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Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

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Re: Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

#2
When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software.

For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They had about 48 hours to book flights out of the country, flee to another part of the country, do more damage, etc. The lack of facial recognition software could have ultimately led to this case being unnecessarily longer. This is an issue that CAN and NEEDS to be fixed quickly--in fact, I hope the government is working on a more sophisticated facial recognition software right now. Ideally, the facial recognition software should be able to crawl through the web to search for faces.

Now that I think about it, a good hacker could build a search engine that allows people to post photos and the program will run an automated search across the web (Social networks, Google, etc.) to see which pictures match it. Hell, Facebook even has facial recognition to some extent. A more sophisticated one cannot be that difficult for the government to build and put to use.

Re: Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

#4

My big questions is why were the suspects faces in the database? Why would a 19 year old, never done anything face be in the facial recognition database?

The older brother had been questioned by the FBI before.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57580534/fbi-interviewed...

Re: Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

#5

My big questions is why were the suspects faces in the database? Why would a 19 year old, never done anything face be in the facial recognition database?

Best random guess: Something related to him being an alien and becoming a naturalized citizen

Re: Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

#6

When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software. For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They h…

There is a lot of money being put into facial recognition software by law enforcement and the military (including DARPA), so it's certainly the case that it's being worked on. But it's a hard problem, especially to do robustly at a large scale. What they do have is almost certainly the state of the art— in fact much of the current commercial state-of-the-art is itself based on stuff developed in older DARPA projects.

Re: Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

#8

When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software. For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They h…

Facebook only has to distinguish among friends of the uploader. And it's not perfect. This man was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. He would not have been identifiable out of the tens of thousands of people at the event, matched across the (probably) millions of people in the database.

Re: Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

#10

My big questions is why were the suspects faces in the database? Why would a 19 year old, never done anything face be in the facial recognition database?

I'm going to venture to guess that either a) the officer was talking out of his ass to make a quick point or b) someone, somewhere massively scraped every social network they could think of for anyone with ties to the area or the event. That being said, I don't really like the sound of it either, regardless of how true it is.

--pre-submit thought: perhaps it was the older brother? Our background is rather limited but it would not be surprising if he had had prior run-ins with the law. Even a minor offense will get your mugshot in the file.

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