STORY: "The FBI Now Has The Largest Biometric Database In The World. Will It Lead To More Surveillance?" by reporter Eric Markowitz, published by the International Business Times on April 5, 2016. (Thanks to CSIDDS (Forensics in Focus) for drawing our attention to this story. HL);
SUB-HEADING: "The FBI is developing its facial recognition program. Privacy advocates are concerned."
GIST: "Nearly a decade ago, fueled by fears of another 9/11-style attack, the FBI signed a $1 billion contract with military behemoth Lockheed Martin to develop and launch the unit, dubbed Next Generation Identification (NGI). The FBI began with a small pilot program in 2011. In late 2014, the facial recognition program finally became fully operational. While facial recognition technologies and algorithms conjure images of a "Minority Report"-like control room, the reality is a bit more prosaic. Just as no two people have the same fingerprints, no two people have the same face. The technology essentially measures minute distances in a person’s face and logs the information. While these methods are still in their infancy, FBI officials say biometric technologies could help law enforcement locate and identify a suspect using surveillance videos, mug shots — or even photos taken from Facebook and Twitter. According to unreleased FBI data provided to IBT in February, the agency had, as of February, processed a total of 77,136 suspect photos and sent police 9,303 “likely candidates” since 2011. The FBI would not comment on how many of those cases led to an arrest. In many ways, the FBI’s biometric program is an extension of the modern-day surveillance technologies that are making average citizens increasingly uncomfortable. Long gone are the days of clunky wiretaps and officers using telephoto lenses from disguised vans. Now local law enforcement agencies increasingly rely on sophisticated technology — largely sourced from the U.S. military — like Stingray devices, which intercept cell phone conversations, and police drones for aerial surveillance. While federal officials and law enforcement hail the NGI program as a futuristic way to track terrorists and criminals, others have been notably less enthusiastic. Since the program's inception, national privacy groups have argued that biometric collection programs like NGI encroach on civil liberties. In the name of security and public safety, many advocates say the U.S. government is increasing its surveillance, through programs like NGI, on everyday citizens who have done nothing wrong. “What we’re seeing is how counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics are being codified into everyday policing,” says Hamid Khan, a privacy advocate in Los Angeles and the founder of a grassroots group called Stop LAPD Spying. “In essence, we’re all suspects.” Fingerprints are still the largest source of biometric information used by the FBI, but the agency is branching out. The fear, of course, is that in this push for more security, Americans will inevitably lose their rights to privacy. This debate is raging now more than ever.........The NGI program has not attracted nearly the amount of scrutiny or media attention as the FBI’s legal battle with Apple, but many surveillance watchdogs and privacy advocates have made monitoring the NGI their main focus. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) have filed lawsuits against the NGI to obtain records about the program. Jeramie Scott, who serves as general counsel for EPIC, has been perhaps the biggest thorn in the side of the NGI. In 2013, Scott filed a lawsuit to obtain internal documents about the NGI program. One of the disturbing factors Scott discovered after winning the suit and gaining the documents was that NGI’s facial recognition program operated with a 20 percent error rate. But what troubles Scott the most, he says, is how the FBI is using photos of innocent people who have never been convicted of a crime. The FBI maintains that it searches only against criminal databases — but the extension into DMV photos is a concerning development for Scott. “I’m pretty sure when you went to get your driver's license, you weren’t thinking that this picture that was being taken was now going to be used for large-scale facial recognition searches,” he says. A Case of Mistaken Identity? But what happens when the match turns out to be wrong? In fact, it's exactly that 20 percent error rate — the rate at which the system produces false positives — that has privacy advocates so worried. German Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar, for instance, recently noted: "In the event of a genuine hunt, [false positives] render innocent people suspects for a time, create a need for justification on their part and make further checks by the authorities unavoidable.” In other words, what happens if the computer makes a mistake, and someone innocent ends up in jail? The FBI says this won't happen because the technology merely provides "investigative leads." "No one's going to go out and knock on a door and make an arrest based on the information we provide," Sprouse says. "There has to be supported information." While that's true so far in the U.S., consider the case of Eddie David, a 39-year-old Australian man who was detained by federal authorities in 2015 when a facial recognition program alerted police that he was an illegal immigrant. David's attorneys said his arrest was purely a case of mistaken identity. "This is a very serious matter," his attorney told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
There
have been domestic mishaps as well. In the United States, John H.
Gass, a 46-year-old Boston resident, sued the city in 2011 after he
received a letter saying the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles
(the state DMV) had revoked his license. Gass, who hadn't done
anything wrong — he didn't even have any traffic tickets — says he was
"shocked" when the letter came. According to his attorney, William
Spallina, the state DMV was using an anti-terrorism facial recognition
system. When the computerized system scanned Gass' face, the system
returned three results: One for Gass' car registration, another for his
motorcycle registration and a third for a separate man who, according to
Spallina, "looked a lot like Gass" but wasn't him. Because the
algorithm was configured to trigger a fraud alert when it returned two
identical faces with separate names, the state was "saying that was
prima facie evidence of license fraud," according to his attorney.
Subsequently, the DMV revoked his license, pending a hearing. As a
result, Gass, who drove a truck for Boston's Department of Public Works,
was out of work for two weeks. In January 2013, an appeals court
dismissed Gass' hardship case on procedural grounds, but it stands out
in Spallina's memory. "It was absurd," he says. The Boston Globe, which first reported Gass' cases in 2011, noted that the facial recognition program has
triggered over 1,000 investigations. While Boston doesn't track how many
people are incorrectly identified, the Globe noted: "Some of those
people are guilty of nothing more than looking like someone else." While
Scott, the privacy lawyer, hasn’t seen anyone sent to jail as a result
of facial recognition gone awry, he says it’s a slippery slope either
way.
The entire story can be found at:
The entire story can be found at:
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The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com;
Harold Levy;
Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
