Photo-Shy
Villains In Britain Have Developed A Bag Of New Tricks
'Big
Brother' in America
Too
Much Surveillance
Means Too Little Freedom
Drawing
a Blank: Tampa Police Records Reveal Poor Performance
of Facial-Recognition Technology
Tampa
Officials Have Suspended Use of the System, ACLU Reports
Thursday,
January 3, 2002
NEW
YORK--Facial recognition technology on the streets of
Tampa, Florida is an overhyped failure that has been seemingly
abandoned by police officials, according to a report released
today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
System
logs obtained by the ACLU through Florida's open-records
law show that the system never identified even a single
individual contained in the department's database of photographs.
And in response to the ACLU's queries about the small
number of system logs, the department has acknowledged
that the software -- originally deployed last June, 2001
--has not been actively used since August.
"Tampa's
off-again, on-again use of face-recognition software reminds
us that public officials should not slavishly embrace
whatever latest fad in surveillance technology comes along,"
said Howard Simon, Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida,
which made the records request last August.
The
logs obtained by the ACLU also indicate that the system
made many false matches between people photographed by
police video cameras as they walked down Seventh Avenue
in Tampa's Ybor City district and photographs in the department's
database of criminals, sex offenders, and runaways. The
system made what were to human observers obvious errors,
such as matching male and female subjects and subjects
with significant differences in age or weight.
"Face
recognition is all hype and no action," said Barry
Steinhardt, Associate Director of the ACLU and an author
of the report. "Potentially powerful surveillance
systems like face recognition need to be examined closely
before they are deployed, and the first question to ask
is whether the system will actually improve our safety.
The experience of the Tampa Police Department confirms
that this technology doesn't deliver."
According
to the ACLU, Tampa police officials have claimed that
their discontinuation of the system was due to disruptions
caused by police redistricting and that they planned to
resume operation at some point in the future.
The
ACLU expressed skepticism that redistricting was what
really led Tampa to abandon the face recognition system.
As the report notes, "it is reasonable to assume
that the professionals in the Tampa Police Department
would not have let the system sit unused for so long because
of a mere redistricting process had they previously found
facial recognition to be a valuable tool in the effort
to combat crime."
Several
government agencies have already abandoned facial-recognition
systems after finding they did not work as advertised,
including the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
which experimented with using the technology to identify
people in cars at the Mexico-U.S. border.
And
Steinhardt noted that more controlled studies of face
recognition software -- by the federal government's National
Institute of Standards and Technology, by the Defense
Department, and by independent security expert Richard
Smith -- have found levels of ineffectiveness similar
to those in Tampa.
Despite
these findings, facial recognition systems are being increasingly
discussed and deployed, largely as a means for combating
terrorism. They are being set up in several airports around
the United States, including Logan Airport in Boston,
T.F. Green Airport in Providence, R.I., Fresno Airport
in California and Palm Beach International Airport in
Florida.
The
ACLU has urged officials at these airports to discontinue
use of the systems, noting that facial recognition schemes
are of little use without a photographic database of known
terrorists. At Fresno airport, officials have addressed
this problem by using photos of criminals from the television
program "America's Most Wanted."
"It
makes little sense to employ an intrusive system that
will have little chance of success," Steinhardt said.
"The technology will not only divert resources from
more effective efforts, but it will also create a false
sense of security that will cause us to let our guard
down."
The
ACLU's report is available online in .pdf format at
http://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy/drawing_blank.pdf
Copies
of the ACLU's letters to airport officials are included
in a special web feature at
http://www.aclu.org/features/f110101a.html
A
Face in the Crowd
Is
surveillance software
turning police into Robocops?
by
Julie Wakefield
Americans
have long accepted the presence of hidden security cameras
that monitor banks, airports, office lobbies, and convenience
stores. But over the past year, law enforcement agencies
have sparked new privacy concerns by quietly linking surveillance
cameras to computers, using software to scan the faces
of ordinary citizens and instantly identify those with
a criminal record.
In
January, federal agents at the presidential inauguration
wore tiny cameras designed to compare the facial features
of onlookers with computerized images of suspected terrorists.
That same month, police in Tampa, Florida, tested "facial
recognition technology" at the Super Bowl, scanning
75,000 fans and running the images through a database
of digitized mug shots. (The system made 19 matches, but
police did not stop any of the suspects to confirm their
identities.) And in June, Tampa police installed software
in 36 cameras in the Ybor City entertainment district
to routinely monitor the faces of pedestrians for wanted
criminals.
The
technology used in Ybor City, called FaceIt, was designed
by Visionics Corp. of New Jersey, a leading developer
of face-recognition systems. The software breaks faces
into 80 distinct "landmarks," which can then
be compared to features in stored images almost instantaneously.
Visionics has received $2 million from the Defense Department
to adapt the idea for military uses, and the company says
that a growing number of law enforcement agencies have
expressed interest in the technology, especially in the
wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. West Virginia
and Illinois already use versions of such software to
confirm the identity of applicants for driver's licenses
and social services. As the systems spread, police are
digitizing more mug shots to create larger databases-and
the FBI has begun digitizing 40 million criminal records
at its National Crime Information Center.
Armed
with cameras linked to every mug shot in the nation, law
enforcement officers would be more like Robocops, capable
of recognizing anyone in a police database. But the emerging
technology has raised myriad privacy concerns. Civil rights
advocates question whether people who have been arrested
but not convicted will be included in the databases, and
who will have access to stored surveillance images. What's
more, government tests show that bad lighting or camera
angles can produce false matches. "Police harassment
of innocent people is a real possibility," says Eric
Rubin, an organizer with the Tampa Bay Action Group, a
coalition that has staged masked protests against the
technology.
So
far, police in Tampa have made no arrests based on the
face-scanning software. But officials in the East London
borough of Newham, where 250 cameras installed by Visionics
have scanned pedestrians for the past three years, insist
that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. The technology,
says town official Bob Lack, is not Big Brother, but more
like "a friendly uncle and aunt watching over you."
Source:
http://motherjones.com/magazine/ND01/surveillance.html
ACLU
Probes Police Use of Facial-Recognition
Surveillance Cameras in Florida
