Face-Recognition Software Fingers Suspects

eldavojohn writes, "In Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts, the police have a new member on the team. It's facial recognition software that will mine the 9.5 million state license images of Massachusetts residents. From the article: 'Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.' The kicker is that this system been in use since May and has been successful." An article from Iowa a few weeks back mentions that software from the same company (Digimark) is in use to catch potential fraud in applying for driver's licenses in Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Texas. But offering the software and photo database as a resource to police departments raises the stakes considerably. I wonder what the false positive rate is.

Re:False positive rate?

[snark23]

It won't be zero, but it also can't be very high or else it wouldn't be cost effective for the police. Assuming that it takes a non-trivial amount of human time to process each positive, a high false-to-true positive ratio would be a show-stopper.

Re:be careful..

[smaddox]

I don't see how facial recognition systems can ever be "near flawless". Most systems I know of use neural networks to match patterns. Neural networks model the brain, and even humans can't always tell apart two people if you only have a picture of their face. Humans use a lot more than a face to determine who a person is.

Re:False positive rate?

[trianglman]

The issue is more than just the false positive rate. The problem is that they are going through the entire DMV records. As it stands right now, most places can only go through previously arrested people for things like fingerprint and facial matches, which is something that comes with having a record. I, as a law abiding citizen on the other hand, should not be immediately thrown under suspicion just because my face is somewhat similar to a blurry CCTV image, which is what the false positive rate could cause. I have a job that requires me to be in a certain place at a certain time, thats not exactly possible if I am being held for questioning because of something someone I have never met did something on the other side of town. If I could trust our government to use new technologies judiciously and with restraint, it wouldn't be a problem, but this hasn't ever been the case and, short of some utopia suddenly appearing, probably never will.

Re:but no stats

[colmore]

There's a fundamental, mathematical problem for any system that screens large populations looking for a small number of targets.

Let's say your system is 99% reliable, that is to say, 1% of the time it checks a negative it reports a positive and vice versa.

Now you screen 1,000,000 people looking for one suspect, your system turns up 10,001 positives. Which one is it?

This is a problem that has been well-studied in cancer screenings. For certain rare types of cancers, there are nearly 100% reliable tests that nonetheless when they report a positive, are usually wrong.

Now it's fine to say, in the case of the cancer, that the 1% of the population should be informed and then checked via another procedure or something. But when we're talking about a process that fingers potential criminals, and in modern criminal justice where merely being a suspect hurts your life in a myriad of ways (god help you if the information winds up somewhere accessible to google, or worse yet, the case has anything to do with terrorism).

I have the same objection to large-scale wiretapping operations, if anything, the human factor there greatly increases the problem.

Oh goodies

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, yet another unpleasant use of interdepartmental government cooperation. One completely unrelated activity (in this case, driving) being used to gather data for another activity (criminal apprehension). I don't know about everyone else, but when I went to get my License I didn't think "oh swell, this information will be culled through every time the police are looking for someone, criminal or not". Perhaps it is my incessant paranoia, but I don't like the Idea of my name/information being put in a database and constantly culled through looking for criminals unless I've been convicted of actually doing something wrong. As far as I am concerned it treats me as a suspect every time, even though I'm probably not within hundreds of miles of the crime, I don't care whether or not a computer is doing it, I'm still being treated as a potential criminal every time. I would not have so much of a problem with the information from convicted criminal mug shots being gone through (though I suppose even in that case there are some issues, but much less prevalent (those people have been "convicted" of crimes)), but innocent, never convicted or suspected citizens, sounds like things are getting scary to me.

As for the level of trust that can be placed in this system......, I would place it as low at best. The inaccuracies of currently understood facial recognition software aside. The fact that swat teams routinely smash into the wrong persons home, because of a misspelled address or faulty descriptions should clue into that this system would probably trouble a lot of innocent people. I have little doubt that there would be many false positives involving people who looked relatively similar to a criminal who made it all the way up to the "arrest" phase of being a suspect before the police finally discovered it was a mistake. And in a environment where, at least as far as police mistakes/abuse are concerned, treated with a light slap on the wrist, paid leave of absence, or a reprimand on their file are about all the punishment that can be expected, I don't think they need a tool as inaccurate and dangerous as this. If they can eventually learn to use their current tools better (like putting heavy/warranted restrictions on access to DMV info, Phone Records, and Credit Card info) and punish/repair mistakes appropriately. Then maybe they should be allowed equally restricted access to a tool as dangerous as this with the affore mentioned criminal mug shots restriction, but not until. //end of rant

WTF!?~

[sc0p3]

This is exactly like finger printing everyone in the state. Privacy has gone out the window. Making use of photos which people allowed for use on their license, to be used to finger them is criminal.

license photograph archive

[JimBobJoe]

You'd be surprised how many state legislatures never bothered authorizing their respective DMVs to archive the photographs (which is a huge change from the days of the original photo licenses, where only negative was produced and no photograph maintained.)

I just took a look at the MA code [mass.gov] and couldn't find anything allowing the photographs to be archived by the registry of motor vehicles. Maybe someone else with a better knoweledge of MA law can find such a law.

This is not an insignificant issue...the archival of the photographs and sharing them to law enforcement, basically without limit and without warrant to access the database, is the practical equivalent of requiring every citizen above the age of 16 to show up at the local police station and be photographed.

I consider the photograph archival of US license pictures to be one of the biggest and least known/understood privacy invasions in the last 10-15 years.

Re:False positive rate?

[bob65]

Well getting lies from random people on the streets would be analogous to getting a false positive from this system (except that the system arguably isn't out to frame anyone on purpose), and since police have no trouble dealing with such false positives from "tips", they should have even less trouble dealing with false positives from this system.

Re:False positive rate?

[Duhavid]

I think you are assuming that the police are not having a problem
dealing with false positives from "tips". I suspect that is not
proven.

The amount of comments here, endorsing ...

[quax]

... such a system is truely scary. What's next? How about 24/7 machine assisted surveilance of all telepone calls just because it may help catch a terrorist? Oh, wait a sec =:-0

Turning the law upside down..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm intrigued that there's so little objection to the gradual reversal of the first principle of law: innocent until proven guilty. In this case it starts on the wholly false premise that the images used on driver licenses are of a sufficient quality to make a proper match without a high false positives rate (you can find the EU specs for biometric passports here [europa.eu]- I know that it has turned making a passport picture into something like an art form, and out of reach of your average 'picture me' box). Result: based on very bad source data you now have to prove your innocence if you somehow resemble a criminal. Nobody has heard of such facilities to be 'tools' (i.e. ASSISTING in the decision process, not actually replacing it). Groan..

Other examples of having to prove your innocence are any broad RIAA 'john doe' suit, being labelled a terrorist (in some cases you can't even prove your innocence there because you're quickly shipped outside the internationally agreed legal framework at Guantanamo Bay), Microsofts' WGA, oh, and forgetting your college card which apparently is good enough to allow police officers to submit you to unwarranted violence which in other nations would lead to such officers facing jail. On that topic, I vaguely recall that the other argument for Iraq was the police brutality the citizens were subjected to. Well, it appears a few lessons were learned there - just not the right ones..

Let me ask you something: does Washington actually have any politicians left with a spine or have they all been bought? Does anyone actually CARE about human rights there other than to harass other nations with and as a pretext to start the odd war when it's politically convenient?

The US is not 'on' the slippery slope - it's damn well sliding fast if citizens don't start making Washingtom behave like most citizens want (I'm making the distinction here because most Americans I know don't seem to agree with what's happening in Washington - proven by the latest election results). It'll be interesting to see if that 'bloody nose' Bush received in the elections will make a difference.

Given the amount of money involved, I somehow don't think so.

/rant..

Re:Once a criminal, always a suspect?

[ectotherm]

I understand your point, but by the same token would you want a convicted burglar as a house-sitter or a convicted child molester babysitting your children? Trust, unfortunately, is like fine crystal- once broken, it will never be the same. It can be repaired, but the initial breakage will always be there as a reminder. It is unfortunate that you made a bad choice in your youth, and that the results of your choice appears in any background checks done, but you cannot expect to engender 100% trustworthiness with a criminal record. People, while generally forgiving, always think twice about such things. Is this right? Probably not. It this reality? Definitely. I work at a financial institution, and they do a background check that is more thorough than a prostate exam. The slightest blemish on your record will deny employment. They are simply covering their asses in the event of another "Enron." (You mean you hired this person with a known criminal history, and now they embezzled/misled investors!!??)

Re:Once a criminal, always a suspect?

[kannibal_klown]

Exactly how is it "wrong" to mass-search drivers' license pictures? So long as they don't ONLY rely on the computer then it's alright.

• Person A gets caught on tape shooting a grocery store clerk. Unfortunately, that is the only lead.
• While persuing the ordinary investigation (involving the public, looking for witnesses, looking for speeding vehicles), etc...
• the police run the face through the recognition DB and get a number of hits
• They then use ordinary police work to check out the potential suspects: geography, past records, maybe a few house calls, etc.

Now they shouldn't place TOO much faith in the system, after all when searching through a vast DB there are going to be multiple hits depending on how low you set the threshold. But as a tool it can be quite useful to find the guy.

As for your problems, yeh it sucks. But the article isn't saying that only convicted criminals go in: everybody goes in. So how is that punishing you? If you got nailed for involuntary manslaughter during a drunk driving hit-and-run a few years ago, and then a couple of years later it happens again in your neighborhood, you can be sure your name will come up again (even if only for a few seconds) -- with or without the system.

It's just an investigative tool to help find a list of suspects. The software is not good enough to treat it like "fingerprints" or DNA, it's just saying "these guys kind of look like the guy in the grainy black-and-white video tape. They'd need a lot more to charge you.