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TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

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Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#91

Post by danesparza »

otakucode wrote: post #89
sho wrote: post #4

> (Every government on earth) plans to use face recognition to track (everyone) through airports Fixed it for you. I know for a fact at least 2 asian countries which are either actively using or trialling this, and not just at airports. Both already have fairly comprehensive facial recognition DBs of their citizens (smile for your driver's license picture!) I've also heard anecdotal accounts of people who stay too lo…

The tech is not there, actually. Facial recognition is absolute garbage. It borders on being completely useless even in ideal circumstances. Airports might have a slight advantage since they have a list of people they expect to be present (people with upcoming flights) and such, but in my experience systems like what the TSA uses are obstinantly terrible. They most likely have a commercial product purchased from some…

"Facial recognition is absolute garbage."

Yes. And so is a human's ability to predict who are good and bad actors in a given situation. The statistical mathematics is very deceiving to most people.

See "Base rate fallacy" for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#92

Post by Sargos »

yardie wrote: post #77
vixen99 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and of course that only occurs in horrible corrupt states - never in our back yard.

You're going to have to be specific about who's backyard. Western Europe doesn't allow executions. The UK doesn't accept organ donation from executed prisoners due to moral perceptions. And the US flat out doesn't do it because the AMA will have no part in it. So if there is evidence of prisoner organ donation please present it.

Denigrating the US whenever you can works very well on reddit and instantly makes your comment a star. I think they hoped it would work here too.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#94

Post by rtkwe »

otakucode wrote: post #89
sho wrote: post #4

> (Every government on earth) plans to use face recognition to track (everyone) through airports Fixed it for you. I know for a fact at least 2 asian countries which are either actively using or trialling this, and not just at airports. Both already have fairly comprehensive facial recognition DBs of their citizens (smile for your driver's license picture!) I've also heard anecdotal accounts of people who stay too lo…

The tech is not there, actually. Facial recognition is absolute garbage. It borders on being completely useless even in ideal circumstances. Airports might have a slight advantage since they have a list of people they expect to be present (people with upcoming flights) and such, but in my experience systems like what the TSA uses are obstinantly terrible. They most likely have a commercial product purchased from some…

Making it slightly easier is that they have multiple points where a person is matched with a name during their time in the airport. With that and good enough coverage they could make the recognition better with continuous tracking. Even without an explicit name attached to a person just knowing all the places a person has gone could be useful for flagging 'weird' behavior.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#95

Post by Tech-Noir »

tessierashpool wrote: post #86
mtgx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tech is there. This is why comments such "but spy agencies have always been spying, it's their job" have always pissed me off. The spy agencies will continue to encroach on our rights the more "tech is here". We now have "smart" devices with mics and cameras in every room, so they're going to use that. If 30 years from now we'll use some kind of "bluetooth headset" that actually interacts directly with our thou…

Yup. “The tech is there” is just the cowards’ excuse for not doing anything. The tech doesn’t make the difference. England had a police state when the only way to do that was to open paper mail with steam. This use of facial recognition is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. The government is always trying to do shit like this, and it’s our job as citizens to stop them. The big takeaway should not be this patheti…

> Yup. “The tech is there” is just the cowards’ excuse for not doing anything. The tech doesn’t make the difference.

I feel like you and the parent of your post are misinterpreting what sho said. I didn't read it as him trying to justify it, or even say "the tech is there (so let's just accept it)", I read it as him pointing out that it's not just the TSA (or other US agencies) doing it.

And how do you know that he's a "coward" and not doing anything about it? What are you doing about it, other than presumably giving money to the ACLU or EFF?

> England had a police state when the only way to do that was to open paper mail with steam.

England (I assume you mean Britain) has never been a "police state", however draconian new laws may be in this day and age. What are you talking about?

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#96

Post by Sargos »

sailfast wrote: post #66

Can we talk about how to hack this? Is there camera-defeating reflective make-up that I can apply before going through an airport? How does one defeat these technologies effectively so that they are no longer useful to governments?

Honestly? You can't. Even if a perfect spray did exist you wouldn't be able to get even close to half of the population to use it. It would actually be a small minority. There's actually quite a large group of people out there that support things like this.

Since you could only ever get a small group to attempt this it would only draw more scrutiny onto yourself and make your life harder. It wouldn't be enough of an inconvenience for the authorities to care.

The largest group I've heard of is the opt-out of scanners group who refused and always demands xrays. It even made the media. It faded away and now the one or two people that care take an extra few minutes in security getting a pat down. No real change happened.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#97

Post by AnthonyMouse »

saas_co_de wrote: post #82
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is their theory that someone is going to use a mission impossible face mask to impersonate me and then get me put on a terrorist watch list? Biometrics are basically useless, but they're useless in two separate contexts. Using them for access control is useless because of this: > Last time I checked anyone can take my picture any time I am in public. Lifting someone's fingerprints or face/iris scan is easy, and foo…

> That is definitively false. We're really, really good at it. machines [are] cheaper and scale better. I am taking the "cheaper and scale better" part into account when I say that machines will be more accurate. If you want to pick a face out of thousands in a crowd or match a single face to a list of thousands of targets facial recognition is going to outperform humans at the same cost. > the false positive rate is…

> I am taking the "cheaper and scale better" part into account when I say that machines will be more accurate.

Then you used the wrong word, because cost and throughput are not accuracy. A machine that always returns "true" can be very cheap and very fast.

> The false positive rate is whatever you configure it to be. The confidence level for flagging someone is a parameter and you can adjust it to whatever false positive rate is acceptable.

When that makes the false negative rate ~100%, you might as well do yourself a favor and throw the entire system in the trash.

> Every single flag will be reviewed by a human who will decide whether or not to take action based on it. This is no different than a human looking at a list of suspects and then watching for matches, except that the computer can use a much larger suspect list, and give the human hints.

That's the problem though. Getting arrested and subjected to twelve hours of questioning every time you walk in front of a camera will ruin your life even if you ultimately get released every time. The much larger suspect list only exacerbates things. Even if the false positive rate is no worse, it gets multiplied by a much higher volume.

When the problem is that people make mistakes, making the same mistakes faster only makes the problem bigger.

And of course they'll look a lot like the target. That's what causes the false positive.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#98

Post by rtkwe »

logfromblammo wrote: post #84
sailfast wrote: post #66

Can we talk about how to hack this? Is there camera-defeating reflective make-up that I can apply before going through an airport? How does one defeat these technologies effectively so that they are no longer useful to governments?

CV Dazzle did a good job of making a face look like a not-face a few years ago, but I'm not sure how well it would work today. I don't think there's any kind of make-up that would be visible to a camera, but not obvious to the naked eye, and still be able to defeat face recognition. My plan would be to create a new religion in the United States that makes the wearing of face masks and veils in public an essential ten…

This it [0]? Googled "short story masks reputation economy musical instrument", it's pretty good at finding seemingly super obscure, usually through someone else describing it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12632596-the-moon-moth

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#99

Post by glenneroo »

exabrial wrote: post #93

http://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-o... I can't believe the TSA came in _as low_ as 80% a failure rate. The fact that they managed to stop _anything_ done by professionals is sort of amazing in my mind.

To be fair, they improved slightly over the past 2 years:

> The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret teams from the DHS found that the TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop inspectors from smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#100

Post by kabdib »

sailfast wrote: post #66

Can we talk about how to hack this? Is there camera-defeating reflective make-up that I can apply before going through an airport? How does one defeat these technologies effectively so that they are no longer useful to governments?

Hmmm. A few years ago I was talking with a guy who worked on a system that pointed IR cameras at hands and did gesture recognition on them.

They were doing user testing, and one of the folks they tried it out with happened to be a wiring contractor who was in the building at the time. It didn't recognize his hands; the IR cameras could not see them. Turns out that the lubricant he was using to pull cables through conduit was blinding them.

I don't know what the lubricant was, but hopefully this reduces your search space dramatically :-)

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