Thread: FBI To Roll Out Face Recognition System Analysis

FBI To Roll Out Face Recognition System Analysis

by Jesse Emspak
Oct 10, 2011 12:19 PM ET

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is setting up a system to recognize faces, with the goal of putting a name to a mug already known.

It's called the Next Generation Identification system. By mid-January, selected states will have access to the FBI database, allowing local law enforcement to match faces with names. Basically, a state policeman could enter the photo of a suspect and see if that person is among the millions of mug shots the FBI has. The system would come up with several candidates, and the local police would pick the ones that most closely resembled the face that was entered. With that, they would get the names associated with those faces and be able to narrow down the possibilities.

Currently an FBI agent has to know a name of a suspect to get a record of that person. So without knowing say, John Smith's name, it is impossible to figure out whether he is the right John Smith in that photo of a "person of interest" or possible criminal suspect.

The first states to test this out are Michigan, Washington, Florida and North Carolina. By 2014 it should be rolled out to the whole country. Part of the process will be local law enforcement uploading photos of people as they are booked.

Facial recognition technology has gotten a lot better in the past several years, and versions of it are already deployed by Google an Facebook. But there are still some issues to be worked out.

On the technical side, there are concerns about errors in the database. Google and Facebook use several photos of a person to match the face to the name, whereas the FBI will usually only have one mug shot. And mistakes can and do happen, even with supposedly reliable identification techniques such as fingerprints. Fingerprints were used in 2004 to flag an Oregon man named Brandon Mayfield as a material witness in the Madrid bombings, even though he hadn't left the United States in at least a decade.

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On the civil liberties front, there are concerns that if local the local police upload photos of people as they are arrested, the FBI would end up with a database of people who were not necessarily convicted of anything. (Think of the average protest march, where many people can end up in police custody, at least for a while). Another problem is how much coordination there will be between immigration enforcement, for example, and the FBI. Immigrant rights advocates have asked if foreigners will be risking deportation because their faces are in an FBI database, even if they aren't convicted of anything or have committed a minor offense. (The Department of Homeland Security already matches fingerprints of booked offenders with the FBI database to see if people are in the country illegally).

http://news.discovery.com/tech/fbi-face ... 11010.html

Immigrant rights advocates have asked if foreigners will be risking deportation because their faces are in an FBI database, even if they aren't convicted of anything or have committed a minor offense. (The Department of Homeland Security already matches fingerprints of booked offenders with the FBI database to see if people are in the country illegally).

Nah! You know that the invasion has the full support of Obama and all the Executive Branch agencies. The facial recognition controls are for all citizens of the North American Union including the illegal aliens that make it all possible!

W

Foreign nationals with no record in the U.S. have an advantage U.S. born people don't have. Our faces have a name somewhere in some system. But those who are strangers can stay strangers, keep off the grid they never got on, and wreak havoc