Afghanistan Biometric Data Given To US 108
wisebabo writes "I just noticed that not only are all Afghans going to have their biometric data (fingerprints and iris scans) recorded but the government plans to share it with the U.S. From the article: 'Gathering the data does not stop at Afghanistan's borders, however, since the military shares all of the biometrics it collects with the United States Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security through interconnected databases.' Talk about 'know thine enemy' (or I guess, for now, friend). Does this foretell the near future when the U.S. govt. (and by extension, Chinese hackers) have the biometrics of almost everyone alive?"
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papers comrade is what we do in the USA as well, but we call it "credit cards affiliates" and "facebook".
Wot? They don't already? (Score:3)
There should be an investigation. With the DHS budget they should have this already.
Re:Wot? They don't already? (Score:5, Funny)
With the huge shitload of money you guys have buried there, every Afghan should be living in a two-story family house with cable TV, barbecue, walled garden and a Hummer in the driveway.
But hey, you're paying. You tell where it's spent.
A Victory for Freedom Abroad! (Score:1)
USA! USA! USA!
A Victory for Freedom Abroad!
Missed the juicy part of the article (Score:5, Informative)
A reporter from The New York Times, an American of Norwegian rather than Afghan extraction, voluntarily submitted to a test screening with the B.A.T. system. After his fingerprints and iris scans were entered into the B.A.T.’s armored laptop, an unexpected “hit” popped up on the screen, along with the photograph of a heavily bearded Afghan.
The “hit” identified the reporter as “Haji Daro Shar Mohammed,” who is on terrorist Watch List 4, with this note: “Deny Access, Do Not Hire, Subject Poses a Threat.”
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Re:Missed the juicy part of the article (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds to me like the system worked - there was a secondary verification of using a photograph, which would have cleared the person who got the false positive.
The problem is that I don't think this reporter of "American Norwegian" descent looked anything even remotely like the match suggested. The real deal is when using it to pick out natives and then having a system which does low odds "best guesses" sounds retarded; especially if it gives you helpful hints to treat people with extreme prejudice.
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Re:Missed the juicy part of the article (Score:4, Insightful)
The face is just there for secondary verification. In a false fingerprint match, you would expect the fingerprints to be similar, but not the faces.
His point is that a face match is great for secondary verification if the people are of obviously different races or genders, but if an American soldier is comparing a heavily bearded Afghani man to to the picture of a different heavily bearded Afghani man it may not work so well.
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Besides, people have been renditioned and tortured based on a phonetic name match alone.
Hopefully if this system displays a picture it might cut down on misidentification ("Well, this short pudgy guy doesn't look anything like the tall terrorist with chiseled features we're looking for, maybe we have the wrong guy?").
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The poor fingerprints are part of the system too.. There's no point building a great heuristic for a shitty database.
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But then you really need to temper how much you actually use this tool ... saying there's a "30% chance someone is a known terrorist" (for example) means you have to use that as merely a broad level of screening.
You simply can't go around treating this system if it's absolutely reliable if
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Re:Missed the juicy part of the article (Score:4, Interesting)
This way any agent of the US wanting to get rid of someone unwanted will just use his terrorist-check-rights and force you at gunpoint to have your fingers scanned. It then uses an "what's your arab-terrorist-alias generator" and generates a false positive, allowing said officer to shoot you directly as you pose a threat to the Free World(tm), said officer then goes through the standardized "blame a technical glitch" whitewash procedure.
It's a brilliant fascist system. Of course we need to take it a step further and remove the do not fly list and whatever lists that numbers those to look out for, because hey, there's so many terrorists that it's hard to keep track. We should instead create a not-a-terrorist-list for the rich and their friends and implement prison wages for the rest of the population, not that there would be any particularly noticable difference
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We should instead create a not-a-terrorist-list for the rich and their friends
Makes sense; computer security is moving from a blacklist model to a whitelist one, so why not real-world security? Create a government certification process for people, much like the Apple review process for the App Store (TM, copyright all rights reserved, patent pending), and problem solved!
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FYI: I know that system and it relies on extremely low thresholds because of the fact the Afghan data is so terrible. SO, first of all, I can be 99.9% sure his iris scan had nothing to do with the "hit" (Iris is scary accurate) and also that if you look at the match score for fingerprint it was probably very low. Unlike what they show in the movies/TV biometric "identification" systems rarely return a single "hit"... they return a candidate list with attached scores. It is your responsibility to determin
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A reporter from The New York Times, an American of Norwegian rather than Afghan extraction, voluntarily submitted to a test screening with the B.A.T. system. After his fingerprints and iris scans were entered into the B.A.T.’s armored laptop, an unexpected “hit” popped up on the screen, along with the photograph of a heavily bearded Afghan.
The “hit” identified the reporter as “Haji Daro Shar Mohammed,” who is on terrorist Watch List 4, with this note: “Deny Ac
Best friends forever! (Score:4, Funny)
Friends? Does that mean that the US shares biometric data on all US citizens with Afghanistan? Aw how adorable!
The US doesn't have friends. It has friendos.
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It's the gift that keeps giving back.
Re:Wrong Relationship (Score:5, Informative)
The US doesn't have "friends", it has "client states" and "potential enemies". When a state switches from one to the other depends on the current economic state in the US. Look at Iraq, at one point Saddam Hussein was a great friend of the US, then he threatened the US oil supply and all that was out the window :P
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Right, all that oil coming from the Middle East, especially Iraq, is crucial to the US. Perhaps you should check your numbers and your understanding of IR theory before writing--lots of info out there on this. Suggest starting with "neo-con" and "Bush." Education is the key to freedom and will save you from idiot posts.
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Look at Iraq, at one point Saddam Hussein was a great friend of the US, then he threatened the US oil supply and all that was out the window :P
To roughly paraphrase a quote I heard on Slashdot:
"Saddam once threatened to trade oil in Euros instead of US dollars. 6 months later, he was hiding in a hole in the ground while his country burned down around him."
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exactly. Even UK and most of other NATO countries were kindly requested to submit the fingerprints of their citizens; of course without getting such a data on US citizens.
Viva Brazil, who dared to have symmetry in treating US citizens just as US treats theirs
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Is that like frenemies?
The new US motto (Score:1)
" All your base are belong to us " !
Re:The new US motto (Score:4, Funny)
FTFY
I hope so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this foretell the near future when the U.S. govt. (and by extension, Chinese hackers) have the biometrics of almost everyone alive?"
I hope so, this would be doubleplusgood. Otherwise, how else can be catch and punish Goldstein?
1984 in T-minus 3...2....1 (Score:2, Interesting)
Now we just need some sacharine, hyperbolic "first they came for..." parodies, then a few posters to angrily dismiss any voices of moderation on grounds that the very first
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Doubleplusone boring! RobinEggs wants to wait till it's too late, before we do anything about it. Let the government surround you and hold a gun to your head, but they're not doing anything wrong until they pull the trigger!
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Hey! You are right! People have complained about totalitarianism and population surveillance before!
Ok guys it's over, let's stop caring for the safeguards of our freedom, it's not IN any more!
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GP's point is not that complaints about totalitarianism are stupid. It's that 1984 (and other similar works) are often inappropriately brought up in the context, where the actual facts do not bear anything whatsoever in common with 1984.
Basically, it's equivalent to writing "Oh, I know! It's just like Hitler!" in every story about every privacy violation, no matter how small.
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I cared about totalitarianism and population surveillance before it was cool. *flips scarf*
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there is no such bullshit exist as you speak of. in socialism, the people own the government, directly. even in the worse implemented attempts like ussr, there were more local and regional assemblies with representatives elected from among those locales than united states had ever had in its history. whatever happened, it happened through people's votes. it was exploitable, and it was exploited, yes.
but at least, peopl
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Ummm ... really? Pol Pot? Mao Tse Tung? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin?
Granted, these are communists in some cases ... but there has always been an aspect of the "inspired" leaders imposing this on people "for their own good", and then essentially ram it down their throats (or up another orifice).
Or, were told that.
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Because you incorrectly assert that I believe the right wing propaganda, or that I haven't read up on this stuff. I've read both ends of the spectrum, and while I don't hold any degrees on the topic, I consider myself to be somewhat informed. I also don't think either side is universally "right" on all points.
So far you've made a couple of d
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Because you incorrectly assert that I believe the right wing propaganda
no, its because you are parroting right wing propaganda. what you think as 'not right wing' in usa, is right of right everywhere else in the world in regard to political spectrum. so, you have been peddling right wing propaganda you believe to be freedom. not to mention calling yourself libertarian - a politically correct renaming of republican.
you are right wing. tell me why i should spare time in attempting to correct the distortion american political climate caused in regard to right/left balance in y
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Yawn. So, I'm forced to conclude you're an idiot who feels he has some special knowledge he's not willing to share with the world -- and even then only if you can define the terms of reference.
I don't need to convince you to share this with me ... but I will basically now say that you have provided nothing to support your opinion, that you're mostly full of shit, and that other than some vague and indirect assertions, you have yet to actually say anything of substance.
Have a nice day there skippy.
For the r
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Yawn. So, I'm forced to conclude you're an idiot
ok then. youre just another right wing nutjob. just scram.
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The sheer fallacy of that statement boggles the mind.
Have a nice day.
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Somebody else not totally ruined might read it.
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USSR? Elected? Please tell me this is a joke.
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USSR? Elected? Please tell me this is a joke.
The Constitution of the USSR was one of the most progressive ever, even moreso than the US constitution. Go read it, it will open your eyes. But a consitution is just a piece of paper, so while the ideals were very good, the implementation shall we say sucked hard. In the US the consitution is for all intents and purposes a piece of paper the politicians use to dry their asses with. And you can see the effects of this policy all around you.
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Sure they had elections, but they didn't have a multi-party system. But as U.S. politics has demonstrated, having two or more parties tends to cause stupidities where party X sabotages decision A just because they want to be against what party Y is for. With a single party you avoid that. However without opposition the ruling party becomes mired in dogma instead of adapting to change...
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Early Soviets (councils) were actually democratically elected, albeit with a system that heavily over-represented cities (where the majority were proletarians) over countryside (where the majority were peasants). The system degenerated over time, and was pretty much completely non-functioning by the time Stalin took over.
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It's worth noting that Orwell himself was also a socialist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Political_views [wikipedia.org]
Dont worry. (Score:3)
Both ways? (Score:1)
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Re:Both ways? (Score:4, Funny)
The Afghans are not sharing *all* of the data they have, and the system is in place because the Afghans want it. If they didn't want it, they could force the US to remove it.
That's the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot this month.
TSA's PLDB (Score:1)
>> (and by extension, Chinese hackers)
Once the Chinese get a hold of the TSA's PLDB information (Penis Length Data Base) on every American male, they'll just give up the New Cold War out of pure embarrassment.
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...or sympathy
Use of biometrics (Score:2)
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I don't have a particular scenario in mind. But I am concerned that this type on information could be used to track or identify me if I were to ever find myself in the position of resisting the government. Law enforcement of various flavors have a history of spying on and disrupting legitimate political protest. Political, environmental, and civil rights activists have been spied on, harassed and even killed by law enforcement trying to preserve the status quo. And now that being labeled a Terrorist get
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Thanks editors! (Score:2)
For posting this story, I thought it got lost in the shuffle (I don't understand the "recent" ratings system at all).
I just wanted to mention, India is also in the process of obtaining biometric data for all of its 1.2 Billion(!) citizens.
Will the U.S. get access to that? With or without the Indian govt.'s permission? (and how long until hackers get ALL of the data?)
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In India everyone has your data.
This isn't *obviously* bad. (Score:2)
As all the cop shows prove, biometrics can just as easily rule you out as rule you in. An iris scan in an airport sounds a lot better to me than the crap the TSA uses these days, or a couple of years in Gitmo while they try to sort out their !@#$.
The tech's innocent and benign. We ought to be watching what's being done with it.
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Iris scan is a joke right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_recognition#Security_considerations [wikipedia.org]
Intelligence just can't win (Score:5, Interesting)
Between the conservatives who claim we've still not gone far enough in fighting terror and the liberals who scream at any infinitesimal possibility of privacy violations but still want a potent intelligence apparatus - and the general public's simultaneous sympathy for both sides - it's impossible to win. The safe operating widths of the intelligence community (on some hypothetical number line ranging from "knows everything about everybody in real time" to "won't so much as question a guy carrying dynamite up the Capitol steps without first consulting the Human Rights Commission and the ACLU") are almost always measured in negative numbers, and large ones at that.
I mean seriously. Many liberals and libertarians are demanding surveillance policies so dense and cautious that no intelligence organization could reasonably decide on manpower and human judgment alone whether to stop a possibly dangerous person from entering the country until well after he's either blown up a building or completed his perfectly innocuous two-week business trip, whichever comes later. And, as in the reaction to this story, God help them if they use computers, networking, and/or any persistent databases to speed up that decision!
And if it's not the liberals and libertarians bitching about even the slightest possibility of privacy violations, it's the conservatives who say we might as well erect a thirty foot electrified fence around the entire nation and fire mortars at everyone who approaches wearing more than a see-through jockstrap and an implanted, US-made chip containing their passport, complete encrypted biometric profile, and HD-video of their entire life up to the moment they walked into view of the mortar teams.
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Yes ... that's why there was such an outcry that the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS didn't warn Norway about Anders Breivik and his doings.
Same with the car bomb in Stockholm in late 2010.
And don't get me started on how Spain crucified every single American ever so slightly connected with the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS over their failure to sto
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Since you asked (well, didn't ask really, but wasted six lines ranting about your pure conjecture on a tangential topic), I only meant that Americans expect US intelligence to catch credible th
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If no one voiced concerns over privacy issues, complained about security forces overstepping the bounds that have been set in law etc, then we would have no privacy whatsoever. As it is the War on Privacy is going fairly well for most intelligence agencies I think. Sure, they occasionally get brought up short over an issue here or there, but there's lots of evidence to indicate that whenever possible law enforcement agencies, government agencies and of course corporations (who have in some cases made destro
wearing out our welcome (Score:2)
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I don't know enough history to even hazard a guess at whether Westerners or Soviets were more welcome, in general, worldwide. But you could take off the Westerners rose-colored glasses for a minute and realize that the Soviets weren't necessarily the crazed, universally despised whackjobs you see in Bond movies. Stalin, yes. The entire Soviet Union, p
Ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
"...Does this foretell the near future when the U.S. govt. (and by extension, Chinese hackers) have the biometrics of almost everyone alive?"
Well, for starters, I find it hilarious that you think this doesn't go on already, sanctioned or not.
And the "by extension" comment regarding hackers? C'mon now, you're talking to Slashdot, not CNN here. Hacking (or cracking) has been and always will be the fallacy of ANY online or offline electronic resource, no matter who owns it or what it contains. That's not exactly "by extension" but more like by inherent design, and it's certainly not limited to "Chinese hackers".
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j00 w1n 1 (one) internets!
Surrender your internets at the border control station, please.