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I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free. It has been tra

I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free. It has been trained on decades of Palestinians crossing check points, some being Hamas camouflaging with beards, glasses and what not. Also the data it's fed for third party customers is as flawless as it can be: if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world. If you're walking in a random mall on the other end of the world, even if you have no phone, you have covered your tracks and you're wearing a hat and glasses, etc, you are going to be recognized by the software if a camera gets even a mediocre shot at you. Compound this with all the information people put online on their own on socials, you're gonna be tracked and recognized, whether you want it or no.

nick_ 9mo ago
Is the Israeli intelligence facial recognition system in the room with us now?
- epolanski 9mo ago
  Oosto, Corsight AI.
sejje 9mo ago
> if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world Approximately what year did this start?
- epolanski 9mo ago
  I have no clue because my first extra EU flight has been in 2022 and I definitely got a full face scan.
  - gruez 9mo ago
    The part I'm skeptical about is "available to virtually every agency in the world". I think every immigration checkpoint I've been to have some sort of camera setup, but the extent of data sharing is unclear. Is China sharing data with the US? Or US sharing with Canada? US with Germany? etc.
    - deaux 9mo ago
      Except for a handful of countries like China, you can very reasonably assume all of the others' is both available to Israel as well as the US.
riobard 9mo ago
I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.
pdyc 9mo ago
i have doubts on accuracy of face recognition. There is already nancy guthrie case going on and if it is so accurate why are suspects still not recognized?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- pear01 9mo ago
  You mean the the case where he came to her door dressed like death with his face almost completely covered? Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.
lp4v4n 9mo ago
I believe that most of what you said is true, but I don't think the tracking of people around the world is as efficient as your post suggests. If a single face scan were enough to track people anywhere like that, American government agencies (I'm thinking ICE, the FBI, etc.) wouldn’t have as much trouble as they do arresting people. That’s just my impression of course, maybe for some reason they choose not to use these technologies.
- junofan 9mo ago
  They need recall, not precision. It’s conceivably fine if you tag 100 people as long as one of them is your guy. Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.
belter 9mo ago
[flagged]
- jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
  Even if you don't believe in the capabilities of Israeli intelligence, it's well documented that Israel supported Hamas as a hard-line alternative to the PLO to avoid a two-state solution. The Israeli right has for decades intensified the conflict to justify total war against Palestinians. Allowing a domestic attack to gin up support for aggression is in line with their behaviour for the past 3 decades. I'm old enough to remember when Arafat was well-respected in the west and a two-state solution was the mainstream view amongst Americans. Once Netanyahu came to power in 1996 (30 years ago!) he worked to delegitimize the PLO and pursue an aggressive genocide against the Palestinians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
- thesz 9mo ago
  > This capability has been demonstrated multiple times, specially when it was politically convenient, like for example the intercepted Hamas calls that showed that some of the rockets fall inside Gaza by mistake. Can it be something generated? One can display something that is politically convenient and not true at once.
  - belter 9mo ago
    "IDF releases intercepted Hamas call on hospital explosion" - https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-releases-intercepted-hamas-call-on-hospital-explosion/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-releases-in...
- deaux 9mo ago
  Of course they knew.
- myth_drannon 9mo ago
  "Walls of Jericho" plan was known to Israel since 2017. Everything was known but as usually with IDF, too much arrogance and this was mostly ignored. Not to mention the 4am meeting the top brass decided not to raise alarms for fear of miscalculation. Maddening arrogance and many heads should have rolled but still some are in their seats.
somenameforme 9mo ago
I think these sort of claims of excessive competence are challenged by the October 7th attacks. Think about the massive amount of planning and organization that went into that attack over a period of years. There were thousands of forces engaging in some specialized and unusual strategies. Hamas even released a propaganda video more or less showing their plan with paragliders and everything. And they carried it out the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. And somehow this all caught Israel completely by surprise. So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole, or accept that these claims of excessive competence are, at the minimum, exaggerated. Similarly this would make things like evading law enforcement pretty much impossible, while in reality there are countless people, at least thousands, who have been photographed in relation to e.g. a crime, but never found, and never identified.
- deaux 9mo ago
  > So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying > Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel? It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option. If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..
  - delichon 9mo ago
    > If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god. That is a naive statement given that 75% of the world's population identifies with an established religion, and each of those have evidence free beliefs such as virgin birth, reincarnation, the existence of hell, etc.
  - tzs 9mo ago
    > So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? That may be a little exaggerated [1]. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-review-on-what-the-epstein-files-show-about-the-fbi-investigation-of-possible-sex-trafficking https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-review-on-what-the-ep...
YeGoblynQueenne 9mo ago
>> I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free. What does "virtually error free" mean? There's no "error free" in facial recognition, or any other application of machine learning. More to the point, who says all this, besides yourself in this thread? Why should anyone believe that "virtually error free" is a factual description of real technological capabilities rather than state propaganda?
- epolanski 9mo ago
  Those are private companies, so it's not state propaganda. By the way, UK, South Wales especially claims an 89%+ success rate and 1 in 6'000 false positives, you can read it on UK's official website. The company between Oosto claims 99%. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-facial-recognition/police-use-of-facial-recognition-factsheet https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...
  - AuthAuth 9mo ago
    That is not even close to error free. 89% is really bad actually.
    - epolanski 9mo ago
      Those are numbers claimed by the UK, the company behind it claims an order of magnitude over it with proper data (airport-level full face scans). Even 89% isn't that bad imho, recognizing the overabundant majority of a population with random cameras that don't require the user to pose or assume specific positions is..quite something.
      - AuthAuth 9mo ago
        Its kinda of bad when factoring in the consequences for being misidentified. Getting misidentified can cost you your life. It can cause you months of time and legal fees to disprove. It can waste police resources and erode public trust. And I trust the UK police data far far more than the company. Every company says they are 99% accurate.
throway23423 9mo ago
I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese. edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams. https://archive.is/0qjVI https://archive.is/0qjVI
- yes_really 9mo ago
  A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people
gerash 9mo ago
I'm sorry this sounds like hyperbole to say the least. idk about their accuracy but "error free"? Also do you understand the amount of compute and network bandwidth necessary to index and track billions of people by processing exabytes of streaming footage constantly with heavy computer vision models. who's integrating all these different camera systems to start with? These claims sound like they come from someone who hasn't done these things in real life. Tangentially, it seems like Israel tech scene has so many players involved in spyware/malware and surveillance.
zjaffee 8mo ago
I mean, it's objectively true that they can do this, especially when even mildly filtered down by incoming external data. It's why you no longer need to speak with a person when reentering your home country in a lot of different places (israel being one of them, but also the EU, trusted travelers in the US through global entry, ect).

nick_ 9mo ago

Is the Israeli intelligence facial recognition system in the room with us now?

epolanski 9mo ago
Oosto, Corsight AI.

sejje 9mo ago

> if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world Approximately what year did this start?

epolanski 9mo ago
I have no clue because my first extra EU flight has been in 2022 and I definitely got a full face scan.
- gruez 9mo ago
  The part I'm skeptical about is "available to virtually every agency in the world". I think every immigration checkpoint I've been to have some sort of camera setup, but the extent of data sharing is unclear. Is China sharing data with the US? Or US sharing with Canada? US with Germany? etc.
  - deaux 9mo ago
    Except for a handful of countries like China, you can very reasonably assume all of the others' is both available to Israel as well as the US.

riobard 9mo ago

I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.

pdyc 9mo ago

i have doubts on accuracy of face recognition. There is already nancy guthrie case going on and if it is so accurate why are suspects still not recognized?

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
pear01 9mo ago
You mean the the case where he came to her door dressed like death with his face almost completely covered? Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.

lp4v4n 9mo ago

I believe that most of what you said is true, but I don't think the tracking of people around the world is as efficient as your post suggests. If a single face scan were enough to track people anywhere like that, American government agencies (I'm thinking ICE, the FBI, etc.) wouldn’t have as much trouble as they do arresting people. That’s just my impression of course, maybe for some reason they choose not to use these technologies.

junofan 9mo ago
They need recall, not precision. It’s conceivably fine if you tag 100 people as long as one of them is your guy. Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.

belter 9mo ago

[flagged]

jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
Even if you don't believe in the capabilities of Israeli intelligence, it's well documented that Israel supported Hamas as a hard-line alternative to the PLO to avoid a two-state solution. The Israeli right has for decades intensified the conflict to justify total war against Palestinians. Allowing a domestic attack to gin up support for aggression is in line with their behaviour for the past 3 decades. I'm old enough to remember when Arafat was well-respected in the west and a two-state solution was the mainstream view amongst Americans. Once Netanyahu came to power in 1996 (30 years ago!) he worked to delegitimize the PLO and pursue an aggressive genocide against the Palestinians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
thesz 9mo ago
> This capability has been demonstrated multiple times, specially when it was politically convenient, like for example the intercepted Hamas calls that showed that some of the rockets fall inside Gaza by mistake. Can it be something generated? One can display something that is politically convenient and not true at once.
- belter 9mo ago
  "IDF releases intercepted Hamas call on hospital explosion" - https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-releases-intercepted-hamas-call-on-hospital-explosion/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-releases-in...
deaux 9mo ago
Of course they knew.
myth_drannon 9mo ago
"Walls of Jericho" plan was known to Israel since 2017. Everything was known but as usually with IDF, too much arrogance and this was mostly ignored. Not to mention the 4am meeting the top brass decided not to raise alarms for fear of miscalculation. Maddening arrogance and many heads should have rolled but still some are in their seats.

somenameforme 9mo ago

I think these sort of claims of excessive competence are challenged by the October 7th attacks. Think about the massive amount of planning and organization that went into that attack over a period of years. There were thousands of forces engaging in some specialized and unusual strategies. Hamas even released a propaganda video more or less showing their plan with paragliders and everything. And they carried it out the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. And somehow this all caught Israel completely by surprise. So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole, or accept that these claims of excessive competence are, at the minimum, exaggerated. Similarly this would make things like evading law enforcement pretty much impossible, while in reality there are countless people, at least thousands, who have been photographed in relation to e.g. a crime, but never found, and never identified.

deaux 9mo ago
> So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying > Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel? It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option. If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..
- delichon 9mo ago
  > If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god. That is a naive statement given that 75% of the world's population identifies with an established religion, and each of those have evidence free beliefs such as virgin birth, reincarnation, the existence of hell, etc.
- tzs 9mo ago
  > So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? That may be a little exaggerated [1]. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-review-on-what-the-epstein-files-show-about-the-fbi-investigation-of-possible-sex-trafficking https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-review-on-what-the-ep...

YeGoblynQueenne 9mo ago

>> I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free. What does "virtually error free" mean? There's no "error free" in facial recognition, or any other application of machine learning. More to the point, who says all this, besides yourself in this thread? Why should anyone believe that "virtually error free" is a factual description of real technological capabilities rather than state propaganda?

epolanski 9mo ago
Those are private companies, so it's not state propaganda. By the way, UK, South Wales especially claims an 89%+ success rate and 1 in 6'000 false positives, you can read it on UK's official website. The company between Oosto claims 99%. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-facial-recognition/police-use-of-facial-recognition-factsheet https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...
- AuthAuth 9mo ago
  That is not even close to error free. 89% is really bad actually.
  - epolanski 9mo ago
    Those are numbers claimed by the UK, the company behind it claims an order of magnitude over it with proper data (airport-level full face scans). Even 89% isn't that bad imho, recognizing the overabundant majority of a population with random cameras that don't require the user to pose or assume specific positions is..quite something.
    - AuthAuth 9mo ago
      Its kinda of bad when factoring in the consequences for being misidentified. Getting misidentified can cost you your life. It can cause you months of time and legal fees to disprove. It can waste police resources and erode public trust. And I trust the UK police data far far more than the company. Every company says they are 99% accurate.

throway23423 9mo ago

I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese. edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams. https://archive.is/0qjVI https://archive.is/0qjVI

yes_really 9mo ago
A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people

gerash 9mo ago

I'm sorry this sounds like hyperbole to say the least. idk about their accuracy but "error free"? Also do you understand the amount of compute and network bandwidth necessary to index and track billions of people by processing exabytes of streaming footage constantly with heavy computer vision models. who's integrating all these different camera systems to start with? These claims sound like they come from someone who hasn't done these things in real life. Tangentially, it seems like Israel tech scene has so many players involved in spyware/malware and surveillance.

zjaffee 8mo ago

I mean, it's objectively true that they can do this, especially when even mildly filtered down by incoming external data. It's why you no longer need to speak with a person when reentering your home country in a lot of different places (israel being one of them, but also the EU, trusted travelers in the US through global entry, ect).