The New York Times has quite the Orwellian lead in Thursday’s edition, "To Track Militants, U.S. Has System That Never Forgets a Face.” It’s the story of how officials in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with U.S. and NATO forces, are now using U.S.-manufactured, handheld facial recognition scanning devices to identify militants and criminal detainees.
Later on in the story, and in an accompanying piece from Naked Capitalism reprinted in this diary, we learn that police departments throughout the U.S. are now testing (or, considering testing) these devices, the technology for which may be applied for virtually instantaneous field identification purposes, as long as an individual’s headshot is taken within five feet of the camera’s lens, whether the person knows their face is being scanned or not.
To Track Militants, U.S. Has System That Never Forgets a Face.
By THOM SHANKER
New York Times
July 14, 2011 (Page A1)
…With little notice and only occasional complaints, the American military and local authorities have been engaged in an ambitious effort to record biometric identifying information on a remarkable number of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly men of fighting age.
The article notes that 1.5 million Afghans’ records are now held in databases accessed by American, NATO and “local forces.” The article continues on to note that digital scans of eyes, facial photographs and fingerprints are being recorded and placed into these data repositories, and they’re now required for all detainees and prisoners throughout Afghanistan and Iraq.
What is different from traditional fingerprinting is that the government can scan through millions of digital files in a matter of seconds, even at remote checkpoints, using hand-held devices distributed widely across the security forces.
While the systems are attractive to American law enforcement agencies, there is serious legal and political opposition to imposing routine collection on American citizens.
Various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have discussed biometric scanning, and many have even spent money on hand-held devices. But the proposed uses are much more limited, with questions being raised about constitutional rights of privacy and protection from warrantless searches...
Yeah. Right. Here's the real story, from Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism...
(NOTE: Diarist has received written authorization from Naked Capitalism Publisher Yves Smith to reprint her blog’s posts in their entirety for the benefit of the DKos community.)
Surveillance State Tactics Increasing: Police Starting to Use Facial Recognition Devices
Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism
July 13, 2011 4:54AM
An article in the Wall Street Journal discusses a disturbing new trend: that of local police forces starting to use hand held face recognition devices. The implements allow for a picture taken at up to a five foot distance to be compared to images of individuals with a criminal record. They can also take fingerprints.
The story focuses on the civil liberties aspects, which are troubling enough and we’ll turn to them shortly. But I’d like to discuss the technology. I worked a bit with a company that had a terrific algorithm for face recognition, and they’d be the first to tell you it was far from foolproof. Even though, in extremely large databases of images, it could find matches of an individual’s photo, it would also generate quite a few false positives. False positives and sloppy or overly aggressive cops means at best an erroneous arrest (and capture of your vital information in the police database; even though that is not supposedly happening, don’t kid yourself that this is the way this is headed) and could conceivably produce more dire outcomes.
The story also describes considerable variation in police attitudes towards these tools. In Arizona, which requires everyone to carry a photo ID (!), the cops are pretty enthusiastic:
Some law-enforcement officials believe the new gear could be an important weapon against crime. “We are living in an age where a lot of people try to live under the radar and in the shadows and avoid law enforcement,” says Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Ariz. He is equipping 75 deputies under his command with the device in the fall.
Mr. Babeu says his deputies will start using the gadget try to identify people they stop who aren’t carrying other identification. (In Arizona, police can arrest people not carrying valid photo ID.) Mr. Babeu says it also will be used to verify the identity of people arrested for a crime, potentially exposing the use of fake IDs and quickly determining a person’s criminal history.
Other police officers are cautious:
Other police officials urge caution in using the device, which is known as Moris, for Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System. Bill Johnson, executive director at the National Association of Police Organizations, a group of police unions and associations, says he is concerned in particular that iris scanning, which must be done at close range and requires special technology, could be considered a “search.”
“Even technically if some law says you can do it, it is not worth it—it is just not the right thing to do,” Mr. Johnson says, adding that developing guidelines for use of the technology is “a moral responsibility.”
Sheriff Joseph McDonald Jr. of Plymouth County in Massachusetts, who tested early versions of the device and will get a handful of them in the fall, says he plans to tell his deputies not to use facial recognition without reasonable suspicion. “Two hundred years of constitutional law isn’t going away,” he says.
The story points out that what type of searches are “unreasonable” has not been addressed in court as far as biometric information capture by police is concerned. But I’m a bit disturbed that the article ends with this quote:
William Conlon, chief of police in Brockton, Mass., says he doesn’t consider the mobile device to be an invasion of privacy. “It is just a picture. If you are out in public, I can take a picture of anybody,” says Mr. Conlon, whose police department tested a prototype last summer and is planning to adopt the device. “Most people will say, ‘I don’t have anything to hide, go ahead.’”
It’s NOT “just a picture” if it involves special technology that captures biometric detail and can only be obtained at fairly close range. But I doubt the courts will come down this way, meaning that that attitudes like that of Sheriff McDonald will soon go the way of the dodo bird.
Unfortunately, most citizens have been acculturated to handing over information casually, prizing convenience over personal security. I had one friend who refused to do business online because he was unwilling to give his address and personal details to any third party (he did business in nasty third world countries, and I think he had some people who were less than happy with him, so some of his paranoia might have been well founded. I know we can’t turn the clock back, but I am saddened to see how these powerful technologies are being deployed, because they are certain to be abused.