8 ms·

The military is building long-range facial recognition that works in the dark

104 points by etxm 7y ago

lm28469 7y ago
When killing the "bad guys" is more important than feeding your own people. I love how they use the term "target" instead of "person", they're not even trying to hide it.
ilamont 7y ago
“Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” the DFBA’s director wrote in presentation notes last year. It also opens up the possibility of weaponry optimized for an individual target's physical and mental weaknesses, personalized propaganda, and attacks on people's social connections, including noncombatants.
- tastygreenapple 7y ago
  > and attacks on people's social connections, including noncombatants. Oh you mean giving terrorists a taste of their own medicine?
justforyou 7y ago
Given the current state of best of breed, up close facial recognition, using the term "works" in a life and death scenario is an irresponsible overreach. "Fail early, kill innocents often" is a terrible paradigm.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
  Generalized systems search massive databases, these systems can have much narrower data sets. "Who is X?" and "Is this X?" are very different computationally. Also; "fail early, kill innocents" is a great paradigm for staying in power. The beatings will continue until moral improves.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  "Fail early, kill innocents often" is perfectly acceptable in foreign countries especially if the population there is viewed as backwards in some way.
- saulrh 7y ago
  Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. I heard a lot of stories out of Afghanistan and Iraq that ended up boiling down to "They had a big thing on their shoulder and it was pointed at a tank so we had to kill them", nevermind that that was a TV camera one in ten times.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    I don't really like that line of thinking. Saying, "well, a human wouldn't have been able to do better" serves only to absolve anyone of any responsibility for the death. It's a lot easier to say it was "unavoidable" if a human isn't responsible.
  - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
    > Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. Firstly, it's about time we stop pretending that people wait until technology does something better than humans do before they deploy it. It will be deployed long before that point. Secondly, there are more reasons to be concerned about this sort of technology than just whether it is effective at its intended purpose (identifying people who do not want to be found, at long range, for the purpose of assassination).
    - lucasmullens 7y ago
      I guess I'm a bit confused, why would they deploy something when humans are still better off without it?
      - DiabloD3 7y ago
        Because military contractors like money.
      - d4mi3n 7y ago
        Politics. Money. Expediency. The cheaper and easier you make it to do something, the easier it is for you to get signoff to do it. Humans require oversight and care. A robot staking out an area? Not nearly as much, and folks don't get nearly as much backlash when a robot doesn't come back home.
- dfsegoat 7y ago
  I'm sorry, but I couldn't find specific reference to where they were saying this tech would SOLELY be used in "life and death scenarios" or be linked to any sort of "kinetic action" The only mention which comes close: > “Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” "Fusion" is military parlance for "we would use a variety of sensor inputs and systems" to make inferences. So, this would likely be only one component of many others used to determine identity and/or hostile intent.
colechristensen 7y ago
Prediction: the 21st century will see computer aided technology for identification and tracking banned like chemical weapons in the 20th. Corollary: not until widespread use and abuse highlights the danger.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Likely won't be banned, but limited in scope (so no autonomous firing, but yes robocop style visual field highlights, etc)
coldcode 7y ago
I seem to recall the Terminator UI did all this before deciding what to do. Is that our future, killer robots wondering around killing suspected "terrorists" or other undesirables? I suppose if you combine China's social score data collection and this tech with Judge Dredd like robots, our society will turn out like a kind of Minority Report where data leads to pre-crime termination. Not a future I want to be in.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 188201 7y ago
  The future is now. Drone assassination had become a common tactic for killing suspected. The tactic is pretty effective and it will not go away, no matter with or without AI.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    The tactic is pretty effective. The strategy is a dragon seed. Every collateral drone strike breeds resentment for generations. The chickens will come home to roost. (But then the MIC can sell even more weapons, so I guess everything will be fine.)
    - red75prime 7y ago
      How collateral drone strike differs from soldiers' errors and war crimes in this respect? Or even from killing combatants who are someone's children?
      - jacobush 7y ago
        Even the sloppiest teams on the ground don’t routinely kill 100 wedding guests, time and time again like the drone strikes do. And if they do, they don’t get to get home at 5 pm and have dinner in their suburb after a deed well done. Drones scale out with little immediate cost, other than festering resentment half a world across. Currently the drone operators experience PTSD from loitering over targets for hours, but with increased automation, maybe someone won’t even have to look at the images. Just “authenticate” a strike based on weighed parameters. War can be made much more streamlined yet.
akeck 7y ago
A possible result is that adversaries will deploy robots that all emit the same radiation patterns in lieu of identifiable persons.
- zimmertr 7y ago
  I'm not sure I'd consider this a possibility as much as a guaranteed evolution of defense.
yayajacky 7y ago
More kill-loops automation? Hope it doesn't kill any QA testers or have datetime bugs. Reminds me of Captain America: Winter soldier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ru5wM7fl7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ru5wM7fl7g "Deploy the algorithm. Algorithm deployed"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dumbfoundded 7y ago
Framing is key for how you think about these military technologies. You could frame this as the government making it possible to kill people in the dark automatically or as another data input to a vast array of data sources used to make life/death decisions for high-value military targets. The technology has the potential to make sure we're getting the right people but almost certainly its use will be pushed too far. It has a utility and we should rightly be concerned that it doesn't get used outside of its limited intended application.
- titzer 7y ago
  Well you mentioned framing, but you aren't even a little worried that the US military continues to kill thousands of people by drone strike with total impunity across several undeclared war zones? This isn't a theoretical. This is going on now. This technology will be used to kill people with absolutely zero accountability. Maybe we should strive for a planet where extra-judicial killings are hyper-efficient isn't where we invest our best minds and our money. I reject the framing where we have to accept this.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Given that they're killing people, with zero accountability, would you prefer technology to help them do so more accurately, or not? Would you prefer less civilians as collateral damage, or more? Yes, I know, you'd prefer that they stop killing people. To do that, you have to either 1) persuade a large number of people to stop trying to kill Americans, 2) persuade America to get out of the Middle East and just let things happen over there however they're going to happen, or 3) persuade the powers that be that, even if we stay in the Middle East, killing people that want to kill us is not the most effective route to peace. And those are fine goals. But until you achieve one of those three, it isn't amiss that, when we're trying to kill someone, we do the best we can to actually kill one of the people that's trying to kill some of us, and not some random other person.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      It used to be hard to kill someone. You'd need a sniper team, or a strike force. You'd take out your target and anyone putting up a fight, including collateral damage. You'd run the risk your team would get killed. Today, you don't run those risks. The stakes are low. More people can be killed with less fuss, and little political fallout at home.
EGreg 7y ago
Every day we are getting closer to slaughterbots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)
jellicle 7y ago
The only real application here is killing people with drone-launched missiles.
jvanderbot 7y ago
Tangential: That face is not the one I would have pictured when looking at the IR image. It looks like some weird "white-hot" version of IR plus ambient lighting, and once transformed, lost the mustache entirely. I'm sure there's a reluctance to put out the real capabilities directly, but I'm also sure there's a reluctance to put out the real weaknesses directly.
- mason55 7y ago
  > and once transformed, lost the mustache entirely. Isn't this what you want? A system that could be fooled by a little facial hair seems like it would be pretty useless.
  - jvanderbot 7y ago
    Well I suppose so! It definitely kept the top hair so I assumed it would be matching as-is.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  It's near-IR, not thermal like the top image.
superbrane 7y ago
Curious if this will work. About 1 year ago I was reading about US military research looking for a portable/personnel use device capable to combine night vision and thermal vision in one vision set - don't think they managed to get a breakthrough with that. This face detection would work great if ported on such a device.
sudoaza 7y ago
Soon you'll be droned by face recognition, oh the future!
Aaronstotle 7y ago
Does anyone know of ways to combat these systems, something like a special pattern that makes it hard to read. China is leading the way in facial recognition, and I'd be surprised if there aren't any countermeasures available.
- xnyan 7y ago
  It depends on the scenario. If all you’re trying is stop it from working, the article says it’s IR based so jamming the sensor (the camera) with a lot of IR radiation can work quite nicely. Individually you could do this with bright IR emitting LEDs. On the scale of the battlefield, a cool trick that is already being done today on yachts of the rich and private is using a laser to shine a lot of light directly on the CMOS (sensor element) of the capturing device when the shutter opens. These methods work but they don’t hide what they’re doing (jamming). It would be instantly obvious as to what you were doing which would be OK on the battlefield if you’re not trying to hide your position, not so much in China.
- polycaster 7y ago
  Well, there is this unpretentious approach: https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/ Look N° 1 could fit very well in a military context I believe. Look + 3 however required at least some urban setting. Also not sure if some of this measures would work with thermal imagery.
- nmstoker 7y ago
  This countermeasure story came up in 2018 but I'd only heard about it recently: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59jm8d/trick-face-scan-hat-infrared https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59jm8d/trick-face-scan-ha...
agumonkey 7y ago
Evolutionary pressure will now make chameleon genes reappear with morphogenesis located on our faces
csb6 7y ago
The responses on HN to this facial recognition technology vs China’s facial recognition technology is mind-boggling. Commenters saw the Chinese tech as dystopian (rightly so), but yet see this technology as a way to “to make sure we're getting the right people“, but that we still might want to think about how its use could eventually go “too far”. If China’s facial recognition system is currently “too far”, how is this tech not also already too far? I guess if a technology is only used to recognize and assassinate foreign nationals, and not surveil citizens (which it will eventually be used to do), most Americans are okay with it. Some commenters are critical of this research, but the level of concern in these comments is way less than on posts about similar Chinese systems. The point isn’t that this tech could increase accuracy and kill somewhat fewer civilians compared to the current amount of civilians killed regularly by U.S. drone and air attacks around the world. The entire basis for this activity - shooting missiles into civilian areas thousands of miles from home in endless wars - is the issue. The fact that the military sees a use for this kind of technology is the core of the problem, and no matter how well it works, it will only increase the efficiency of assassinations performed by the U.S. military, not abolish them.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Technology is morally neutral, the only moral consideration is how the technology can or will be used. People's moral values differ and it's not usually productive to argue about them, but I'm far more sympathetic to the use of technology to kill terrorists while reducing collateral damage than I am to the use of technology to prop up a totalitarian state that throws people into concentration camps, and I don't think that's an especially uncommon set of moral values.
  - yzmtf2008 7y ago
    > Technology is morally neutral This argument needs to stop being used. Developed knowingly, a race-condition-full Therac-25 machine is objectively bad and a side-effect-free cancer cure is objectively good. It's along the same lines of "guns don't kill people, people kill people". It is a gross simplification of morality and ethical theories but nonetheless touted by people on the internet way too often. If anything it highlights the need for an ethics class as a requirement for any engineering degree.

104 points by etxm 7y ago

When killing the "bad guys" is more important than feeding your own people. I love how they use the term "target" instead of "person", they're not even trying to hide it.

ilamont 7y ago

“Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” the DFBA’s director wrote in presentation notes last year. It also opens up the possibility of weaponry optimized for an individual target's physical and mental weaknesses, personalized propaganda, and attacks on people's social connections, including noncombatants.

tastygreenapple 7y ago
> and attacks on people's social connections, including noncombatants. Oh you mean giving terrorists a taste of their own medicine?

justforyou 7y ago

Given the current state of best of breed, up close facial recognition, using the term "works" in a life and death scenario is an irresponsible overreach. "Fail early, kill innocents often" is a terrible paradigm.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Generalized systems search massive databases, these systems can have much narrower data sets. "Who is X?" and "Is this X?" are very different computationally. Also; "fail early, kill innocents" is a great paradigm for staying in power. The beatings will continue until moral improves.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
"Fail early, kill innocents often" is perfectly acceptable in foreign countries especially if the population there is viewed as backwards in some way.
saulrh 7y ago
Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. I heard a lot of stories out of Afghanistan and Iraq that ended up boiling down to "They had a big thing on their shoulder and it was pointed at a tank so we had to kill them", nevermind that that was a TV camera one in ten times.
- kelnos 7y ago
  I don't really like that line of thinking. Saying, "well, a human wouldn't have been able to do better" serves only to absolve anyone of any responsibility for the death. It's a lot easier to say it was "unavoidable" if a human isn't responsible.
- Jweb_Guru 7y ago
  > Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. Firstly, it's about time we stop pretending that people wait until technology does something better than humans do before they deploy it. It will be deployed long before that point. Secondly, there are more reasons to be concerned about this sort of technology than just whether it is effective at its intended purpose (identifying people who do not want to be found, at long range, for the purpose of assassination).
  - lucasmullens 7y ago
    I guess I'm a bit confused, why would they deploy something when humans are still better off without it?
    - DiabloD3 7y ago
      Because military contractors like money.
    - d4mi3n 7y ago
      Politics. Money. Expediency. The cheaper and easier you make it to do something, the easier it is for you to get signoff to do it. Humans require oversight and care. A robot staking out an area? Not nearly as much, and folks don't get nearly as much backlash when a robot doesn't come back home.
dfsegoat 7y ago
I'm sorry, but I couldn't find specific reference to where they were saying this tech would SOLELY be used in "life and death scenarios" or be linked to any sort of "kinetic action" The only mention which comes close: > “Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” "Fusion" is military parlance for "we would use a variety of sensor inputs and systems" to make inferences. So, this would likely be only one component of many others used to determine identity and/or hostile intent.

colechristensen 7y ago

Prediction: the 21st century will see computer aided technology for identification and tracking banned like chemical weapons in the 20th. Corollary: not until widespread use and abuse highlights the danger.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Likely won't be banned, but limited in scope (so no autonomous firing, but yes robocop style visual field highlights, etc)

coldcode 7y ago

I seem to recall the Terminator UI did all this before deciding what to do. Is that our future, killer robots wondering around killing suspected "terrorists" or other undesirables? I suppose if you combine China's social score data collection and this tech with Judge Dredd like robots, our society will turn out like a kind of Minority Report where data leads to pre-crime termination. Not a future I want to be in.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
188201 7y ago
The future is now. Drone assassination had become a common tactic for killing suspected. The tactic is pretty effective and it will not go away, no matter with or without AI.
- jacobush 7y ago
  The tactic is pretty effective. The strategy is a dragon seed. Every collateral drone strike breeds resentment for generations. The chickens will come home to roost. (But then the MIC can sell even more weapons, so I guess everything will be fine.)
  - red75prime 7y ago
    How collateral drone strike differs from soldiers' errors and war crimes in this respect? Or even from killing combatants who are someone's children?
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Even the sloppiest teams on the ground don’t routinely kill 100 wedding guests, time and time again like the drone strikes do. And if they do, they don’t get to get home at 5 pm and have dinner in their suburb after a deed well done. Drones scale out with little immediate cost, other than festering resentment half a world across. Currently the drone operators experience PTSD from loitering over targets for hours, but with increased automation, maybe someone won’t even have to look at the images. Just “authenticate” a strike based on weighed parameters. War can be made much more streamlined yet.

akeck 7y ago

A possible result is that adversaries will deploy robots that all emit the same radiation patterns in lieu of identifiable persons.

zimmertr 7y ago
I'm not sure I'd consider this a possibility as much as a guaranteed evolution of defense.

yayajacky 7y ago

More kill-loops automation? Hope it doesn't kill any QA testers or have datetime bugs. Reminds me of Captain America: Winter soldier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ru5wM7fl7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ru5wM7fl7g "Deploy the algorithm. Algorithm deployed"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dumbfoundded 7y ago

Framing is key for how you think about these military technologies. You could frame this as the government making it possible to kill people in the dark automatically or as another data input to a vast array of data sources used to make life/death decisions for high-value military targets. The technology has the potential to make sure we're getting the right people but almost certainly its use will be pushed too far. It has a utility and we should rightly be concerned that it doesn't get used outside of its limited intended application.

titzer 7y ago
Well you mentioned framing, but you aren't even a little worried that the US military continues to kill thousands of people by drone strike with total impunity across several undeclared war zones? This isn't a theoretical. This is going on now. This technology will be used to kill people with absolutely zero accountability. Maybe we should strive for a planet where extra-judicial killings are hyper-efficient isn't where we invest our best minds and our money. I reject the framing where we have to accept this.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Given that they're killing people, with zero accountability, would you prefer technology to help them do so more accurately, or not? Would you prefer less civilians as collateral damage, or more? Yes, I know, you'd prefer that they stop killing people. To do that, you have to either 1) persuade a large number of people to stop trying to kill Americans, 2) persuade America to get out of the Middle East and just let things happen over there however they're going to happen, or 3) persuade the powers that be that, even if we stay in the Middle East, killing people that want to kill us is not the most effective route to peace. And those are fine goals. But until you achieve one of those three, it isn't amiss that, when we're trying to kill someone, we do the best we can to actually kill one of the people that's trying to kill some of us, and not some random other person.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    It used to be hard to kill someone. You'd need a sniper team, or a strike force. You'd take out your target and anyone putting up a fight, including collateral damage. You'd run the risk your team would get killed. Today, you don't run those risks. The stakes are low. More people can be killed with less fuss, and little political fallout at home.

EGreg 7y ago

Every day we are getting closer to slaughterbots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

jellicle 7y ago

The only real application here is killing people with drone-launched missiles.

jvanderbot 7y ago

Tangential: That face is not the one I would have pictured when looking at the IR image. It looks like some weird "white-hot" version of IR plus ambient lighting, and once transformed, lost the mustache entirely. I'm sure there's a reluctance to put out the real capabilities directly, but I'm also sure there's a reluctance to put out the real weaknesses directly.

mason55 7y ago
> and once transformed, lost the mustache entirely. Isn't this what you want? A system that could be fooled by a little facial hair seems like it would be pretty useless.
- jvanderbot 7y ago
  Well I suppose so! It definitely kept the top hair so I assumed it would be matching as-is.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
It's near-IR, not thermal like the top image.

superbrane 7y ago

Curious if this will work. About 1 year ago I was reading about US military research looking for a portable/personnel use device capable to combine night vision and thermal vision in one vision set - don't think they managed to get a breakthrough with that. This face detection would work great if ported on such a device.

sudoaza 7y ago

Soon you'll be droned by face recognition, oh the future!

Aaronstotle 7y ago

Does anyone know of ways to combat these systems, something like a special pattern that makes it hard to read. China is leading the way in facial recognition, and I'd be surprised if there aren't any countermeasures available.

xnyan 7y ago
It depends on the scenario. If all you’re trying is stop it from working, the article says it’s IR based so jamming the sensor (the camera) with a lot of IR radiation can work quite nicely. Individually you could do this with bright IR emitting LEDs. On the scale of the battlefield, a cool trick that is already being done today on yachts of the rich and private is using a laser to shine a lot of light directly on the CMOS (sensor element) of the capturing device when the shutter opens. These methods work but they don’t hide what they’re doing (jamming). It would be instantly obvious as to what you were doing which would be OK on the battlefield if you’re not trying to hide your position, not so much in China.
polycaster 7y ago
Well, there is this unpretentious approach: https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/ Look N° 1 could fit very well in a military context I believe. Look + 3 however required at least some urban setting. Also not sure if some of this measures would work with thermal imagery.
nmstoker 7y ago
This countermeasure story came up in 2018 but I'd only heard about it recently: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59jm8d/trick-face-scan-hat-infrared https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59jm8d/trick-face-scan-ha...

agumonkey 7y ago

Evolutionary pressure will now make chameleon genes reappear with morphogenesis located on our faces

csb6 7y ago

The responses on HN to this facial recognition technology vs China’s facial recognition technology is mind-boggling. Commenters saw the Chinese tech as dystopian (rightly so), but yet see this technology as a way to “to make sure we're getting the right people“, but that we still might want to think about how its use could eventually go “too far”. If China’s facial recognition system is currently “too far”, how is this tech not also already too far? I guess if a technology is only used to recognize and assassinate foreign nationals, and not surveil citizens (which it will eventually be used to do), most Americans are okay with it. Some commenters are critical of this research, but the level of concern in these comments is way less than on posts about similar Chinese systems. The point isn’t that this tech could increase accuracy and kill somewhat fewer civilians compared to the current amount of civilians killed regularly by U.S. drone and air attacks around the world. The entire basis for this activity - shooting missiles into civilian areas thousands of miles from home in endless wars - is the issue. The fact that the military sees a use for this kind of technology is the core of the problem, and no matter how well it works, it will only increase the efficiency of assassinations performed by the U.S. military, not abolish them.

philwelch 7y ago
Technology is morally neutral, the only moral consideration is how the technology can or will be used. People's moral values differ and it's not usually productive to argue about them, but I'm far more sympathetic to the use of technology to kill terrorists while reducing collateral damage than I am to the use of technology to prop up a totalitarian state that throws people into concentration camps, and I don't think that's an especially uncommon set of moral values.
- yzmtf2008 7y ago
  > Technology is morally neutral This argument needs to stop being used. Developed knowingly, a race-condition-full Therac-25 machine is objectively bad and a side-effect-free cancer cure is objectively good. It's along the same lines of "guns don't kill people, people kill people". It is a gross simplification of morality and ethical theories but nonetheless touted by people on the internet way too often. If anything it highlights the need for an ethics class as a requirement for any engineering degree.