FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by tal8d » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:14 AM UTC

morpheuskafka wrote: post #9

Hmm, almost like those REAL IDs weren't such a good idea... not like civil liberties advocates mentioned this or anything... The ID security improvements (central issuance, anti-copying features) were fine and good, the federal database is not.

Oh I miss the good old days when we were fighting things like the clipper chip and weaponized algorithms. Now it is all about the data, which is much more difficult to rally people around. Anybody else remember the time the Office of Personnel Management leaked all the military biometric records (plus security clearance metadata) they fought to have stewardship over? No more vets working under cover :) You'd think they'd have learned that they can't trust themselves to warehouse so much high value data in one place, that single incident will serve as a daily reminder for about 20 years. Lots of externalities in that as well: given what would have been in my records, I don't think I'd fare well doing business in China.

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

#62

Post by Scaevolus » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:20 AM UTC

bko wrote: post #34

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 t…

dlib's face recognition is unsuitable for large-scale (a million faces) or single-reference recognition tasks.

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

#63

Post by tal8d » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:24 AM UTC

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…

> We even use SSNs for identification!

Funny you should mention that in your call for caution against black pilling. When SS was proposed there was massive popular outcry against serializing citizens with a federally assigned number. The USG assured everybody that SSNs would only ever be used for the distribution of benefits...

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

#64

Post by tal8d » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:45 AM UTC

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...

And this is why the morning of the Snowden leaks will always be a fond memory for me. Anybody with experience in the kinetic aspects of the USG, who also had a solid understanding of what is technologically feasible, knew about that mass surveillance was a certainty. The Department of State's process for designating terrorist organizations is instructive here: groups are evaluated on both disposition and capability. Well, the USG has repeatedly demonstrated a predisposition for spying on citizens and relatively recently it gained the technological ability to do so at scale. Lots of people feeling vindicated that morning.

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

#65

Post by xfitm3 » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:46 AM UTC

fromthestart wrote: post #51

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

Is this the same type of neural net that's powering "deepfakes"?

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

#66

Post by threezero » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:50 AM UTC

metaphor wrote: post #15

This line caught my attention: > The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches. What the GAO study[1] actually said: > However, we found that the te…

Exactly. They could get 100% matching with 50 results returned out of 50 subjects in the database.

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

#67

Post by sangnoir » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:52 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #44

2Ccltvcm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then do more than just argue. And when you do argue, argue to change minds, not to win. I know I used to argue to win. I found that it just puts people off. It doesn't matter how right you are if you make the other person feel angry (obvious counter examples aside). Arguing to convince the other side is harder because you have to understand them. Not only that, but you have to demonstrate that understanding. It…

The geek/hacker contingent has been surprisingly inept at applying the hacker ethos on the political scene. This is despite the wealth and self-assessed brilliance - where are the subversive PACs exploiting loopholes? Or trade groups communicatinf what is "common sense" on HN to the rest of the world? Perhaps the industry attracts the lone-wolf/Randian types who do not see value in unity-of-purpose, because less-wealthy and allegedly "lower-performance" industries are much more politically effective.

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

#68

Post by OrgNet » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #6

craftinator wrote: post #3

Yay! More surveillance! Maybe we'll finally stop getting attacked by terrorists every single day!

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

some comments are just common knowledge and don't require references...

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

#69

Post by Redoubts » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 2:04 AM UTC

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...

Great, all the downsides of a national id, without any of the benefits of a national ID beyond an SSN...

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

#70

Post by _iyig » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #49

_iyig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I think I failed to clarify my point. I don't think ubiquitous vehicle position tracking is legal, or a good idea. I do think that if you're a driver on public roads, your face will be photographed at some point (such as for your license), and _that's_ legal and to be expected.

As far as I know, the problem here is police running photos that it has from some cameras against the DMV database. Which is a) apparently of dubious legality because it's a biometric search and should be done in a criminal case but is instead done promiscuously left and right; and b) is ethically dubious because it creeps into the territory of ubiquitous surveillance. Vehicles and roads don't enter the equation apar…

As far as I know, there isn't a problem here.

> [...] of dubious legality because it's a biometric search and should be done in a criminal case [...]

That is not the law. You have been misled, perhaps as the article's author intended. The author's feelings on whether such searches should be legal are not the same as democratically-enacted laws on the matter.