12 ms·

Facial recognition database used by FBI is out of control

160 points by nkristoffersen 10y ago

nkristoffersen 10y ago
Do city police departments have access to the FBI facial database or do they have their own?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mtreis86 10y ago
  Many have had access since it's inception three years ago https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans-have-52-million-photos-its-ngi-face-recognition-database-next-year#footnote2_eur8305 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans-have-52-mill... Section 4.1 of this https://www.fbi.gov/services/records-management/foipa/privacy-impact-assessments/interstate-photo-system https://www.fbi.gov/services/records-management/foipa/privac... shows that state and local authorities are not the only ones with direct access.
  - nkristoffersen 10y ago
    Thank you for these links. Very interesting stuff. Curious how good these systems are compared to the latest visual machine learning tech...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
joshontheweb 10y ago
Our privacy is under attack on all fronts by our own government. It seems hard to imagine a feasible way to defend against this. Even well thought out legislation will likely just be ignored with impunity. Is privacy of any sort a lost cause at this point? Edit: forgot a word
- dukeluke 10y ago
  Pretty much. There are things you can do, but the majority of people won't do them. Our political system is showing its age, being completely gerrymandered, bought by major corporations, and is incapable of changing unless it benefits the rich in some way.
- subduedjdj 10y ago
  It's not just privacy, Governments everywhere are pushing towards a complete fascist take over: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-27/coming-inner-city-uprising-near-you-ultimate-riot-control-truck-future http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-27/coming-inner-city-u...
cortesoft 10y ago
Wow, calling the system 'race-blind' is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while. Of course the computer has no conception of race, but that has no bearing on whether the system is accurate for all skin shades.
- nkristoffersen 10y ago
  Curious how advanced the system is too... Does it use deep learning ML like the current state of the art?
  - sushirain 10y ago
    The article says 5 years old, so it's probably not deep learning.
jopolous 10y ago
Why are these representatives so upset about this when they just passed resolution 34?
- blazespin 10y ago
  Because computer users don't deserve privacy, didn't you know? They don't vote Republican that much.
- civilian 10y ago
  Maybe because the privacy rules don't make as much sense anymore? http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/325708-senate-was-right-to-block-fccs-broadband-privacy-rules http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/325708-sena... I don't feel strongly either way, I just think that there is more nuance around the issues of privacy.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    I don't have a choice of ISP. I can (trivially!) choose not to use Google's services, including their DNS servers.
blazespin 10y ago
Yeah, imagine your Trumpista ICE agrent walking down the street with a camera that flags people who aren't in the database (ie, no valid driver's license or passport). Welcome to 2017
- jrockway 10y ago
  This doesn't mean much. They can flag you for whatever, but not having ID isn't a crime, so a flag is the most they can do. Let's say they think that not having an ID means you're an illegal immigrant. They have to prove that in court, while you don't have to prove that you aren't.
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    Police can do whatever they want. Here's an article about several people who were arrested (and booked into custody) for "failure to identify" themselves[0] [0]http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/02/yes-police-can-arrest-you-refusing-identify-yourself/8485/ http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/02/yes-police-can-arrest-y...
    - gnaritas 10y ago
      More accurately, police "will" do whatever they want; they aren't lawyers and frankly barely understand the laws they're supposed to enforce. They think they're allowed to do things they're not allowed to do all the time, because the reality is they're mostly thugs and simply aren't that bright.
    - beezle 10y ago
      As noted in the article, its only a violation if you fail to identify yourself after being arrested. What is not clear to me is whether it is sufficient to just give your name? I often go out without my wallet and I'm not sure why there would be any legal presumption that a citzen would produce some type of government document to serve as "ID".
      - DINKDINK 10y ago
Eyas 10y ago
> Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people I think technology is often a very effective way to describe what "systemic racism" is. Racism propagates easily, and race-blind / race-agnostic / race-indifferent behavior does not combat it or counteract it. Imagine a majority-white tech team, largely color-blind, yet still (by virtue of economic and geographic segregation) in a mostly white-centric bubble. The training set might be largely white. If some preprocessing or feature-detection is taking place on the raw images, it might be tracking features that could have higher variability among white people while overlooking other features. If you don't know to go out of your way to check for, include tests, and give thought to mitigating imbalances caused by race (because you "see no race") then you allow this problem to propagate. In the case of computer vision, you will inherit the "racism" of every library you import from. This reminds me of gender biased found in Word2vec[1]. It is hard to accuse the dataset of being sexist, especially when viewing it as a reflection of language in news article. Yet, people using Word2vec use it as a representative of language, not a representative of language in news, with all the baggage in today's (and past) culture. As a result, sexism can propagate, autocomplete and query suggestions might be biased. Then spending habits might be biased, etc. [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/
- abandonliberty 10y ago
  That is a very interesting point regarding Word2vec, but it's inappropriate to call this example racism based on the evidence provided. Only 16% of the US population is Black, while 70% is white. If the error rates between Caucasians and Blacks were the same that would, in fact, be racist - or at the very least undemocratic. It's like asking that everything in the world be symmetric when only 10% of the world is left handed.
  - Eyas 10y ago
    I don't see why being in a minority means accepting a higher chance of being confused by a criminal. This is how cycles of oppression propagate.
abandonliberty 10y ago
I wrote a class paper about the threat to privacy/freedom from data mining and advanced algorithms in 2003. Unfortunately the risks they highlight exist without facial recognition. It's interesting to see facial recognition as a point of debate because the battle has been largely lost. The quantity and intimacy of personal data already captured is much more damaging. Amazon figured out a teen girl was pregnant in 2012 [0]. IMO face recognition isn't even the most invasive modern technology. Sure it helps close the loop on a few Luddites but most of us willingly handed over the keys to our lives long ago. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#269d6b256668 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
- theparanoid 10y ago
  Appropriate username. Ditching credit cards and smartphones are the best ways of increasing privacy.
wallace_f 10y ago
This is absolute madness. Where this--and other troubling revelations from both the Surveillance State and the Deep State--leads us to is authoritarianism. Once we're there, nothing will matter anymore. It will be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.
- Sunset 10y ago
  "Western Civilization" has operated as Imperialist and Totalitarian regimes for centuries. "Modern" democracy is the exception, not the default mode of our societies.
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    To be fair that is misleading. Even in the most extreme cases, Feudal Europe arguably struggled to maintain authoritarianism as it was often government and military power was decentralized. Let's be honest though, I was never talking about feudal Europe. We're talking about America, and yes, modern democracy that built the Western world. Your characterization of it as always authoritarian is plainly erroneous.

160 points by nkristoffersen 10y ago

nkristoffersen 10y ago

Do city police departments have access to the FBI facial database or do they have their own?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mtreis86 10y ago
Many have had access since it's inception three years ago https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans-have-52-million-photos-its-ngi-face-recognition-database-next-year#footnote2_eur8305 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans-have-52-mill... Section 4.1 of this https://www.fbi.gov/services/records-management/foipa/privacy-impact-assessments/interstate-photo-system https://www.fbi.gov/services/records-management/foipa/privac... shows that state and local authorities are not the only ones with direct access.
- nkristoffersen 10y ago
  Thank you for these links. Very interesting stuff. Curious how good these systems are compared to the latest visual machine learning tech...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

joshontheweb 10y ago

Our privacy is under attack on all fronts by our own government. It seems hard to imagine a feasible way to defend against this. Even well thought out legislation will likely just be ignored with impunity. Is privacy of any sort a lost cause at this point? Edit: forgot a word

dukeluke 10y ago
Pretty much. There are things you can do, but the majority of people won't do them. Our political system is showing its age, being completely gerrymandered, bought by major corporations, and is incapable of changing unless it benefits the rich in some way.
subduedjdj 10y ago
It's not just privacy, Governments everywhere are pushing towards a complete fascist take over: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-27/coming-inner-city-uprising-near-you-ultimate-riot-control-truck-future http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-27/coming-inner-city-u...

cortesoft 10y ago

Wow, calling the system 'race-blind' is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while. Of course the computer has no conception of race, but that has no bearing on whether the system is accurate for all skin shades.

nkristoffersen 10y ago
Curious how advanced the system is too... Does it use deep learning ML like the current state of the art?
- sushirain 10y ago
  The article says 5 years old, so it's probably not deep learning.

jopolous 10y ago

Why are these representatives so upset about this when they just passed resolution 34?

blazespin 10y ago
Because computer users don't deserve privacy, didn't you know? They don't vote Republican that much.
civilian 10y ago
Maybe because the privacy rules don't make as much sense anymore? http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/325708-senate-was-right-to-block-fccs-broadband-privacy-rules http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/325708-sena... I don't feel strongly either way, I just think that there is more nuance around the issues of privacy.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  I don't have a choice of ISP. I can (trivially!) choose not to use Google's services, including their DNS servers.

blazespin 10y ago

Yeah, imagine your Trumpista ICE agrent walking down the street with a camera that flags people who aren't in the database (ie, no valid driver's license or passport). Welcome to 2017

jrockway 10y ago
This doesn't mean much. They can flag you for whatever, but not having ID isn't a crime, so a flag is the most they can do. Let's say they think that not having an ID means you're an illegal immigrant. They have to prove that in court, while you don't have to prove that you aren't.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Police can do whatever they want. Here's an article about several people who were arrested (and booked into custody) for "failure to identify" themselves[0] [0]http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/02/yes-police-can-arrest-you-refusing-identify-yourself/8485/ http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/02/yes-police-can-arrest-y...
  - gnaritas 10y ago
    More accurately, police "will" do whatever they want; they aren't lawyers and frankly barely understand the laws they're supposed to enforce. They think they're allowed to do things they're not allowed to do all the time, because the reality is they're mostly thugs and simply aren't that bright.
  - beezle 10y ago
    As noted in the article, its only a violation if you fail to identify yourself after being arrested. What is not clear to me is whether it is sufficient to just give your name? I often go out without my wallet and I'm not sure why there would be any legal presumption that a citzen would produce some type of government document to serve as "ID".
    - DINKDINK 10y ago

Eyas 10y ago

> Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people I think technology is often a very effective way to describe what "systemic racism" is. Racism propagates easily, and race-blind / race-agnostic / race-indifferent behavior does not combat it or counteract it. Imagine a majority-white tech team, largely color-blind, yet still (by virtue of economic and geographic segregation) in a mostly white-centric bubble. The training set might be largely white. If some preprocessing or feature-detection is taking place on the raw images, it might be tracking features that could have higher variability among white people while overlooking other features. If you don't know to go out of your way to check for, include tests, and give thought to mitigating imbalances caused by race (because you "see no race") then you allow this problem to propagate. In the case of computer vision, you will inherit the "racism" of every library you import from. This reminds me of gender biased found in Word2vec[1]. It is hard to accuse the dataset of being sexist, especially when viewing it as a reflection of language in news article. Yet, people using Word2vec use it as a representative of language, not a representative of language in news, with all the baggage in today's (and past) culture. As a result, sexism can propagate, autocomplete and query suggestions might be biased. Then spending habits might be biased, etc. [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/

abandonliberty 10y ago
That is a very interesting point regarding Word2vec, but it's inappropriate to call this example racism based on the evidence provided. Only 16% of the US population is Black, while 70% is white. If the error rates between Caucasians and Blacks were the same that would, in fact, be racist - or at the very least undemocratic. It's like asking that everything in the world be symmetric when only 10% of the world is left handed.
- Eyas 10y ago
  I don't see why being in a minority means accepting a higher chance of being confused by a criminal. This is how cycles of oppression propagate.

abandonliberty 10y ago

I wrote a class paper about the threat to privacy/freedom from data mining and advanced algorithms in 2003. Unfortunately the risks they highlight exist without facial recognition. It's interesting to see facial recognition as a point of debate because the battle has been largely lost. The quantity and intimacy of personal data already captured is much more damaging. Amazon figured out a teen girl was pregnant in 2012 [0]. IMO face recognition isn't even the most invasive modern technology. Sure it helps close the loop on a few Luddites but most of us willingly handed over the keys to our lives long ago. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#269d6b256668 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

theparanoid 10y ago
Appropriate username. Ditching credit cards and smartphones are the best ways of increasing privacy.

wallace_f 10y ago

This is absolute madness. Where this--and other troubling revelations from both the Surveillance State and the Deep State--leads us to is authoritarianism. Once we're there, nothing will matter anymore. It will be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

Sunset 10y ago
"Western Civilization" has operated as Imperialist and Totalitarian regimes for centuries. "Modern" democracy is the exception, not the default mode of our societies.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  To be fair that is misleading. Even in the most extreme cases, Feudal Europe arguably struggled to maintain authoritarianism as it was often government and military power was decentralized. Let's be honest though, I was never talking about feudal Europe. We're talking about America, and yes, modern democracy that built the Western world. Your characterization of it as always authoritarian is plainly erroneous.