FBI launches $1 billion face recognition project

The Next Generation Identification programme will include a nationwide database of criminal faces and other biometrics

"FACE recognition is 'now'," declared Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in a testimony before the US Senate in July.

It certainly seems that way. As part of an update to the national fingerprint database, the FBI has begun rolling out facial recognition to identify criminals.

It will form part of the bureau's long-awaited, $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme, which will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification to the toolkit. A handful of states began uploading their photos as part of a pilot programme this February and it is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2014. In addition to scanning mugshots for a match, FBI officials have indicated that they are keen to track a suspect by picking out their face in a crowd.

Another application would be the reverse: images of a person of interest from security cameras or public photos uploaded onto the internet could be compared against a national repository of images held by the FBI. An algorithm would perform an automatic search and return a list of potential hits for an officer to sort through and use as possible leads for an investigation. Read more >>

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 >>

Elliot Cohen on How Surveillance Is Erasing Freedom and Autonomy, Step by Incremental Step

Image via WikipediaElliot Cohen's reputation for prescient reporting precedes his new book, "Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project." In 2007, years before today's comparatively widespread coverage of the Comcast-NBC merger and other threats to net neutrality, Cohen won the first place Project Censored award for his story about the free speech implications of the 2005 Supreme Court decision cementing the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) position that telecommunications laws could not be applied to cable modem services.

This time, Cohen zeros in on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Total Information Awareness project, a comprehensive surveillance program begun under the Bush administration that continues under Obama and that Cohen characterizes as an "Orwellian nightmare." More...