German Art Activists Get Passport Using Digitally Altered Photo of Two Women Merged Together (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, an activist from the German art collective Peng! walked into her local government office in Berlin and applied for a new passport. "I probably have broken the law," the woman, a chemist living in the Western Saxony region, told Motherboard, "but our lawyers don't know which one." The woman applied for a passport using a photo of two separate people. Using specialized software created by Peng!, the collective merged the facial vectors from two different faces from two different images into one. Billie Hoffman (a pseudonym used by everyone in the Peng! Collective when talking to journalists), she told me how easy the whole process was: "Officials didn't mention fraud at any point." Hoffman's passport application was approved, and now she has an official German passport using the digitally altered photo. The photo is half her, half Federica Mogherini, an Italian politician who is the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. "The software calculated an authentic average of the faces and that's it," Hoffmann recalls.

Hoffman's passport is part of an artwork called "Mask ID," a campaign that's encouraging ordinary citizens to "flood government databases with misinformation" and disrupt mass surveillance programs. Ironically, the project is funded by the Bundeskulturstiftung, the German Federal cultural fund, part one was recently on show in Hamburg accompanied by a photo booth where anyone could upload their image and create their own distorted passport picture in an attempt to confuse government surveillance and circumnavigate facial recognition software. "Passports are tools of oppression" another member of the collective who declined to give me their real name told me.

Comments

Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[cascadingstylesheet]

It's literally all fun and games until someone literally gets hurt ... again ...

Border control will come to matter to you at some point, but it might be too late :(

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[110010001000]

If border control is a farce then why bother constructing tunnels to smuggle people in?

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[bluefoxlucid]

That's the problem: you go outside, dance around each night, and then when it rains 2 weeks later you claim your rain dance made it rain.

It's infeasible to monitor an entire border; and then people go under it anyway. Talk about terrorists, drug cartels, and other well-funded and heavily-organized threats goes hand-in-hand with apprehending poor women fleeing from a creditor who wants to gangrape them to death and sell their children into sex slavery while the well-funded insurgents bypass all your security.

We've done something. It did nothing, but we had to do something. Let's do it even more.

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[110010001000]

So you are claiming that border control does nothing, and the result would be exactly the same even if we got rid of all border controls across the world? Except for the tunnels of course, they would no longer be needed because people could freely walk across the border.

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[postbigbang]

Indeed there are sonograpic equipment combos that find tunnels. This isn't about tunnels. It's about failure to acknowledge that countries are often built on the backs of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees, and until recently, slaves. Cheap labor has its value.

The farce is "Build The Wall" believing that other people will suddenly stop their lifestyles and go back to work, because that's how John Calvin envisioned the world. Doesn't work that way.

There are tunnels from Israel to Egypt, Mexico to the USA, Bellingham to Vancouver. There are electronic money tunnels to The Caymans and Panama. Tunneling is a well-rewarded sport.

Confounding privacy invasion and poor data privacy controls is also a blood sport. Surveillance societies need the control; it's a power trip and info-asset-greed posture I like the collective idea, however, although it waffles a bit on the civility test. Civility counts.

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[lgw]

Why did China build the Great Wall? It didn't 100% keep the Mongols out - the just climbed the wall. But their horses didn't, and it limited the amount of loot that could carry back with them after a raid.

Physical security, like digital security, isn't about "all or nothing". Making it harder makes it harder. It's harder to walk across a desert than to drive.

Meh, it's mostly symbolic anyway, and what people are actually arguing about is whether they like the symbolism. Why not just say "globalism is good; no borders" instead of pretending your objection is to the effectiveness of the wall?

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[rickb928]

Yes. It's economics.

If it's not worth the effort, even the perceived effort, for the payoff, even the perceived payoff, it won't be done.

Locks don't keep the honest and law-abiding out, they discourage the criminals and prevent the less competent ones.

There is no absolute security for virtually anything. Just a sufficient amount to make the risk acceptable. And less security is needed when the value of the protected asset is less, or when recovery or replacement is cheap enough.

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[Calydor]

No, the idea that passports are 'tools of oppression' is the problem.

Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

Passports in and of themselves are not.

Databases of faces (Passport, Driver's License, Student ID, etc) and ubiquitous facial recognition are more and more frequently being used as tools of oppression.

An art project/political statement to populate these databases with junk data is a valid form of protest.

easy enough to fix...

[phayes]

For passport applications performed in person - change the passport application process so that the picture is taken by the passport delivering authorities - Similar pictures are taken when entering many countries like the U.S. and every European passport already has the passport authorities taking fingerprints.

For mailed in passport renewal applications, make doctoring the picture cause for revocation, force people to pick up their passports in person and only deliver them if the picture is a close match to the applicant and apply a temporary ban on re-applying for a new passport when people attempting to subvert the process are detected.

What? This is overly burdensome? Well subverting the utility of passports by doctoring the pictures has a cost too and it seems to me that making sure that MY right to travel isn't being called into question by these idiots is worth some bother.

Re:easy enough to fix...

[andrewbaldwin]

"every European passport already has the passport authorities taking fingerprints"

Citation required -- I certainly didn't need to submit fingerprints when my passport was renewed recently.

Re:easy enough to fix...

[Anonymice]

Likewise. It's been at least the best part of a decade, if not more, that the UK has had so called "biometric" passports. From what I can tell, all that really means is they added an RFID & doubled the renewal fees. I've never been asked to give any prints, and until this day, the only places in the UK with any of my biometric records are a couple of datacentres.

Re:easy enough to fix...

[jrumney]

"Biometric" can also mean facial recognition, which they can generate from the photo you send when you apply for the passport. Some countries are collecting fingerprints at the border, but they are checking against their own databases, not against your passport.

Re:Add drivers licenses, license plates, to that l

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what your driver's test looked like but mine had two phases.. The written part where I demonstrated I had basic knowledge of traffic laws and vehicle operations. Then the practical driving test where I demonstrated a number of basic skills, like staying in my line, making safe right and left turns, backing up while following the necessary traffic laws.

Driver's tests are designed to verify you have a minimum of proficiency, coordination, mental capacity and skill to handle a vehicle. Which sure sounds like a good idea to me because some folks just are not safe out there even with the tests. The purpose of the tests isn't to control you but to make sure you are capable.

Your complaint about taking ones driver's license doesn't wash with me. Usually this only involves situations where driving might be impaired, such as DWI convictions, seriously violating the traffic law; demonstrating a level or recklessness that makes you unsafe on the road and the like.

Re:Not the right well to poison.

[110010001000]

I follow all those rules. I also make my own soap.

Advantages and disadvantages of unrecognizability

[XXongo]

The face looks like her (to a human), but the biometrics don't match very well.

Well hopefully the border control isn't using biometrics to match the photo against the person.

Where the biometrics is going to come in is when the Border Patrol uses biometrics to compare the person traveling to the photo on the passport, to verify that the person on the passport is actually the person traveling.

Basically, the question here is whether she will be able to travel using that digitally-altered passport.

The advantage to her is that if passport photos are sent to a government database of faces that is distributed to facial-recognition systems (say, looking at images from security cameras), she won't be recognized, and thus her movements won't be picked up and tracked.

Re:Shouldn't crime imply malevolence?

[MooseTick]

"Shouldn't crime imply malevolence?"

No. You can still get convicted of manslaughter and have had no intention of doing anything bad.

And this is basically fraud. She is presenting a photo for a passport and saying it is her when it isn't. I'm sure when you sign to get it you state that everything provided is factual, accurate to your knowledge, and correct. The image is NOT of the woman in question, hence, it is not accurate. Its not of her or even of a real person. You can't talk your way around this.

Funny until you use it

[manu0601]

This is funny until a software at the border decides this is not you on the passport photo.

At that point, at best you spend the whole day explaining what is going on to custom officers.

Re:Funny until you use it

[xlsior]

This is funny until a software at the border decides this is not you on the passport photo.

At that point, at best you spend the whole day explaining what is going on to custom officers.

Or worse: If you happen to lose your passport while abroad, the embassy won't issue you replacement travel papers because you can't identify yourself and you don't match the info they have on file. And without that passport or emergency travel papers, you won't even be able to board your flight home. Potentially ever.

So good luck with that -- you could really screw yourself over by messing with those records.