How Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Spy on Thousands | Hacker News Reader

How Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Spy on Thousands

noisey.vice.com

99 pointsfizl24 comments

I've been trying to beat this drum for a long time, sometimes on this very forum.

Face and gait recognition really is the scariest thing going on these days. I don't like the NSA snorting all the phone calls and the emails, either, but there are reasonable countermeasures.

To avoid this shit, you can't go anywhere, ever, unless you're in disguise and you breakdance/shuffle down the street.

It's a short jump from license plate recognition to face/gait recognition. Sure, the software isn't as good yet as it is with license plates (near perfect), but everybody on this website knows it will get there. And 'they' will be able to do all the same things they can do with license plates.

Not only track where you are and whether you go to this place or that place; they can decide ten years from now to find out where you went over the past decade.

And, they don't need a black budget and the complicity of major corporations to do it. In this case, they can be the Sausalito police, Starbucks, or your local shopping mall.

> To avoid this shit, you can't go anywhere, ever, unless you're in disguise and you breakdance/shuffle down the street.

Make no mistake: in a world with that breed of surveillance, not going anywhere or breakdancing down the street in disguise will be guaranteed to flag you as "interesting" and a good candidate for "special" investigation.

And that's a feature.

This is happening in NYC too. Over the past couple years, they've installed cameras just past each subway turnstile which are perfectly positioned to capture an image similar to the one shown in this document. Link that data with the swipe-data from your metrocard, which is more-times-than-not associated with a credit card, and you've got a pretty good way to not only pair a face with a name, but also follow somebody around the underground. Additionally, subway stations are gradually adding cell service, providing additional vectors for use in monitoring using Stingray or some other tracking technology.

What's astounding to me here is not that they're doing this kind of surveillance, but that they uploaded everything to an unsecured FTP server.

That's really the galling bit, isn't it? There's a lot of [imho] justified outrage about the liberties taken by government enforcement groups, but that they also seem to be lousy at it is unsettling. On the one hand the carelessness is worrying, but on the other I feel reassured they'll never get their act together well enough for a full MiniLove. There's a terrifying potential for finesse in oppressive targeting - and reports tell of it happening - but it seems to botch and backfire enough to keep it public and exposed. At least, some industrious reporter or watchdog hacker will spot it and publicize it.

So perhaps we just need to get better at exploiting that propensity to screw up. Though it's a bit worrying incompetence is one of our checks and balances on the government.

^ this. so now we know the govt may not be on top of it enough to really utilize this info, but it is all out there..and when these activities get privatized, there will be a larger cause for concern

What makes you think private companies aren't already doing this? I was making a license plate tracker back in '97 by myself with no budget.

How did that turn out?

The OCR was not quite up to snuff or the cameras, but it would work in ideal conditions (they had to come to a complete stop, full daylight etc.). I had no real reason to do it other than I thought it could be done.

If you want to talk about private companies already conducting appalling and creepy levels of tracking, look no further than downtown Palo Alto - Palantir has got you covered.

Shhh! They're listening!

Once facial recognition technology is deployed on a large scale, it can be leveraged in some scary ways.

First, when it's tied into a network of surveillance cameras, the cameras become useful for tracking a person rather than a location. They could easily search for any video caught of you, forever.

Second, when you have a network of cameras you can track everyone's location at a very fine resolution, orders of magnitude better than tracking via cell phone towers. (And the cell phone tower data can be used to help with facial recognition since you can narrow down candidates of who might be in the photo.)

Third, once you're tracking locations in a network, the accuracy becomes pretty much 100% since you just need to match an unknown person once and then you can propagate their identity as they move around.

"Spy" on people at a public event where there are thousands of people taking pictures and posting it online. Also, it was IBM doing the test, the BPD just let them run the test and evaluated it for the future. BPD is not using this system yet as it not yet released by IBM.

> "Spy" on people at a public event where there are thousands of people taking pictures and posting it online.

The people in those pictures are not being identified, and it's not being done by a law enforcement agency (or being considered as an option by a law enforcement agency).

Seems to rely heavily on the following source, including subsequent parts of an ongoing series of articles:

http://digboston.com/boston-news-opinions/2014/08/boston-tro...

> We really need to get a handle on what exactly government agencies are doing. Not just thinking about it, but actually acting on public concerns about how this technology is going to be used against us, and actually passing laws that restrict some of the ways.

Ever since the ruling shooting videos in public is a constitutional right is going to make this extremely difficult. Especially so when you consider human ability to recognize people has always existed meaning this is only a more efficient version of what police/private businesses can already do.

Sounds like always wearing sunglasses when in public should be a basic measure of getting privacy from the government.

Creepy shit.

Supposedly some facial recognition systems are designed with things like that in mind. They are meant to be invariant to hair style, sun glasses, facial hair, etc. If they weren't they would be less useful.

What about when they break in to your house at midnight, photograph and kidnap your children then threaten and entice them to spy on one another? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5AkFlAeCHE

What about then "they" aren't even human!? /s

> Sounds like always wearing sunglasses when in public should be a basic measure of getting privacy from the government

I've heard about that solution, but I wonder if it really works. For example, using just the shape of your sunglasses and the shape of your chin, probably you could be uniquely tracked if not identified. To identify you, other physical features may work (nose, chin, gait, etc.).

Biometric ear recognition. Google it, there's plenty of research in this area.

See also: CV Dazzle, a fashion trend designed to foil face detectors like Viola Jones (which is pretty easy to foil) or face recognition algorithms (which are all horrible wrt occlusion these days): http://cvdazzle.com/

Liberty or security. Choose one.

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