Congress Faces Decision on Whether to Rein in Controversial Spying Program
WASHINGTON — Congress must decide by year's end whether to overhaul a controversial surveillance program that collects the content of Americans' emails, phone calls, text messages and other electronic communication without a warrant.
"This law is supposed to be a tool to fight terrorist threats overseas; instead it's being used as an end-run around the Constitution," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Wyden has promised to put a hold on any bill that allows the government to continue spying on Americans without a search warrant.
Knowing what we do about Donald's approach to policy issues, it seems unlikely that the American president is aware of what is going on. Lawmakers are not expected to simply let the law lapse.
The Age of AI Surveillance is Here
Long possible in Hollywood thrillers, the tools for identifying who someone is and what they’re doing across video and images are taking shape. Companies like Facebook and Baidu have been working on such artificial intelligence-powered technology for years. But the narrowing rate of error and widening availability of these systems foretell a near future when every video is analyzed to identify the people, objects, and actions inside.
... The largest public example of this is MegaFace, a project out of the University of Washington. The dataset contains nearly 5 million images of 672,000 people, sourced from Flickr’s creative commons. In July, the MegaFace team presented the latest scores for algorithms trained on the dataset. When tested on matching two images of the same person in a separate dataset of 1 million face images, top-ranking teams touched 75% accuracy when given one chance to guess, and more than 90% accuracy when allowed to give 10 options.
“We need to test facial recognition on a planetary scale to enable practical applications—testing on a larger scale lets you discover the flaws and successes of recognition algorithms,” Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a UW professor who oversees MegaFace, told the UW press shop.
... If state or federal governments expand into deploying facial recognition in public, they will already have a database of more than 50% of American adults from repositories like DMVs. And again, the bigger the dataset, the better the AI.
And that might not be far off. Axon, a company once known as Taser and the largest distributor of police body cameras in the US, has recently ramped up ambitions to infuse artificial intelligence into its products, acquiring two AI companies earlier this year.
The Facial-Recognition Arms Race: Is Jason Bourne Technology Near?
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking,” H.L. Mencken observed a century ago. The 21st-century version of that could be, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns that something is always looking” — with something being technology that grows ever more invasive by the year.
Underneath our very noses, there is a facial-recognition arms race going on.
Slate reported this month that Facebook is ignoring state laws that forbid the compiling of biometric data because it is convinced that DeepFace — a “deep learning” facial recognition system that uses advanced artificial intelligence — will be a revenue gusher. Slate wrote that even if ...... Facebook never sells its biometric data troves and keeps them locked in encrypted storage, the company still stands to turn big profits, as businesses look to tailor ads to specific customers based on their mood, age, eye gaze or other personal attributes that could indicate a propensity to buy.
Facebook has innovated heavily in this space. It’s worked on a feature that can identify a user even if her face is hidden, drawing from other potentially unique identifiers, like body shape, hair, posture and clothing.
Mashable’s report this week about the new iPhone 8 expected to debut Sept. 12 shows Apple is also very much in the facial-recognition game. The new iPhone reportedly will have a default of automatically scanning the faces of everyone in a room — something media leaks suggest it will be able to do even in the dark and while face up on a table. Mashable summed up the downside of more prevalent facial-recognition devices like this:Does this matter to you now? Maybe, maybe not. But it probably will when someone drains your bank account using nothing more than a photo they pulled off your Instagram account.
Mashable, like most tech blogs, focused on how facial recognition will be used in lieu of a fingerprint for sign-in or purchase-confirmation purposes.
But the potential issues raised by hyperaccurate facial recognition go far beyond its use as a marketing tool. ... Which gets to perhaps the most provocative aspect of advances in facial recognition occurring in sync with the development of gigantic databases of images of individuals. A fairly common scene in movie spy thrillers is for computers being able to use photos to quickly find individuals around the world by scanning millions of video feeds. Aha — Jason Bourne is at the Rome airport!
Hiding Behind Your Hands Won’t Stop Next-Gen Facial Recognition Software
As evidenced by Apple’s rumored plans to replace Touch ID with facial recognition technology for the iPhone 8, the ability of computers to seamlessly recognize faces is pretty darn impressive these days. The technology is not infallible, however, and there are still things capable of tripping it up. One example? Hands covering faces, which represents a significant challenge, due to how often a particularly animated hand gesture accidentally obscures a speaker’s face.
What researchers from the University of Central Florida and Carnegie Mellon University have developed is a method of dealing with the so-called “facial occlusion” problem. Called Hand2Face (which admittedly sounds a little bit like that early 2000s “talk to the hand” meme), they’ve developed technology that can help improve facial recognition technology for a variety of applications — ranging from security to making machines better understand our emotions.
Driver’s License Facial Recognition Tech Leads to 4,000 New York Arrests
The state of New York says its driver's license facial recognition technology has led to the arrest of 4,000 people in connection to identify theft or fraud crimes. This number is likely to skyrocket in the wake of the state doubling the number of measurement points for photographs.
The state last year increased the measurement points of a driver's license picture from 64 to 128. The DMV said this vastly improves its chances of matching new photographs with one already in a database of 16 million photos. As many as 8,000 new pictures are added each day.
At least 39 US states use some form of facial recognition software.
New York's DMV photo database is not among those databases forwarded to an FBI program containing about 411.9 million facial recognition images of people who have committed no crimes.
Just like China ...
From Ale To Jail: In China, Facial Recognition Is Used To Buy KFC, Board Planes, and Catch Drug Users
Over the past several months, private companies and government entities have successfully deployed facial recognition technology for a number of different purposes, ranging from shopping to public safety. The speed of the rollout is a sign of how China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence are advancing rapidly—and in a manner that will make Western techies envious, and privacy advocates queasy.
... On Monday, media in the northern Chinese city of Qingdao reported that police had apprehended 19 individuals at an annual beer festival who tested positive for drug use. How did they do it? Authorities simply spread 18 cameras across the premise’s four entrances and recorded the faces of more than two million attendees. Police identified individuals with past histories of drug abuse—Chinese law requires people caught using illegal drugs to register with authorities—tested them on the spot, and arrested those with positive results.
Meanwhile, in late July, authorities in Macau, which is technically a special administrative region of China with a government separate from Beijing, installed facial recognition on 680 ATMs across the city. Out-of-towners regularly travel to the casino hub to gamble and get easy access to foreign exchange, which has become increasingly difficult to do within the mainland. The facial-recognition feature only affects holders of UnionPay cards, the main payment provider in mainland China, and marks an attempt from Beijing to make it even harder to surreptitiously move capital out of its borders.
The Communist Party, facing no political opposition or democratic checks, can implement controversial technology with little pushback. This all means that facial recognition in China looks set to steadily move beyond few novelty cases toward near ubiquity. (... just like in the U.S.)
China’s Dystopian Push To Revolutionize Surveillance
As part of a new multimillion-dollar project in Xinjiang, the Chinese government is attempting to “build a fortress city with technologies.” If this sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is. According to the Sina online news portal, the project is supposed to strengthen the authorities’ hands against unexpected social unrest. Using “big data” from various sources, including the railway system and visitors’ systems in private residential compounds, its ultimate aim is to “predict … individuals and vehicles posing heightened risks” to public safety.
And this isn’t the only project in China that aims to expand surveillance while denying people privacy rights. Across the country, local governments are spending billions of dollars implementing sophisticated technological systems for mass surveillance. The consequences for human rights are ominous.
The project aims to build a nationwide, intelligent digital surveillance network capable of identifying and locating individuals, as well as offering the state immediate access to personal records at the push of a button. (... just like the U.S.)
This dystopian project is bearing fruit. China’s pervasive Internet censorship and its use of countless security cameras in public spaces are well known. Recent reporting reveals authorities’ aspirations to enable facial recognition through upgraded cameras, to calculate citizens’ “social credit” scores based on economic and social status and to establish a national DNA database that logs genetic code irrespective of anyone’s connection to a crime.
What’s worse, the Chinese government is promoting its surveillance model abroad. It has pushed the concept of “Internet sovereignty” — the idea that, instead of a free World Wide Web, a country’s rulers should determine what netizens can say and read.
Chinese telecom giant ZTE sold technology and provided training to monitor mobile phones and Internet activity. Meanwhile, closed-circuit television cameras and monitoring systems made by Chinese companies — some high-definition and equipped with facial and movement recognition powers — have been sold to countries around the world, including Brazil, Ecuador, Kenya, Britain and the U.S.
Vocord Face Recognition System Tops World Ranking – Again
The world’s best face recognition algorithm is made by Skolkovo resident Vocord, according to the MegaFace platform, which rated it above Google in one of its rankings this week.