Face-Recognition Software Fingers Suspects 184
eldavojohn writes, "In Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts, the police have a new member on the team. It's facial recognition software that will mine the 9.5 million state license images of Massachusetts residents. From the article: 'Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.' The kicker is that this system been in use since May and has been successful." An article from Iowa a few weeks back mentions that software from the same company (Digimark) is in use to catch potential fraud in applying for driver's licenses in Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Texas. But offering the software and photo database as a resource to police departments raises the stakes considerably. I wonder what the false positive rate is.
finger suspects ? (Score:5, Funny)
finger: suspect: no such user.
$ finger suspects
finger: suspects: no such user.
Re:finger suspects ? (Score:5, Funny)
Once a criminal, always a suspect? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's wrong to mass-search drivers' license pictures. It's also wrong to mass-search pictures of anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. Many, many people have a regrettable misdeed in their past. It's wrong to continue to punish people who have, as was once said, "paid their debt to society."
Penitent and paranoid in California.
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Its a freaking computer! It doesnt give a damn about you.
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The convicted burglar? Depending on circumstances. If he broke into a store because he was starving on the street at age 18, and he's now 40, sure, why not? The child molester should never be let out onto the streets again. If someone's enough of a bastard to rape a child, they should get a mandatory death penalty.
Trust, unfortunately, is like fi
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Provided that the record is for non-violent and/or "victimless" crimes, I'd take the candidate with the record. Why? (a) I don't necessarily want blind followers working for me (b) as a "fuck you" to the government (c) because I'd feel like I was doing something good for someone who needed a job.
-b.
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Growing pot in your basement and then smoking it yourself (or with friends who are of age) is illegal. Who's being victimized?
Laws against sex toys in some states (sale is a felony).
Illegal gun ownership for self defense even if you don't shoot anyone.
Need I go on?
-b.
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"Once done, always more likely" (Score:2)
I truly understand what you mean. Although I have not been convicted of any crime (other than a few traffic issues and a failure to appear) my closest friend was so accused. What really sucks is that, in his case
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Vastly depends on the state and the will of the county judge. Plus you need money for various court fees and possibly for an attorney, but if you aren't working you may not have the money.
-b.
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Speak for yourself.
False positive rate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as someone with (a) some common sense and (b) a formal CS background including image processing work, I think it's fair to say that it won't be zero.
I hope they have good procedures in place to immediately drop any proceedings against those who are misidentified, and that any automatic identification using this system is not somehow considered 100% reliable in court.
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Trouble is..to the general populace....the computer is infallible...much more correct than a person could be...people really beleive that in droves out there.
Much like they all believe that Doctors know it all...give them complete 100% trust...not knowing that the Dr's largely are making only very educat
False positive rate > 100% might be good (Score:2)
If the false positive rate is around 200%, and if the false negative rate is 50%, then any given search might tend to yield 2-4 suspects (depending on the variance of the false positives, of course) and about half the time the actual culprit will be included. Of the 2-4 suspects that are not the culprit, most of the time it will be quite easy to eliminate them, either visually by the user, or from simple detective work (i.e., a rock-solid alibi or possibly even common sense in some cases). So, for a fairly
Re:False positive rate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:False positive rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
dealing with false positives from "tips". I suspect that is not
proven.
Re:False positive rate? (Score:4, Informative)
Explanation: I was flipping through channels and landed on one that was following a Los Angeles SWAT team. They were serving a warrant on an apartment based upon a tip from a confidential informant that there was a gun in the apartment (and I think that drugs were sold out of the apartment -- I missed the start). Nobody answered the door, so the SWAT team battered down the front and back doors, broke a window to investigate a room that was locked, and ransacked the entire place. They found no drugs and exactly one "weapon": a pistol-shaped BB gun. The conclusion from the SWAT team leader: that the confidential informant had proved his worth *and* that their destruction of the apartment had shut down a drug distribution center.
I wish I were making this up. Sadly, this is probably typical of cases that Radley Balko has cataloged.
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Re:False positive rate? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:False positive rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's not really a valid complaint in and of itself. The system already works with you being a suspect for looking like whoever committed the crime. That's what wanted posters are about, what "have you seen this man" questions are about, etc. It's not like criminals pose for cameras, so using im
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Well, there's your problem right there. Sometimes it's not about justice, it's about the police arresting someone and the DA getting a conviction for political gain, or just so that they don't look like a bunch of fools. The justice system in the US is supposed to operate on a presumption of
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Which is the difference between then and now. Then, someone COULD have done it true, but statistically, the odds of it happening were slight. (Cop being there, you being there, cop noticing you and running a check, dozens of other people not being checked because cop was checking someone else, cop not munching a donut
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Think how long you wait in line at the DMV now. Do you want the person behind the counter to spend an extra five, ten, or thirty minutes vetting the past and proof of ide
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You're assuming they want to nail _the_ perpetrator, not _a_ suspect. Consider the number of times that US prosecutors have actually opposed conceivable exonerating DNA tests even for convicts on death row, and you might not think a high false positive rate would be a showstopper at all.
From what I've seen of facial recognition software, the error rates are horrible. Set it to sensitive and you get error
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It will be like the Do Not Fly list.
Years ago, Scientific American had a story about a prototype system for facial recognition created of students at Brooklyn College. They had a database of about 1,000 faces, and they showed the 2 most similar and the 2 most different. The 2 most different were very different. The 2 most similar were so similar, I couldn't tell them apart. So back-of-the-envelope, I'd say about 2 faces in 1,000 will be so similar you can't tell
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Hispanic and Italian? Surely not... they were obviously both Italic.
*rimshot*
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But consider the opposite side of the equation... if you are able. What if the system was only 50% sucessful? Isn't that at least a high enough success rate to send out a cop to personally ID the guy? What's the difference between this system, and some old lady down the street calling in to the cops saying she recognized the guy from the photo in the post
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If the "match" is against, say, an escaped felon, "armed and presumed dangerous," I strongly suspect the cops are going to do just a bit more than saunter up and ask for your id...
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My example simply served to demonstrate the severity of that potential mistake...
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They already have systems like this for fingerprints: local police send fingerprints to the FBI; the FBI puts them in computer; computer spits out a possible match or matches; a real person then looks at the submitted fingerprint and the stored fingerprint and makes a decision. If it goes to court, a real person who is locally available will testify as to the match (well first, you can see both have a tented
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This would just help them narrow down the possibilities.
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Blockquoth the AC:
That's lovely, and as long as this sort of system is used as a way to make the human checkers' job easier and not an excuse to remove human checking from the system that's great. The problem is that systems like these often do get u
Ewwwww! (Score:1)
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Well... (Score:1, Funny)
Oh yeah? (Score:5, Funny)
And what does it do if they're male?
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It fingers them.
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Wonderful (Score:2)
internet renewal is your friend (Score:1)
That coupled with the ravages of solar radiation upon your facial skin after a few years you will never be recoginzed.
You will be unstopable.
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And Taxachusetts has been known as a viper's nest of do-gooders and Puritans since the time of the Pilgrims. Keep in mind that in the 1600s, you could be hanged for fathering a child out of wedlock among other things, something that didn't normally happen even in Britain at that time. If
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Nah, more like limousine liberals. The *real* hippies have all moved out to Vermont or Oregon. Cheaper living, more land, cleaner air, and less intrusive government :-P
-b.
False positives before, too (Score:5, Interesting)
I fear "automatic" matching of criminals and trying to catch them, e.g., when they renew their license. Here is a true false-positive story that happened to me. I went to renew my driver's license, and the nice lady informed me that she could not issue me a license because I had had mine revoked in Maryland due to felony charges. Now, I have never committed a felony and I have never been to Maryland, let alone had a driver's license there. The nice lady was unpersuaded by this information. The database said I was a felon in Maryland, and that was the end of the story.
After much yelling about the problem, it was finally revealed that the real felon's name was exactly like mine except for one letter, and some moron doing data entry had gone ahead and decided we were the same person, based solely on name. Since this data problem was local to the "matching" system they had implemented, and not prevalent in who-knows-how-many databases, it was cleared up with a little investigation. However, if that "match" had been replicated into other systems, I could very well have had a nasty time clearing my name. The lady at the DMV was 100% convinced that I was a felon based on what the computer told her. Quite likely, no one else would have believed I was innocent either.
I can see this system playing havoc with people too. I have met people with no connection to each other but who nevertheless look virtually identical.
Re:False positives before, too (Score:5, Informative)
This article is a great example of what you've described,
http://nebraska.statepaper.com/pages/drudged/inno
In summary: There are two girls that look nearly identical. One of them committed a crime, and the other was put in jail for a week. There are photos in the article.
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If they lied to a judge, shouldn't they go to prison for perjury? Lying to secure an arrest or conviction carries the same amount of prison time (or even execution) as your "victim" served in a lot of states. So shouldn't they sit in jail for at least a week?
Better yet, there's always the option of someone finding them in a dark alley and using a baseball bat
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Is your name Tuttle [wikipedia.org], by chance?
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I don't think this applies to all felons. However, it would make sense if you were (say) driving drunk and killed someone with your car. Manslaughter is a felony, and you'd definitely not want that person driving anytime soon.
-b.
Good old SQL... (Score:5, Funny)
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Not really. Members of both parties, these days, with few exceptions are authoritarians. Remember that Democrats were strongly behind the PATRIOT Act and the Dept of Homeland Security right after 9/11. If you want freedom, vote Libertarian or Independent.
-b.
fingers suspects (Score:1)
but no stats (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:but no stats (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's say your system is 99% reliable, that is to say, 1% of the time it checks a negative it reports a positive and vice versa.
Now you screen 1,000,000 people looking for one suspect, your system turns up 10,001 positives. Which one is it?
This is a problem that has been well-studied in cancer screenings. For certain rare types of cancers, there are nearly 100% reliable tests that nonetheless when they report a positive, are usually wrong.
Now it's fine to say, in the case of the cancer, that the 1% of the population should be informed and then checked via another procedure or something. But when we're talking about a process that fingers potential criminals, and in modern criminal justice where merely being a suspect hurts your life in a myriad of ways (god help you if the information winds up somewhere accessible to google, or worse yet, the case has anything to do with terrorism).
I have the same objection to large-scale wiretapping operations, if anything, the human factor there greatly increases the problem.
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Worse, what if the answer is "none," since the actual criminal is either not in the database or wasn't recognized? Will the pressure to solve the case become great enough to pick the likeliest suspect out of those 10,001, and try to get a conviction.
In Texas, there was a case where two janitors were the suspect in the killing of a girl. One was Black, one was White. There was no strong evid
Jack-booted thugs (Score:1)
Next stop... (Score:1)
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I, for one, welcome our new CSI overlords! (Score:5, Funny)
Finally! Inept police departments will be able to solve murders and other heinous crimes using awesome computer graphics in 47 minutes or less...just like on TV!
Enhance...enhance...enhance...
Suddenly... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now a "Person of Interest"? (Score:1)
Oh goodies (Score:2, Insightful)
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WTF!?~ (Score:4, Insightful)
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Forget the 5th amendment, I think this ought to be considered a direct violation of the 4th amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... [findlaw.com]
Searching a database of pictures which were collected under the premise of a different use seems like an unreasonable search of my papers or if 'papers
That is him officer! (Score:1)
license photograph archive (Score:5, Insightful)
I just took a look at the MA code [mass.gov] and couldn't find anything allowing the photographs to be archived by the registry of motor vehicles. Maybe someone else with a better knoweledge of MA law can find such a law.
This is not an insignificant issue...the archival of the photographs and sharing them to law enforcement, basically without limit and without warrant to access the database, is the practical equivalent of requiring every citizen above the age of 16 to show up at the local police station and be photographed.
I consider the photograph archival of US license pictures to be one of the biggest and least known/understood privacy invasions in the last 10-15 years.
Related to a story on /. yesterday (Score:2)
Obviously they are. A License to drive has just been t
Heh (Score:1, Informative)
Oh, that's just great. First face-regonition violates our privacy, and now it's violating our orifices!
The amount of comments here, endorsing ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Twins (Score:5, Interesting)
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Turning the law upside down.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Masks (Score:1)
false positives (Score:2)
Even if the rate is unacceptably high for automated use, it could prove very helpful.
Imagine someone coming in to get a license, gets his picture taken, and while he waits for the license to be printed and laminated, the system searches its database. It produces the 10 closest matches it can find, and presents them to the DMV worker. The worker then visually compares the ten images with the actual person sitting in the waiting area. It's not necessary for the syst
Yes, but that's the whole problem.. (Score:2)
The whole problem starts with someone considering the computer to be authoritative instead of yet another fraud detection tool - usually followed by downskilling the frontline workers which makes the whole matter worse.
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I worked on image recognition software on my last job. The project was a failure, for many reasons. Our stuff was worse than average for such software, but the biggest problem is that facial recognition is very hard. The best stuff out there can maybe hit 90% accuracy. With lots of time consuming help from people, the accuracy rate can be pushed up to 98% or 99%. For 90% accuracy to even be possible, the subjects have to be photographed in a very controlled environment. Everyone's face must be in exac
Hmm...oh..I get it .. ? (Score:2)
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Big time. I and lots of other people can often identify someone without seeing them just from hearing them walk. Video would be a big step forward, as people tend to be very distinctive in their movements, but I doubt there will ever be a computer than can people-watch as well as people themselves can.
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6.3 million residents, 9.5 million registered voters.. are you against giving the dead the right to vote?
Racist.
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