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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

#51

Post by fromthestart »

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…

You train the neural net to encode landmarks which are unique to individual faces. Such a net, when trained, can extract the unique facial features from a single image and embed them in a vector to be compared to features extracted from other images.

This is similar to how single images of faces can be animated with GANs now.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1

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

#52

Post by shados »

gizmoduck wrote: post #47
_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. False. Until the observer effect occurs, I - essentially - do not exist but as a record in a database. Someone who knows me, my car, or has the ability to ascertain who I am from identifiers on the vehicle, is able to collapse that sense of privacy but, until that happens, I am just one of the many of the nameless mass. In that, I have p…

> Your credulous, at best, belief in law enforcement's use of the system largely ignores the prevailing example given in the article

Law enforcement will always be a compromise. There will always be some who abuse it, and there will always be a need for it (if you want a reasonable level of civilization anyway). It's not binary. It's not "Give up all freedom and rights for infinite security" vs "Give up absolutely nothing for absolute freedom" with nothing in between. The line has to be drawn, but it is arbitrary, and a lot of people have different opinions on where it should be drawn (rightly so! there's not an obvious place to draw it).

We certainly have to be careful not to draw it too far on one side, but that doesn't mean it has to be completely on the other side.

Eg: I personally think it's too far to put surveillance cameras everywhere, but I'd be ok with cameras and facial recognitions on some major roads (they already have pictures associated with driver's licenses and various other documents for acceptable reasons).

Yeah, it might get abused sometimes, but everything can be. Everyone for themselves and hope for the best hasn't historically worked out so hot either. Law enforcement being completely neutered with zero tools and powers isn't very effective.

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

#53

Post by sys_64738 »

This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.

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

#54

Post by JadeNB »

sys_64738 wrote: post #53

This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.

> This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.

I think that there were plenty of problems with the old approaches to policing, too. It was and remains the case that there's no need for detection if you can manage to pin the crime on a conveniently available candidate, whether or not that person did it; and pinning the crime on whoever you've got is greatly assisted by brute-force techniques that have nothing to do with technology.

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

#55

Post by imglorp »

godelski wrote: post #46
macinjosh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was passed by Congress in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act

What the parent is trying to say is that it was not public. This can mean that they just weren't aware of it too, or thought it was something else. I know when I heard about the RealID act there wasn't much discussion about it among my peers. It just seemed like an update into how licenses were done, and one that would make them more secure (and let's be honest, identification in the US is atrocious. We even use SSNs…

Yeah there was a little privacy debate when it was proposed, and a little states' rights debate. Now it's really just a formality, but back then there wasn't this level of integrated and aggregated data about individuals.

Some states listened and intentionally dragged their feet. Mine is one - we needed an extension in order to fly -- but we're rolling it out here now too.

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

#56

Post by identity0 »

RaceWon wrote: post #50

Imagine a USA where the citizens are no longer armed, and the 1st Amendment has been cannibalized by the passing of various "hate speech" laws that only serve the interests of the current elected... and then imagine trying to redress a Government gone full Orwellian. Just sayin.

What you're describing is literally the UK right now.

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

#57

Post by darpa_escapee »

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…

> 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.

You hit the nail on the head. Any system that hinders law enforcement’s assumptions and hunches will be touted as defective, anything that confirms those assumptions will be exalted.

This is why narcotics dogs are used. Studies show that dogs will signal upon trainer instruction, and that dogs aren’t accurate nor precise in practice. Such dogs exist to establish probable cause, not to determine whether or not a suspect possesses narcotics.

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

#58

Post by tal8d »

pixl97 wrote: post #22
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #19

Sensible regulations around what the government can do/not do in regards to things like facial recognition tech seems like it’s becoming more and more necessary. I am far more worried about privacy invasions/abuse by the government than I am by private companies that seem to get all the press (ie facebook). For the simple reason that 1) facebook can’t arrest me 2) facebook has no incentive other than targeting me wit…

The issue here is it is not an either/or. We commonly run into joint partnerships where the government doesn't have/maintain the data at all. The goverment just 'buys' an answer from the private corporation and the courts ok this behavior.

For some dark comedy, look into NIST and their resistance to the release of their biometric software purpose built for the FBI. The solution they have since found is the purchase of COTS with contracts explicitly denying any kind of ownership as a result of purchase. We can't have the taxpayers getting too much bang for their buck!

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

#59

Post by sunebeck »

ma2rten wrote: post #41
bko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Accuracy depends on the dataset like you point out. It's a hard task to find a person among all driver license photos in the US.

Anecdotally, FindFace found my Russian friend's VK.com profile (amongst many millions of such profiles) as the number one hit after I took a picture of her in a bar and submitted it to their face recognition service.

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

#60

Post by JetSpiegel »

RaceWon wrote: post #50

Imagine a USA where the citizens are no longer armed, and the 1st Amendment has been cannibalized by the passing of various "hate speech" laws that only serve the interests of the current elected... and then imagine trying to redress a Government gone full Orwellian. Just sayin.

How is this particular development relevant? The US government still has nukes, SSN, etc etc etc.

This particular reading of the 2nd Amendment seems to have been frozen in time since the drafting of the Constitution.

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