Face Recognition Technology- Big Brother Has Arrived

Face Recognition Technolgy Is Next - Big Brother Arrives
{Editor's Note: (Feb 11, 2001) This story is dated March, 2000; almost a year ago. The recent videotaping and face recognition of people attending the SuperBowl should tell you something about the reality of Big Brother's electronic surveillance curtain descending across the American landscape. Notice the pride expressed by CEO Atick and Lark in their "work" and their duplicitous concerns at "attempts to balance individual privacy rights...". Sort of reminds me of the pride seen in the scientists working for IG Farben in German newsreels released after the war. They too seemed terribly proud of their speedy 'accomplishment' to develop Zyclon B gas- just in time for Adolf's Final Solution. I often wonder; what sort of world would it be without these shinning men of technology, driven by their lust for financial reward and "recognition"?

A Little Side Note: I assume that many ATMs have already installed retina scanning devices (as in Texas) and haven't bothered to tell their customers about it-yet. To play a little game, I always hold my 3 section wallet wide open in front of my forehead/eyes so the cameras looking at me through the ATM's mirror and glass partition can't get a bead on my eyes or enough of my facial features to make a positive ID. Just my little way of saying "Up Yours" to the Illuminati satanists and traitors behind these enslaving schemes. Try it, you might like it.]

The Boston Globe
Mar 1, 2000
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,150015975,00.html

Your face is on its way to becoming your "fingerprint" - for accessing ATM machines, entering the workplace, checking in at airline ticketing counters and even getting you into your own computer. Instead of punching in an easily forgotten series of letters or numbers, or digging through a thicket of plastic cards in your wallet to fish out an ID, you may soon turn toward a closed-circuit TV camera to get you into your workplace or gain access to an ATM machine.

In less than a second, a face-recognition program will scan your features while it electronically riffles through millions of stored "faceprints" to find the proper match and signal an OK - or a flashing warning sign that the face it's scanning isn't yours. What makes it all possible is artificial intelligence software that can extract from a video image the unique pattern of irregularities in the human face, and compare it with facial images stored in a data bank.

These programs mimic the way the human brain recognizes a face. That is, when a video camera captures a face, the programs electronically analyze the distances between various parts, or landmarks, of the face. Because every face has its own distinct pattern, the information enables the programs to distinguish one individual from another.

Facial landmarks are on distinctive structures, such as the eye sockets, the bridge of the nose or the cheekbones, explains Joseph Atick, a former mathematical physicist who heads Visionics Corp. of Jersey City, N.J., the maker of a leading face-recognition program called FaceIt.

The face has 60 landmarks, "but it only takes 14 to reconstruct" an individual's distinctive facial pattern, Atick said. While face-recognition methods may make it easier for banks and employers to identify you, they have another large and growing application that many find troubling: The programs, when used with automated closed-circuit TV, or CCTV, cameras and zoom lenses, become powerful surveillance tools.

Civil liberties activists worry that the technology will be used to monitor the movements of ordinary citizens and might be unfairly focused on political activists or minorities. "It has very frightening consequences that we have only begun to explore," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

For starters, he said, the technology could "make it impossible to maintain anonymity in society, so that even the most innocent of our movements and activities will be subject to tracking by the public and private sectors." In commercial use since 1997, the technology is used for spotting known card sharks in U.S. casinos, catching repeat shoplifters in England, and checking for known terrorists in international airports.

Both CCTV and face-recognition applications are already used by law enforcement officials in Britain, where high-tech surveillance by the government is much more accepted than in the United States. Officials in Newham, a borough of East London, have adopted Visionics' FaceIt system to check people in the streets against a database of known criminals. In one instance last December, the system was used to identify troublemakers hanging around a soccer stadium before a big match. And Newham officials say the system has significantly reduced crime there.

"We don't regard ourselves as 'Big Brother,' " said Bob Lack, who manages security technology for the East London borough of Newham, where the cameras watch an inner-city area. "We're more like a friendly uncle and aunt watching over you" to prevent muggings and robberies, he said.

Last week, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw visited Newham to see its anticrime surveillance in action as they promoted a new government initiative aimed at reducing crime in Britain over the next five years. The government has given Newham a grant to expand and upgrade its CCTV face-recognition system, said Tim Pidgeon, head of European business development for Visionics.

Atick, the Visionics president, said: "FaceIt attempts to balance individual privacy rights with society's larger expectation of public safety." And, he noted, face-recognition technology "is blind as a bat without a database behind it." Meaning: If you aren't a known lawbreaker, the system will just discard your image.

But critics aren't reassured and they are calling for regulation of high-tech surveillance. "The technology is developing at light speed, but the law that governs its use is not developed at all," said the ACLU's Steinhardt. Among his fears, he said, is cameras recording everyone present at a political rally - and identifying them by matching their captured images to, say, photos stored by departments of motor vehicles. "Once you create these databases you can expect they'll be used for a whole host of other purposes," Steinhardt said.

So far, high-tech surveillance - at least in the hands of governmental agencies - has found strong resistance in the United States. A proposal by the police department in Oakland, Calif., to install face-recognizing TV cameras in that city was withdrawn in 1997 after the ACLU and other critics protested. The city attorney, too, held that the system would violate constitutional privacy protections.

Still, US society seems to be more tolerant of surveillance technologies in the hands of the private sector than the government - the reverse of the situation in Britain. In several major casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere, for example, the technology has been installed to identify known card sharks and cheaters. Security personnel who watch casino play from an overhead "eye in the sky" previously had to flip through a book of photos if they thought they saw a cheater at work and wanted to identify him or her. But Jeff Jonas, president of Systems Research & Development in Las Vegas, said that the FaceIt face-recognition system can make the process much faster and more accurate; however, he added, it doesn't always work unless the person is in a certain position and is illuminated with strong lighting.

Face-recognition technology is just one branch of the science called biometrics - the identification of people by their unique features. Among its tools are those that measure hands, laser devices that scan the eye's iris, and devices that analyze voice patterns, scan the ear, and even record patterns of heat from a person's body. The FaceIt system grew out of mathematical research that Atick and others conducted at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The trick was to write programs that could read the landmarks or "nodal points" on a face. A major challenge, he said, was to adapt the software - which originally could be run only by $25,000 computers - to personal computers.
Along the way, Atick founded Visionics and headed development of its FaceIt system, which was launched in 1997.

A rival faceprint system developed at MIT's Media Lab is licensed to Viisage Technology in Littleton, Mass. Its program measures 128 different points on the face, according to Viisage president and chief executive officer Thomas Colatosti.

The Viisage system is being used at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut and in the state Department of Transitional Assistance to make certain people don't file under multiple names for welfare benefits, Colatosti said. The company also produces Massachusetts' drivers licenses with a photo ID, and is working on a pilot project involving ATM machines, he said.

In perhaps the most sweeping law-enforcement application of face recognition, the Visionics system is being used with a database in Florida that shares criminal and terrorist information with Interpol, the organization that coordinates international police operations.

"It's a fantastic concept," Atick said. He said an officer taking video photos live at a crime scene, for example, can send the images instantaneously to the Florida database that contains millions of photo records.

Richard Norton, executive director of the International Biometric Industry Association in Washington, said his group is well aware that the new technology can both invade the privacy of and protect people at the same time. "We are sensitive that people are going to say, 'What's the government really doing with this technology?' " Norton said. The industry, he said, is prepared "to tolerate intelligent regulation on this topic."

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