FBI begins installation of $1 billion face recognition system across America

“Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not,” US Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law earlier this year. “Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online.”

In his own testimony, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Alessandro Acquisti said to Sen. Franken, “the convergence of face recognition, online social networks and data mining has made it possible to use publicly available data and inexpensive technologies to produce sensitive inferences merely starting from an anonymous face.”

“Face recognition, like other information technologies, can be source of both benefits and costs to society and its individual members,” Prof. Acquisti added. “However, the combination of face recognition, social networks data and data mining can significant undermine our current notions and expectations of privacy and anonymity.”

With the latest report suggesting the NGI program is now a reality in America, though, it might be too late to try and keep the FBI from interfering with seemingly every aspect of life in the US, both private and public. As of July 18, 2012, the FBI reports, “The NGI program … is on scope, on schedule, on cost, and 60 percent deployed.”

Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a milestone in the development of their Next Generation Identification (NGI) program and is now implementing the intelligence database in unidentified locales across the country, New Scientist reports in an article this week. The FBI first outlined the project back in 2005, explaining to the Justice Department in an August 2006 document (.pdf) that their new system will eventually serve as an upgrade to the current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that keeps track of citizens with criminal records across America .

“The NGI Program is a compilation of initiatives that will either improve or expand existing biometric identification services,” its administrator explained to the Department of Justice at the time, adding that the project, “will accommodate increased information processing and sharing demands in support of anti-terrorism.”

“The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation and implementation of advanced technology within the IAFIS environment.”

Is that just all, though? During a 2010 presentation (.pdf) made by the FBI’s Biometric Center of Intelligence, the agency identified why facial recognition technology needs to be embraced. Specifically, the FBI said that the technology could be used for “Identifying subjects in public datasets,” as well as “conducting automated surveillance at lookout locations” and “tracking subject movements,” meaning NGI is more than just a database of mug shots mixed up with fingerprints — the FBI has admitted that this their intent with the technology surpasses just searching for criminals but includes spectacular surveillance capabilities. Together, it’s a system unheard of outside of science fiction.

New Scientist reports that a 2010 study found technology used by NGI to be accurate in picking out suspects from a pool of 1.6 million mug shots 92 percent of the time. The system was tested on a trial basis in the state of Michigan earlier this year, and has already been cleared for pilot runs in Washington, Florida and North Carolina. Now according to this week’s New Scientist report, the full rollout of the program has begun and the FBI expects its intelligence infrastructure to be in place across the United States by 2014.

In 2008, the FBI announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, one of the Defense Department’s most favored contractors, with the authorization to design, develop, test and deploy the NGI System. Thomas E. Bush III, the former FBI agent who helped develop the NGI's system requirements, tells NextGov.com, "The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics." With those items being collected without much oversight being admitted, though, putting the personal facts pertaining to millions of Americans into the hands of some playful Pentagon staffers only begins to open up civil liberties issues.

Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, adds to NextGov that investigators pair facial recognition technology with publically available social networks in order to build bigger profiles. Facial recognition "is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots," he says. When these files are then fed to law enforcement agencies on local, federal and international levels, intelligence databases that include everything from close-ups of eyeballs and irises to online interests could be shared among offices.

http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-recognition-system-ngi-640/

Facebook has been using facial recognition software for quite a while already.

8/16/2012 @ 4:40PM

Germany Is Freaking Out About Facebook's Facial Recognition Feature (Again)

Germany wants Facebook to destroy its database of face-prints

Last year, when Facebook first started rolling out its facial recognition-based photo-tagging feature in Europe, our friends across the Atlantic flipped out. Angry words were said. Investigations were launched. Facebook abstention was threatened.

This all seemed to be somewhat resolved after Ireland’s Data Protection Agency launched a big investigation into the social networking company — because its European headquarters are in Dublin — and determined that, under E.U. law, Facebook could make the biometric face-prints of its members, but that it had to give users more prominent notice and the chance to opt out. Facebook suspended its “Tag Suggest” and face-printing of all European users who joined after July 1st until it comes up with a notification process that pleases the Irish.


All settled, right? Nein, says Germany. Hamburg data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar disagrees with Ireland. He argues that under E.U. law, Facebook doesn’t have a right to break out its facial recog software on users and put their face-prints on file without their explicit opt-in consent. (For what it’s worth, States-side, Sen. Al Franken has suggested the same thing. Norway is also not completely down with it.) The New York Times reports that Caspar will make “a formal request” to Facebook to “destroy its photographic database of faces collected in Germany and revise its Web site to obtain the explicit consent of members before it creates a digital file based on the biometric data of their faces.”

Facebook doesn’t seem to be backing down.

“We believe that the photo tag suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” Facebook said in a statement. ” During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about Photo Tag Suggest.”

If the formal request doesn’t work, reports the New York Times, Caspar could hit Facebook with a hefty $31,000 fine… yeah, hefty…. or take the Big Blue Face-scanning Giant to court, in hopes of getting a judicial order compelling Facebook to do as it says.

Facebook could well end up doing with “Tag Suggest” what Google has had to do with Street View, configuring it to match the privacy expectations  of a given country. There was a time, for example, when Google allowed German users to blur their homes out on Google Street View. But the demands became laborious enough that Google eventually abandoned Street View all together in Germany.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., there are already Facebook apps on the market that are tapping into facial recognition to let people get in-person, in-store deals. (Don’t tell Germany.)