Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing
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In the end it was mostly dumb luck, dumb criminals, and the fact the poor victim who lost their legs managed to survive. In fact that was the success, that more wounded people didn't die thanks to fantastic work by the hospital and doctors.
Instead of patting law enforcement on their backs, how about thanking the doctors, where is their applause?
But yes, multiple subsystems failed in the police response. If you listened to police scanners, you also heard that they had some trouble identifying streets correctly, or keeping their mics off when not talking. But police response protocols are one human system that definitely needs to be able to work in the face of multiple subsystem failure. I say judge the police on how the response worked as a whole.
I have to say though, thank god that Dunkin' Doughnuts' Tactical Ration Deployment Vehicle ran smoothly.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22federal+grant%22+%22encry...
Surely not only financial reasons. In the United States, consumer purchase of inexpensive radios that pick up police communication frequencies has been commonplace since the early 1970s (when I first owned one). I remember a Hacker News thread a year or two ago in which a European was surprised that a news report including the name of a person arrested (not tried and convicted, but just arrested) was permitted in the United States. Our historical sense in the United States is that police operations and arrests should be largely in public view, reportable by the news media and observable by the public. Different societies come up with different trade-offs on this issue, in law and in custom, but in the United States arrest records are public (and routinely reported, although often with some time lag, in local weekly newspapers) and police radio activity can be monitored by many private citizens. It was noteworthy this last week that the Boston police make more use of Twitter than many urban police departments, but the general degree of openness observed in the police response to the marathon bombings is fairly typical of the United States.
But for the shelter-in-place order (it wasn't a lockdown or curfew) the guy may not have been home in the first place for find Tsarnaev.
lots of things went wrong for this to happen. thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious. our police deserve the "pats on the back" (which, by the way, is an extremely condescending way to put it) they're getting, and more.
> In the end it was mostly dumb luck
What? Painstaking police work went in to getting images of these suspects, and the release of those photos are almost certainly what led to Thursday's events and, ultimately, the killing and capture of the suspects.
> the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown)
Firstly, the lockdown is what forced suspect #2 to hide out in a boat instead of fleeing the area. Secondly, and less importantly, the guy smoking a cigarette wasn't violating the lockdown. It had ended prior to him going outside.
Was there luck involved? Of course. But there was also tremendous work done by a number of law enforcement agencies - without which, the suspects may never have been killed and captured.
It was mostly dumb luck. It's not like they were hiding!
Oh, and http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/27/hanover-police-trying-...
From what I can tell, numerous people called in after the photos were released. Even if Thursday's events hadn't taken place, the police would have known the identities of both suspects shortly thereafter.
It just seems crazy to me not to acknowledge the role of investigators in all of this and chock it up to luck.
As for the edit you just made about the bombs in Hanover: are you implying there's a link to the Marathon bombers? Seems like conspiracy theory reaching - unless there's some sort of evidence you'd like to share.
People do crazy things when they have made up their minds before the story even begins.
I know you dislike law enforcement in general, but such casual exaggeration isn't helping your case. As of today, it's only 6 days since the bombings took place. The bombings happened late on a Monday morning. By Thursday evening, there were photos and videos of the suspects all over the media. There's a good chance that that's what flushed them out of cover.
"Failed" might be too strong, but I'd definitely say it's not yet ready for deployment.
My impression is that the Boston marathon was extremely well-photographed from a variety of angles, by everything from nearby security cameras to folks in the crowd. This seems like the best kind of data set you'd reasonably expect outside a controlled environment (i.e., a lab or security checkpoint). If it's not yet good enough to at least flag possible matches based on this data, I'm not sure I believe it's ready for widespread use.
I guess when you create a panopticon you're relying more on psychology than surveillance.
Think about it this way: would you want just anyone to be watchlisted based on tips that could be politically motivated, intentionally misleading, or just completely factually inaccurate?
What you can never account for in terrorism screening is the lone-wolf element. There will always be some fringe guys in parts of the world who hatch their plots outside of the view of what we're able to observe. The only options you have are to limit their access to harmful weapons/devices, or contain them as fast as possible when they do go on the offensive.
Yes, doctors and other emergency responders did a great job, but don't be so quick to take away a victory from law enforcement when there are very few positive stories circulated about them ever. The boston marathon runners/crowd didn't know they were putting their lives on the line that day. Law enforcement, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to do so.
The EMTs and hospitals did marvelous work, but one nonobvious fact that helped a great deal was that the bombing was within 2 miles of FIVE DIFFERENT level 1 trauma centers. All five are world class teaching hospitals and one of them, MGH, had been recognized as the best hospital in the US at one point.
There are several states that don't have even a single level 1 trauma center....
Flamebait. Anything people point out, you just define as luck. Luck that LEO found evidence, had pictures of the perps, etc.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2013/04/21/ma...
Massachusetts does in fact have an assault weapon ban in place (similar to the 1994 Federal AWB), although you can get modified/MA-compliant versions of many "assault weapons" such as the AR-15/AK that are legal, however you are limited to a 10 round magazine. They would have needed a Class-A LTC to even contemplate owning such a weapon -- this involves fingerprints, a full background check, references and a "letter of purpose" along with permission from your local police chief to get.
However, the younger brother was too young to get a permit, the older brother was in fact not a US citizen and was here on a green card and thus is ineligible for a gun permit. Having said that, even if he was a US citizen his previous arrest for domestic assault would've rendered him ineligible for/and or revoked an existing LTC-A had he had one.
I have not seen anything yet reported as to what kind of long gun(s) they had or where they got them. The FBI warned agents responding to Watertown on Thursday night that they had "fully automatic AK47s" [along with grenades/dynamite and IEDs]. It is my understanding that they only recovered two handguns at the scene of the firefight in Watertown and one handgun and a long gun were found on the boat after the final surrender [aside from the IEDs scattered over Watertown].
It is interesting that despite the incredible firepower the brothers had access to (handguns, long gun(s), multiple IEDs), that when there's someone shooting back, the brothers plans were pretty much shut down and the loss of life/injury was very minimal considering the circumstances.
Let's say that you want to catch terrorists creeping around in your airport. To do this, you have a magic camera that, when it takes a picture of a civilian, compares it to a picture of a known terrorist. If they're in fact the same person, it will flag security over. Let's say that it is indeed a magic camera and makes the correct decision 99.99% of the time, which is far better than the current state of the art[1].
Do you have any idea how much DHS or DoD would pay for such a magic camera?
But it won't be enough.
Consider a watch list of 100 terrorists that we're looking for in our airport. If our camera compares each civilian's picture to all 100 terrorists in succession, and if we model each comparison as a Bernoulli trial, then each civilian has a 0.9999^100 = 99.004% chance of getting through security unfazed, which means we flag innocent people as terrorists about 1% of the time.
This doesn't work in an airport setting. Assuming 5,000 people pass through your small airport per hour and you have a 14-hour day, that means your security people have to go through 0.01 * 5000 * 14 = 700 false alarms each day. That's about 1.2 false alarms per minute. Your security people will have to go through all their checks each time this happens. Before long, they're going to stop trusting your magic camera.
As you scale your watch list up, it gets worse. How well would it work for 1,000 people on the watch list? 10,000? Note that the current US watch list has 50,000 people on it.
Even if it were a perfect magic camera, it coudln't catch terrorists on their maiden crime who aren't on the watch list at all.
(Most of this post was adapted from: http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/IJCB11-tutorial-boult.ppt , which is a really interesting presentation if you're interested in these sorts of things.)
Even perfect automated facial recognition won't convict people. It will merely point out people that should be looked at. If a jury looking at the image and the guy's face think the system is wrong, they can disregard it.
As far as prevention goes, what we need are systems that can detect deception reliably, which will help if we ever decide to ask people meaningful questions. Not to convict, but to focus attention on a possible threat.
Facial recognition algorithms always give their best matching candidates, with thresholds to skip those not quite matching ones. Your article makes it sound like no such results were produced at all, which is unlikely how recognition is supposed to work.
Even if the system would allow it, not only would false positives be enormous, you'd probably miss the match as well (false negative).
One are also dealing with a lot of legacy systems her. But the next generation surveillance system will probably be HD, and then maybe 3D, 4k, 16k etc.
OTOH, I do actually see more and more HD (or relatively high def) surveillance footage. It all depends on how when the security system was installed, I guess. Also smaller businesses can afford a shorter turnaround for these things, as well as not having the handicap of a head-start[1].
[0] actually I'm guessing those lifetime spans, it seems a bit much? but I also can't see anyone signing off on a security system that's expected to be replaced in 5 years. good thing my job isn't facility management ... :P
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_s... , how odd, is there no common English phrase for this law?
In a real life scenario, surveillance camera images are all you will get to work with, most likely. So maybe, the focus should be on figuring a way out to recognize individuals based on images taken at those angles. Is there any progress in this regard?
One should be able to blend in, and make video surveillance pretty useless...
Edit: Did work for this robbers: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2192115/Robbers-disg...
Don't know how easy it is to get those masks though.
But then again, the police will label you as "that guy with weird bits of plastic on his face", which won't help you hide at all.
Costs $3, will beat any facial recognition
:)
For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They had about 48 hours to book flights out of the country, flee to another part of the country, do more damage, etc. The lack of facial recognition software could have ultimately led to this case being unnecessarily longer. This is an issue that CAN and NEEDS to be fixed quickly--in fact, I hope the government is working on a more sophisticated facial recognition software right now. Ideally, the facial recognition software should be able to crawl through the web to search for faces.
Now that I think about it, a good hacker could build a search engine that allows people to post photos and the program will run an automated search across the web (Social networks, Google, etc.) to see which pictures match it. Hell, Facebook even has facial recognition to some extent. A more sophisticated one cannot be that difficult for the government to build and put to use.
Maybe instead of more intrusive surveillance we find more ways for the public to participate. Maybe we uphold the public's right to take pictures and video in "sensitive areas". Etc.
I wonder if this would help in similar instances. A system that uses facial detection to isolate faces and then zoom in on them very quickly seems feasible. I'm assuming it would be overwhelmed in a scenario like a marathon of course, but perhaps it would help in other situations.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57580534/fbi-interviewed...
Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver’s license, and those pictures go into a facial recognition database.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside...
--pre-submit thought: perhaps it was the older brother? Our background is rather limited but it would not be surprising if he had had prior run-ins with the law. Even a minor offense will get your mugshot in the file.
Funnily enough, if you download your information using Facebook's tools, you get a copy of your facial recognition data too. Presumably US law enforcement has access to that for their own uses.
Everyone who applies for a US visa is additionally photographed and fingerprinted.
Everyone who applies for naturalisation is additionally photographed and fingerprinted.
The suspects did all three of these things. The US government has almost every foreigner legally on American soil in a database.
Plus then you have the DNV on top of that and or passport office.
The average cctv shot will have around 200-1000 pixels on the entire face, if you're lucky.
US law enforcement has to distinguish between 300 million civilians.
Of the two, I would expect Facebook to be more successful at identifying peolpe.
Actually, those jokes refer to a scene in Blade Runner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0
However, nowadays I am quite amazed by the picture quality of the average smartphone camera. So maybe something changed? Still, we're talking about better lenses/quality than smartphone photos. They may be sharp, but that comes from the advantage of being up close and coming in huge numbers.
And in addition to the lens, there's a lot of other expensive parts in a security system, that may need to be replaced or reconfigured because it is all integrated with the current low-res cameras. The bigger such a system is, the more expensive it becomes to change it all up when better tech has come around, even if the new parts are relatively cheap by themselves.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that most security cameras are not setup for capture of facial details (or license plates for that matter).
Most security cameras are setup for general overview shots, with around 10-20ppf (pixels per foot), whereas good detail starts at around 80ppf (meaning that you'd need 4x as many cameras in most areas to start to get something approaching an image quality that you could use for reliable facial recognition.
On top of that there is the storage factor. A "common" camera in a new deployment is a 1080p (2.1 Megapixel) camera. If this is set to record good quality images 24/7, it consumes about 60GB of storage per day. Various tricks like "record on motion", etc. can reduce this to maybe 10GB/day, at the risk of potentially missing key evidence or having gaps in the recording.
Lenses are important, but it's not that hard to find a lens with sufficient resolution for these cameras. A good lens rated at 2+ megapixels is around $70-$120 (depending on various factors), and a good outdoor camera (including lens) can be had for $500-$1200. Big price ranges, yes, but not to the point that the lenses are the limiting factor budget-wise.
It's more for confusing the lion running after the zebra, than an attempt hide from the lion.
Matching gait may be a more effective means of identification at a distance (and, in this and many other cases, at odd angles).
http://www.am.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sagawa/pdf/accv06.pdf (PDF)
I know of Lambda labs but I personally haven't use their solution post Face.com.
There are not enough events like this in open places that drive requirements for facial recognition use. Limited cases (airports, casinos, etc.) more frequently have cameras setup to get good straight-on high-res facial shots, but almost no typical outdoor area is covered that way.