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China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk
- otto2 8y agoThis will cause people to start walking on the street in the same way as Fremen in Frank Herbert's Dune, by varying frequency and step length in order not to attract a (government) worm.
- cirgue 8y agoI was thinking more Ministry of Silly Walks.
- yantz 8y agoIt cannot be overstated how apathetic the Chinese are about mass surveillance. Flagged why? Don't like to hear the truth?
- cglace 8y agoOr just put a rock in your shoe.
- cglace 8y agoI don't know why this is being downvoted. It's an actual strategy used by the CIA to change walking patterns to avoid detection.
- maxxxxx 8y agoSince our internal random generator is not really random they probably will be able to detect your variations before you know yourself ...
- hindsightbias 8y agoOutliers are the easiest to find. You need to impersonate others gaits.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoWhich will make the staggering oddballs much easier to detect by human review of the footage, or by police/informants in person. It's like that anti-face-ID makeup that covers your face with dazzle patterns. It may work as a visible act of protest, but it won't actually protect your privacy.
- hndamien 8y agoI'm just imagining a person with face dazzle and silly walks trying to remain inconspicuous.
- chronic1921 8y agoOld tech, been around for decades.
- r-bryan 8y agoIn Cory Doctorow's _Little Brother_, some characters would put pebbles in their shoes so gait-recognizers wouldn't recognize them.
- on_and_off 8y agoThat's what real life spies do too edit : a source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8
- Choco31415 8y agoThe relevant time stamps 4:39-5:02. Former CIA Chief: "Changing the way that you walk requires some amendment to what you're doing. You're going to need a physical apparatus to make you walk differently. You can't possibly say, okay, now I'm going to limp. To change my walk, I put a little piece of gravel in my shoe, just a little thing that pinches my toe, and it changes my walk whether I want to or not. You can put a bandage around a knee, something that restricts you, will change your walk."
- Upvoter33 8y agoAnd in Dune ...
- ARothfusz 8y agoDarn, now I'm going to have to go back and re-read Dune considering the worm as a metaphor for the surveillance state. Walk without rhythm!
- geggam 8y agoI knew I read something like this
- ctoth 8y agoCurious if Doctorow got this from Double Star (Heinlein, 1956)
- lozenge 8y ago...says some company. Yeah right. The sensitivity/specificity requirements for this to be useful would be insanely difficult or impossible to reach.
- ei8htyfi5e 8y agoThe US government has had this forever. This is why they train you at the farm to put a pebble in your shoe if you’re trying to evade detection so your gait changes. It is most certainly not impossible.
- LitFan 8y agoFor others that aren't aware, "The Farm" refers to a CIA training facility at Camp Peary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Peary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Peary
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cronix 8y agoWe should all start skipping in public instead of walking, because we're happy.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoSo.. happy.. > the kinds of questions that began to present themselves were just.. the questions themselves were ugly and I didn't want to know the answers. It's like banging on a door, you knock on a door, and the door opens slightly and behind that door it's dark and there's loud noises coming like there's wild animals in there or something. And you peer into the darknees and you can't see what's there but you can hear all this ugly stuff.. do you want to step into that room? No way, you just sorta back out quietly, pull the door shut behind you, and walk away from it. -- Bill Ehrhart ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 )
- OG_BME 8y agoHe was my history teacher in Highschool. He was (and still is) an inspiring orator and incredibly talented poet. His perspective is invaluable and has already proven to be timeless.
- d0ne 8y agoThis isn't new. Gait recognition has been in use for well over a decade.
- jandrese 8y agoI'm curious what the false positive rate is on this technology. It seems like a very noisy source to do correlations from.
- gowld 8y agoDoesn't matter. Like polygraph, it only matters if people have a fear of being caught with non-trivial probability. False-positives don't matter, since China has no civil rights.
- throwaway2048 8y agoI'm also very suspect of these claims, we know "forensics" often plays extremely fast and lose with evidence. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/forensic-tools-whats-reliable-and-whats-not-so-scientific/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/forensic-tools-wh... The real punchline from that article "no peer reviewed scientific studies have ever been done to prove the basic assumption that every person’s fingerprint is unique."
- diydsp 8y agoI'm about to walk out the door so I can't look up papers, but I'm going to guess that it's based as much on dynamics as actual proportions of limbs. I would estimate the number of features to be on the scale of 2000-2010 era facial recognition. Dynamics would increase the number of dimensions, making it possible to separate two people with nearly identical features. However, I do agree that inferring the proportions from video imagery at various angles and with various items of clothing is going to be challenging due to systemic distortion, e.g. inferring incorrect angle due to clothing.
- cxseven 8y agoIf they blanket an area with cameras, as China does, they can use multiple vantage points to get more accurate measurements and, when a positive ID is made, they can persistently track that person crossing from one field of view to another. I think the main advantage of gait analysis (or limb proportion measurement) is that it will encourage a more efficient, decentralized computation that first distills the observed data into a fingerprint that can be more easily transmitted over a wire to a massive database for matching, rather than the alternatives of either replicating that database or transmitting raw, high-bandwidth data. Besides limb measurements, they could also use last known location, residence, and vehicle ownership information to increase the certainty of loose matches.
- eganist 8y agoMitigation strategies discussed in an unrelated (but relevant) conversation between WIRED and Jonna Mendez - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8&t=278 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8&t=278 (if you're not auto-jumped, find 4:38 in the video)
- Erlich_Bachman 8y agoA url with &t= pretty much always auto-jumps.
- wufufufu 8y agoTop 10 technologies that sound scary when in an article starting with 'China'. I'm guessing one day we'll look back on these clickbaits and say they're racist.
- tdb7893 8y agoThey are scarier from China because they have a recent history of more authoritarian government control
- jessaustin 8y agoChinese government has done very little to oppress USA residents. USA government, OTOH...
- tdb7893 8y agoThe US is still actually pretty good to it's citizens by global standards. For example as an American I don't have any worries that the government will come after me if I speak out against it and a politician can't have me thrown in jail without a trial. But I mean of course as an American I would care more about what the US does because it affects me more. The war on drugs especially is an authoritarian nightmare (and practically had ended up racist) and the war on terror has eroded due process but China has a type of authoritarianism that just isn't the same as the type we have in the US.
- jessaustin 8y agoUSA Drug War was always meant to be racist, and it always has been. See the statements of e.g. Anslinger and Nixon. Seeing mere contingency where intent is clear is a tawdry sort of privilege.
- tdb7893 8y agoI was just making a weaker claim because honestly I didn't have enough time to properly defend a stronger one on the internet and in my experience ascribing racism explicitly to things takes a lot of effort to defend (though in this specific case that isn't true). Apologies if it was insensitive.
- coliveira 8y agoThis is not new, and is not unique to China. Any country with intelligence units, like the US, is using data mining to identify and control their citizens. It has become fashionable lately to imply that China is the only country doing these things, or somehow doing it in larger scale. Has everyone forgotten what Snowden revealed?
- dmitriy_ko 8y agoChina is doing it at MUCH larger scale and a lot more intrusive. Everything on the internet is tracked and filtered, cameras everywhere. Chinese government can pinpoint location of any of it's 1.3 bln citizens.
- coliveira 8y agoSorry, but it looks like China is just playing catch up on this. The US intelligence already has information on pretty much every American, their social networks, phone calls, consumer habits, etc. And through Facebook, Google and others, they also have information about mosts people around the world. Even if China is able to track everyone inside Chine they're still at a disadvantage compared to the US covert operations.
- ctoth 8y agoThe whataboutism is strong with this one. Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful. Or abused. But useful.
- yourbandsucks 8y agoThey're not making a value statement, it's a capabilities statement.
- eiaoa 8y ago> Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-friends/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-friends/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-friends/ffgfcbfgdemibfcpcfkpicfgkiojbdkn?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-friends/ffgfcbf...
- nabla9 8y ago1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.
- foop123 8y ago> Everyone unrecognized with abnormal gait is person of interest I'm so glad people like you are building my future.
- dpwm 8y ago4. Counter-counter-countermeasure: wheels.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drb91 8y agoOr, apply bat to camera.
- logfromblammo 8y agoUse of skateboards (and Heelys) is already punished in the US.
- nabla9 8y ago5. You don't have enough social credit for wheels.
- taneq 8y agoNice segway.
- 24gttghh 8y agoWalk without rhythm, and you will attract the autocrats?
- 8y ago
- arcaster 8y agoTime for some IR emitting / reflecting pants!
- arcaster 8y agoFake crutches or wheelchairs could also be an interesting foil to this method of surveillance?
- mhb 8y agoIf this is all out in the open in China and many Chinese people even approve of it, wouldn't it be more efficient to have everyone wear ID tags of some kind?
- apexalpha 8y agoBecause those are easier to fake than your face or way of walking. And you want to monitor the people who'd be inclined to fake this.
- cimi_ 8y agoSetting who wants to do this aside in order to avoid the constant 'X is worse than Y' arguments. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise, not speculative like the current online tracking. Would you live comfortably in this world? Would you build this?
- marmaduke 8y agoThe accelerometer in a smart phone might be sufficient to identify gait parameters which map to stress, relaxation etc. Why bother with cameras?
- muraiki 8y agoIf the goal is to police and/or suppress, using this system means that your targets don't have to carry a phone (and that you don't need to have access to the phone's data).
- mentat 8y agoThere are ways to induce people to carry the instruments of their surveillance with them (including phones).
- mrkstu 8y agoIf you do that, you can just simplify it down to an automatic bluetooth beacon that identifies you to the government- and if you don't carry one you're not allowed out in public. I think they just don't want to be quite so blatant and obvious about it.
- jbob2000 8y agoEven if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in. Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).
- trainingaccount 8y agoCan they tell if I'm a women's man, no time to talk?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- geggam 8y agoThere was a science fiction book who talked about putting a rock in your shoe to change your gait and avoid detection. What was it ?
- resters 8y agoSurely gait analysis is part of the US arsenal as well. It's unique like a fingerprint and is used extensively by equestrian teams, etc., to detect shoe and health issues early to protect the investment in the horse. Many relevant health problems are visible early on as a change in the horse's gait. It can be done with an accelerometer or a camera, and probably other kinds of sensors. It could also be used for early diagnosis in humans, but is cost prohibitive for human preventative care use.
- eiaoa 8y agoHow well does gait analysis work against gait-disguise techniques like putting a pebble in your show as described in this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8
- harveywi 8y agoThe Segway will finally be vindicated.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoSo, my understanding is that the machine vision technologies discussed in this article don't really work that well, at least not once deployed in the real world, outside of "the lab" and away from the controlled conditions of a scientific experiment reported in a research paper. I wonder, then- do the authorities of the various countries (by far not just China) who make use of this kind of technology know how little they add to their ability to spy on their citizens? If they know- do they use it anyway just so that lucrative contracts can be signed and money exchange hands? Do they (also?) figure that the fear of being identified by all-seeing, all-knowing cameras will keep the population in the straight and narrow, even if the cameras are blind and dumb as bricks, in practice?
- cooperellis 8y agoUK has been doing this for decades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8
- superfrank 8y agoSo have casinos. I was really into the idea of card counting when I was in high school (over 10 years ago) and remember coming across multiple sources that claimed casinos did this as part of their arsenal to detect people who've been blackballed.
- echevil 8y agoI remember this being a research topic while I was in grad school more than 10 years ago. Like face recognition, it is nothing unique and is being researched by plenty of people
- 80mph 8y agoAnyone who's heavily near-sighted knows this technique. In college, my dorm bathroom was quite a distance from my room. At night, I would remove my contact lenses, and upon returning I would always identify certain people by their style of walking, or their posture.
- yodon 8y agoI made a couple trips to the South Pole in grad school. Down there you were either a scientist in a red parka, black insulated pants, and white boots or support staff in brown carharts. No part of the body could be seen at a distance and even the gloves were standard issue. What constantly amazed me was how you could see someone walking a quarter mile away and instantly know exactly who it was. The South Pole is a smaller population than China so I'd be worried about false positives (probably mostly within families as kids learn to stand and walk like their parents and have similar dimensions when fully grown) but I suspect it's actually a pretty robust identification technique.
- taneq 8y ago> The South Pole is a smaller population than China so I'd be worried about false positives Even if the false positive rate is really low, it's still a problem. All of these dragnet-style things mess with your priors. In a traditional investigation, the police have a handful of suspects and then gather evidence. Circumstantial evidence showing that the chances are 1 in 1000 that this one of the five suspects was not the culprit is pretty convincing, and probably enough to convict. Cast a dragnet over a city of 1 million, and suddenly that same 1-in-1000 error rate will be giving you 1000 innocent people who, under the old system, are 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt'. They've been pre-selected to look pretty frikkin' bad regardless of whether they're guilty, which means any one of them will have a hell of a time proving their innocence.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI suspect there’s quite a bit of case law on what probability of false positives is acceptable?
- lifeformed 8y agoWhen I hear a roommate or family member walking down the stairs somewhere else in the house, I can immediately tell who it is based on the sound of the pattern of how fast and how hard they are walking.
- eigenhombre 8y ago
- wwarner 8y agoI'm skeptical, especially of the surveillance claims. If you already know who you're looking for and you have lots of footage of that person, you might be able to train your system to pick up that person's gait from new footage. But that's a far cry from being able to "identify anyone" by their gait, i.e. set up lots of cameras around the city and track individuals coming and going. There are already amazing airborne camera systems that track the motion of every license plate in a city, and even that isn't the same as tracking every car's movement because you still have to know which license plate to follow -- you just can't care about all movement of all cars. I suppose someone will say that you can store all movement in a database, but I'll wager that's just not worth anywhere near the cost. Your computing power would be much better spent on computing large primes. Anyway, it's a cool sci-fi movie premise. You can see the murderer shaving off his mustache, burning off his own fingerprints and then knee-capping himself to avoid detection.
- nindalf 8y ago> you just can't care about all movement of all cars Of course we can. For each license plate encountered by CCTV or cop cars, store a tuple of (timestamp, coordinates). This won't require much disk space, so that's not a concern. Later, it is easy to answer questions like "what places was this car seen and when?" and "which cars were in this vicinity at this time?"
- wwarner 8y agoWell, let's test your claim. Say there are 1 million cars in a city. Say your camera system covers 300 square miles (to handle nyc). The question is how long would it take to scan the images from a single moment and capture all license plates. At 5 seconds per plate, that's 57 days. Plenty of time to commit a crime and escape without detection. And again, you could've been doing something useful like capturing some large prime numbers, in order to break the encryption of someone who is actually trying to hide something.
- somebodythere 8y agoWhy would it take 5 seconds a plate? They could as well station a licence plate reader at each intersection, and update a key-value store with a given plate's last seen location whenever one is spotted. O(1).
- Tade0 8y agoMy Bachelor's (of engineering) thesis was in biometrics and if there's one thing I remember from the seminars it's that gait along with typing rhythm and voice are these modalities that pop up every now and then only to disappear after a while after their proponents figure out that it's no use. These modalities simply don't carry enough information to reliably identify anyone. Facial recognition works best when you need the subject to be unaware that they are being identified.
- informatimago 8y agoYou don't necessarily need to identify one amongst 1.3 billion. (requiring 30 bits of information out of the gait!) The context is a crowd of about 100 (10 - 1000), in which you are tracking a few percent, and you need to keep "eyes" on an individual, discriminating amongst a few others that have crossed is path. That said, I'd agree that it looks difficult to help distinguish individuals in a trained team.
- subcosmos 8y agoGait analysis has been around for a LONG time. I saw papers 15 years ago from labs here in the states.
- brohee 8y agoIs this defeated by the stone in shoe gait changing technique?
- m3kw9 8y agoThey gonna combine this with facial to get better accuracy
- EGreg 8y agoI wonder how hard it would be to fool them by walking differently. Are there parameters you can’t change much?
- donpdonp 8y ago[Scanning] Subject: Woman's man Time to talk: None.
- geitir 8y agoOne of the books I read when I was younger that got me into programming is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. In the book, the high school they attend has cameras that identify students by measuring gait. The characters in the book put gravel in their shoes to throw the tech off when cutting class.
- hobbes78 8y agoAmazing that nobody has so far mentioned "Mission Impossible Rogue Nation"! There's a scene where Benji has to pass a corridor where people are identified by the way they walk!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pasbesoin 8y agoRemember a decade or so ago when the U.S. military was icing Middle Eastern "terr'ist" targets based upon gait analysis? Well, now it's you. And also, once again, brought to "the world" by China. (Maybe they'll sell it along side of or as an add-on to their Great Firewall turnkey systems.) I remember viewing a few of those old video segments (drone- and plane-based platforms) and feeling pretty nervous.