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FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

washingtonpost.com

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Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#31

Post by verisimilitudes »

gbrown wrote: post #12
xmichael999 wrote: post #7

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

If I had to guess, they're paying a company tons of money for a crappy product that will make us all a bit less free, and will decrease the signal to noise ratio in actual investigation of wrongdoing. I'd also bet that there will be racial bias of one sort or another baked in, since the criminal justice system is heavily biased. Outcomes like "arrests" or "convictions" are poor proxies for crime, but good proxies for…

Firstly, I had to have this website believe I was using it from the US before it would let me read the article. Secondly, it's for exactly these reasons that I find it awful and indefensible that I should be required to have a driver's license. Thirdly, this is why I have a single photograph and will be reusing it for as long as I can.

>Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases.

This doesn't seem like an issue, considering those wouldn't be US citizens. It's bad when it happens to US citizens. Only an idiot would enter a country illegally and then register with some of its systems, such as this.

It's important to remember that one reason a country may allow lawlessness, violence, or unchecked immigration is to then demand stricter laws and security measures to the problem it created.

Now, to respond to your comment:

>As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases.

You complain about ''racial bias'', yet then write that. Would it be biased to start pointing out crime statistics and how only a few white people have been caught by such a system? Tell me how you think this reads:

As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of security camera data from businesses: they're catching black male offenders who could blend into the crowd.

Do you like that?

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#32

Post by verisimilitudes »

I'll resubmit since the tree my comment was in is dead.

Firstly, I had to have this website believe I was using it from the US before it would let me read the article. Secondly, it's for exactly these reasons that I find it awful and indefensible that I should be required to have a driver's license. Thirdly, this is why I have a single photograph and will be reusing it for as long as I can.

>Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases.

This doesn't seem like an issue, considering those wouldn't be US citizens. It's bad when it happens to US citizens. Only an idiot would enter a country illegally and then register with some of its systems, such as this.

It's important to remember that one reason a country may allow lawlessness, violence, or unchecked immigration is to then demand stricter laws and security measures to the problem it created.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#33

Post by _iyig »

Fairness of the U.S. immigration system aside, what is wrong in principle with law enforcement using driver’s license photos to uphold and enforce the law? When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S.

I would be much more concerned if law enforcement were, for example, using these photos to profile drivers by race or using them in an otherwise illegal manner. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#34

Post by bko »

xmichael999 wrote: post #7

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

A single picture is surprisingly effective in recognizing that person in another photo. I've been playing around with a python wrapper on dlib's facial recognition [0] and it's astonishing how it can identify people from just one photo. It's not like other machine learning methods that include training a classifier or even fine tuning a classifier. It works by encoding the persons face to a 128 dimension vector and then using that for comparison.

The accuracy from most methods is between 99.2% - 99.8%, but the problem is that the training samples are too easy and controlled. It's sensitive to lighting. Google's most recent paper [1] on Facenet found 99.63% on the easy Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, and an impressive 95.12% on the Youtube faces dataset, presumably a much more difficult dataset.

[0] https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#35

Post by godelski »

2Ccltvcm wrote: post #30

There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.

These kinds of comments make me extremely upset. Such thinking is exactly why we're losing power in democracy. Such thinking is how authoritarians win. I will go as far as saying that spreading this idea is dangerous at best.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#36

Post by phyzome »

2Ccltvcm wrote: post #30

There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.

Kinda weird for you to say that, when right in the article:

« Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at the use of driver’s license photos in federal facial-recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or individual license holders. »

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#37

Post by 2Ccltvcm »

godelski wrote: post #35
2Ccltvcm wrote: post #30

There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.

These kinds of comments make me extremely upset. Such thinking is exactly why we're losing power in democracy. Such thinking is how authoritarians win. I will go as far as saying that spreading this idea is dangerous at best.

In my youth I spent thousands of hours I will never get back arguing about the merits of various social policies and I have never made a positive impact with my contributions.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#38

Post by ma2rten »

_iyig wrote: post #33

Fairness of the U.S. immigration system aside, what is wrong in principle with law enforcement using driver’s license photos to uphold and enforce the law? When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S. I would be much more concerned if law enforcement were, for example, using t…

Just because I am in public doesn't mean that I want to be tracked by government all the time. The idea that FBI constantly knows where I am sounds Orwellian and unconstitutional to me.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#39

Post by godelski »

imglorp wrote: post #4

What did you think was going to happen? Did you speak out against it when it was proposed? How would they NOT use this data available to them? https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/r...

You have a good point but many people do not realize the implications of things. To be fair to them, things are purposefully framed so that they seem to be in the public's best interest. I understand the anger and resentment, but if people are now worried then we can use that momentum to fix the issue. You're right, it didn't have to be an issue in the first place, but let's do what we can to fix it instead of spreading the frustration.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#40

Post by Ididntdothis »

_iyig wrote: post #33

Fairness of the U.S. immigration system aside, what is wrong in principle with law enforcement using driver’s license photos to uphold and enforce the law? When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S. I would be much more concerned if law enforcement were, for example, using t…

"When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy."

I think in the age of automated large scale image recognition we need to revise the concept of privacy. I don't think we should lose our privacy completely as soon as we leave our home. And with devices like the Echo we don't even have privacy at home. There need to be restrictions on mass processing of this kind of data. Otherwise we'll create a version of the world of "1984" where nobody can escape surveillance.

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