Feds use biometrics against Super Bowl fans
By: Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 01/02/2001 at 18:19 GMT
Super Bowl 2001 fans were secretly treated to a mass, biometric scan in which
video cameras tied to a temporary law-enforcement command centre digitised
their faces and compared them against photographic lists of known malefactors.
Everyone entering Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida last Sunday was
subjected to the surveillance system cameras, set up at the entrance turnstiles.
No notice or disclosure was ever given, and no one, therefore, had an opportunity
to decline to enter the stadium if they should have objected to this unprecedented
treatment.
The faceFINDER equipment and software used are the products of Viisage
Technology, which supplies it to the US Department of Justice Immigration &
Naturalization Service (INS); numerous state corrections authorities and driving
license administrations; gambling casinos which use it to compare patrons' faces
against pictures of known cheats; and several governments.
"Viisage Technology has pilot programs with Western European governments to
provide face recognition surveillance systems that leverage our existing
faceFINDER technology. The systems will identify criminals and terrorists in high
security areas. The customer will have the ability to capture a constant stream of
live video and compare each face image against their face "list" of bad guys. The
project could lead to the integration of several faceFINDER systems and
databases across all of Western Europe," the company cheerfully notes.
The Viisage software translates the characteristics of a face into set of numbers,
called an eigenface, which is used for comparisons in real-time against a
database of stored images.
"The Company's face-recognition technology is unique because of its capabilities
of both rapid and accurate real-time acquisition as well as its scalability to
databases containing millions of faces. Therefore, the software can instantly
calculate an individual's eigenface from either live video or a still digital image, and
then search a database of millions in only a few seconds in order to find similar or
matching images."
'Similar or matching.' This clearly acknowledges the possibility that innocent
civilians going about their peaceable business may be stopped, hassled, even
arrested, merely for resembling someone naughty. This raises sticky issues
regarding the presumption of innocence many of us were encouraged to believe in
during our grammar-school civics lessons. Is there a violation of this principle
when a person is required to produce evidence that they are not, in fact, the evil
bastard whom they unfortunately resemble?
Of course technology is neither good nor bad in itself; the scary questions arise
when one considers the ways it's to be used, or abused. While we can see
numerous benefits in legitimate identification from technology like Viisage's, we've
also not seen a technology so ripe for positively Orwellian abuse. ®
theregister.co.uk
steve |
