the government.
Did you know that for decades the FBI has been keeping all civilian fingerprints from all employment background checks, personal FOIA's, CCW permits, Licensure for Occupations, etc, etc... every fingerprint that has ever been submitted to it by any means, including via the State's ID bureaus, arrests adjudicated by judge and jury to be found not guilty, etc.
Now they're doing the same thing with Photos and DNA and Retinas.
This stuff isn't new, its carried on ingrained and washed in secrecy ever since Hoover's policies and before.
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The point is YOU ALL volunteered to feed the beast and let peer pressure control you. You don't need any of this crap, but they need you to think you do because the faces you post and text you write all contribute towards your digital fingerprint while acting as key information needed to keep our economy rolling. This digital fingerprinting will make encryption a joke in a few years because Artificial Intelligence will know based on your browsing behavior who is actually doing what and can cross-reference that data with social network information and keep building on it, making it more and more accurate every time you do anything on the internet. Facebook cannot go bankrupt nor could its owners ever be able to pull the plug if they wanted to. Someone would end up blackmailed, replaced, or dead. It's the digital version of Fort Knox but instead of gold, it's information; except, Facebook is actually worth more. Only $180 billion in Fort Knox; Facebook's net worth is $190 billion. Fort Knox isn't the only place in the U.S. to reserve gold, but it does hold about half of the gold the U.S. does have. So check this out, 945 million Facebook users access via cellphone; that's roughly 1/10 people (945 million out of 7.49 billion) in the world with an active Facebook account on a smartphone or tablet with a nice little camera to take photos of everything and a microphone caught more than once monitoring your TV. Now let's just say for simplicity sake (some crazy math coming) that Facebook was mobile only. That would make each active account worth about ~$200. The average (world) human being weighs about 136.7 lbs. That comes to about 2187.2 ounces, ergo 9 cents per ounce. Fort Knox gold in April 2016 was worth $1,226.60 an ounce. This means that Facebo
This is, in large part, bullsh*t. It holds true for really crappy cameras, like webcams with bad lighting, but most cameras over a few hundred dollars are actually pretty good at capturing contrast. For example look at the photographic comparison with a Canon Powershot S95 from 2011 (purposefully selected because it's one of the worst rated cameras at dpreview.com). Even on that POS the contrast doesn't wash out until the very low end of the scale and very few people have features that dark, and none uniformly so (you still have the sclera of the eye, teeth, general geometry of the face from the outline, etc). What cameras tend to get wrong is the tone of the skin, not the contrast. The real problem is also demonstrated by that review, the only face on the reference is of a fair skinned woman. Most facial recognition systems have been disproportionally trained and tested with Caucasians and don't do well with darker skin because they weren't tuned and tested for it, not because they can't. BTW: dpreview has since updated their target to include multiple ethnicities. But this was done to determine how good they are at handling skin tones, not contrast.
I think police should need a warrant to use facial recognition in many cases.... In my opinion, the police really have no business going after crime that isn't reported to them anyway, except for a few exceptions like murder.
That's great in theory, but in practice, if you're responsible for keeping a really sensitive location safe--a very high profile target with lots of civilians or key government operations, most obviously places like Grand Central, Times Square, Freedom Tower, the White House, the Capitol Building, the DC Monuments, etc...--it actually becomes much harder to justify refusing to let government use facial recognition. Put a time limit on how long the data is kept for people who don't flag anything suspicious, and I don't want the government tracking every car that goes in and out of New York (like they do), but if a guy is in a database of known terrorists and he walks into times square carrying a backpack, that seems like something the local cops should know.
We need to protect the public by putting strict safeguards, accountability, whistleblower channels, judicial review, and fundamentally reasonable limits on the privacy eroding effect of tech. But we still should actually *use* the technology to make people safer. It's a thousand times better than the security theater of a local airport.
Does anyone know what technology the FBI uses for their face recognition? If it's been implemented for quite a while then maybe it's similar to what is available in open source systems. I thought that you needed a whole lot of photos to make that anything like accurate. If they only have one or two photos of someone from a driver's license or passport I would not expect that too much could be done with it.
On its own face recog is pretty crap due to high false positive and often poor quality input footage. But if you trying to identify someone from footage of a specific location and have the location metadata to isolate a pool of potential matches first, and then use face recog to narrow down that list, you have a good chance of id'ing a perp if they are on grid.
It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.
I can see nothing wrong with comparing a still camera in a studio to a video stream shot 15 feet away on a subway platform. Nothing at all.
"The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time" - I assume this is a misprint and they meant to say that they are only accurate 15% of the time
Before you jump to conclusions about "racist software," I can tell you that the reason for this is very well known and understood: lighting and contrast ratios. Specifically, you get a much higher contrast ratio of faces with light skinned people from image sensors than do you for dark
It holds true for really crappy cameras, like webcams with bad lighting, but most cameras over a few hundred dollars are actually pretty good at capturing contrast
I can see nothing wrong with comparing a still camera in a studio to a video stream shot 15 feet away on a subway platform. Nothing at all.
Which brings us back around to where we started. It appears they are quite satisfied to use cheap cameras setups that are good enough not to overly misidentify white people, and then stop there.
>"no federal law controls this technology"
It's a tool, not a policy or action. Are there laws controlling pencils or shoes?
Did the summary mean to write" "no federal law controls the USE of this database".
FTFY
Which brings us back around to where we started. It appears they are quite satisfied to use cheap cameras setups that are good enough not to overly misidentify white people, and then stop there.
Simple facts - better cameras cost money, white faces are easier to identify on camera. The most logical conclusion is to use cameras that are good enough for a majority of the population. Or if we have a "social justice" bend we can conclude that the planners considered better cameras but decided that they preferred cameras that misidentify black people and the low cost was only a bonus. Get over yourself. This is probably shocking to those who think that there is a vast conspiracy to keep the dark man down but it really isn't always about you. Besides, knowing that no group whines louder than the SJW crowd they would be complaining if the cities bought better cameras just so that they could better identify black criminals.
This is the House oversight committee, so will there be oversight? I doubt it.
The House oversight committee is supposed to be performing, you know, oversight. And they've identified a problem, or at least a concern. "...no federal law controls this technology" and "no court decision limits it."
Yet the FBI wants this database and I'll bet they also want the conditions of no oversight. Controls on the Three Letter Agencies have been mostly absent for nearly 20 years now and the only political response has been, Our Citizens Must Be Safe At All Costs!!! Terrorism!!!
The House oversight committee is a paper tiger and the FBI knows it. The FBI has no fear of being limited in any way. All the FBI has to do is whisper the word "terrorists" and the oversight committee will fall in line. Job done, and the House oversight committee is absolved of both responsibility and the tedious work of performing their mandate. Everyone wins!
Well, you know, except the citizens. That's no problem though, we'll just scare them with terror talk during the next election. Or on Fox. It's an easily solved problem.
I did.
Aren't you used to it by now? When people say "we" or "us" you're not included in that group. No one was talking about you or to you here; we never are. Now go away weird loser.