Giant billboards may be scanning your face

Sarah Freishtat

The Washington Times

As you scan the face on that giant billboard, it may just be scanning your face right back. Increasingly sophisticated digital facial-recognition technology is opening new possibilities in business, marketing, advertising and law enforcement while exacerbating fears about the loss of privacy and the violation of civil liberties.

Facial recognition tech is rocketing ahead of laws that can control it

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"Many Americans don't realize they're already in a facial recognition database," Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Wednesday in a hearing on the technology. Addressing Senator Al Franken and the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, Lynch pointed out that there is a painful disconnect between how little personal action is required to capture a face and how much personal information can be associated with it. All that, thanks to the Internet. As it is, Lynch said, "Americans can't take precautions to prevent the collection of their image."

Senator Franken called the hearing out of concern for the speed at which facial recognition technology is progressing as its use remains unregulated. Dr. Alessandro Acquisti, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said facial recognition could soon become a casual pursuit as computers get smaller, more powerful, and cloud computing costs come down. "Within a few years, real-time, automated, mass-scale facial recognition will be technologically feasible and economically efficient," Acquisti wrote in a statement; for companies, for friends, and for law enforcement.

Facial recognition has two characteristics that alarmed most members of the panel. First, faces (unlike other common information gatekeepers like passwords or PIN numbers) can't be changed for protection. Second, neither permission nor interaction is required for one person to capture the face of another. If they're in public, their visage is fair game. Facial recognition "creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not" because of the ease of collection, Franken said. Read more >>

More Dead Afghans: Franken is “Cautiously Optimistic”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 17, 2010

Turn them upside down and they all look alike. Democrats and Republicans that is. When Bush and the neocons ruled the roost, Democrats complained about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that their man is in office, Democrats support Obama’s criminal expansion in Afghanistan.

For the average Afghan on the ground, however, there is zero difference between Bush or Obama. It is a continuation of butchery.

“Fresh from a tour of Afghanistan, Sen. Al Franken expressed modest support this week for the president’s plan to drastically expand America’s presence in the war, now in its eighth year,” reports the Star Tribune in Minnesota, where Franken is a senator. “The Minnesota Democrat previously was uncommitted on whether the U.S. should deploy 30,000 more troops to the region. Speaking to reporters Wednesday from an airport in Dubai, Franken said he will back Obama’s plan and is ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the war’s progress.”

He wasn’t necessarily opposed to illegally invading Iraq and killing over a million people. “Al Franken has had many positions on the Iraq war. Franken supported the war at the outset, although in a much more ambivalent way than [Norm] Coleman did. He says he felt, at most, ‘53 percent’ in favor. There were reasons to be for the war, and reasons to be against, but ‘all the reasons to be for the war turned out to be false,’ Franken said during our interview,” the Minnesota Post wrote in 2008.

Al Franken was more than half in favor of committing war crimes. As for what many of us knew in 2002 as Bush’s neocons dreamed up lies in preparation for invasion — the lies were so transparent as to be absurd — Franken was clueless along with a lot of other Democrats.

“I do support the president’s plan,” Franken said, adding that he will vote for additional funding. “I may have done it a little bit differently myself but I … came away from this trip feeling that we already have momentum from the president’s speech.”

Al Franken and your garden variety Democrat — and Republican for that matter — are completely clueless about the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. Somebody needs to tell them about the Afghan code of Pushtunwali, their honor-to-the-death code.

“Afghans have their own agendas, which are inevitably local, and exist only at the town and village level. Their loyalties – indeed their sense of manhood and honor – are based on promoting the well-being of their families, their clan, their tribe and their Islamic sect,” writes Robert P. Pearson. “The paradox is that the more American troops we send, the more resistance we will create. Neither the British (three tries) nor the Russians (a 10-year war) has succeeded in controlling Afghanistan, and after eight years there, we are failing too.”

Franken’s boss Obama will fail like Bush, the Russians, and everybody else who tried to invade and hold Afghanistan, including Alexander the Great.

The United States is not in Afghanistan to save the people of that country from the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The United States created both. The Pentagon is in Afghanistan at the behest of Wall Street and the bankers. Orwell said War is Peace. It is also immensely profitable.

“The counter-insurgency strategy McChrystal advocates will never work. There is no way we can provide long-term security to tens of thousands of villages throughout the country. Even if security is the main Afghan preoccupation, they know the Taliban are a far surer path to that end than American soldiers whom they know will eventually leave. At present, the Afghan government can barely keep Kabul safe, and has little influence in the countryside, which is under the control of numerous warlords or the Taliban, none of whom are eager to have their power taken away by American or NATO forces,” Pearson concludes.

In the meantime, we will have to suffer Mr. 53 Percent, Al Franken, the former comedian who is now an apologist and facilitator for mass murder.

In Germany at the end of the Second World War, war criminals were tried and summarily delivered to the gallows for invading small defenseless countries and killing countless people.

In America, they retire and write books.