FBI Developing Software To Track, Sort People By Their Tattoos (gizmodo.com) 125
An anonymous reader writes: According to an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) investigation, the FBI is working to create software with government researchers that will allow law enforcement to sort and identify people based off their tattoos. The advanced tattoo recognition technology aims to determine "affiliation to gangs, sub-cultures, religious or ritualistic beliefs, or political ideology" and decipher tattoos that "contain intelligence, messages, meaning and motivation." Such research first originated at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2014, and used a database of prisoner's tattoos. The technology developed by NIST would "map connections between people with similarly themed tattoos or make inferences about people from their tattoos," the EFF reports. What some may view as even more unnerving is that the EFF investigation claims the researchers disregarded basic ethical government research standards, especially those relating specifically to prisoners. The obtained documents reveal NIST researchers sought permission from supervisors only after they had conducted their initial research. The EFF argues that a database that sorts citizens based on their tattoos may or may not reflect their religious or political beliefs, social affiliations, or interests.
late to the party (Score:4, Interesting)
They missed this in the summary (Score:2)
Not really all that mundane (Score:2)
Identifying marks and law enforcement formally sorting you by your political and religious ideologies for making decisions about your guilt, innocence, suspect nature, surveillance, search, and seizure, however, isn't really old school at all. Not so publicly, anyway.
I find the whole thing very interesting. Apparently, the legal system can get away with considerably more than I thought it could.
Live and learn, I suppose.
So, how about those Kardashians?
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Law enforcement has been interested in political and religious ideologies (or lack of them in the case of religious) for as long as I've been paying attention. Depending on the country, if you lean left/right and whether you follow the established religion, along with how much money/power you have has always figured in to how much attention law enforcement gives you. At least most countries have been more up front about it then America where the propaganda has taught people that they're the free-est people
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Law enforcement don't make decisions about guilt or innocence. Did you sleep through Civics 101?
Re: Not really all that mundane (Score:1)
Sure they do. They just don't say it in so many words. Getting it to stick is another matter.
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Who needs proof when the process is:
o Throw as many charges as possible at the victim
o If actually guilty, main charge sticks, plea bargain others off
o If not guilty, main charge dropped if you plea bargain to lesser thing
o or, go to court, be tried by (annoyed) judge, guilty of lesser thing and max penalty unless apply $$$
o or, go to court, be tried by (REALLY annoyed) judge + and jury, take chance with Gaussian landings on your Kardashian-fed empaneled, ignorant of their rights and powers
Speaking as someo
Re:Not really all that mundane (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideally, no. In point of fact, sad to say, they do it all the time. And most of the time, the courts go along without significant demur.
No. I have a deep legal background as well. But knowing all three of how it's supposed to work, how they say it works, and how it actually works tends to color what I say. Here, we're talking about how it's supposed to work, and how they say it works, both of which fail to correlate well with how it actually works.
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My buddy had a company in the 2000s which specialized, in part, in this type of tracking. If you recall a story from 2008 when ~29000 or so sex offenders' accounts were banned from MySpace (my, how times have changed), resulting in a number of arrests, his technology helped.
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Even after this story aired, his company tried to offer their services to Facebook and were met with a resounding "No." At the time, they had barely opened their doors to non-students (or were, perhaps, just about to effect that change) and had no real concern regarding sex offenders or criminals.
An ounce of prevention, they say...
Re:late to the party trivia (Score:1)
Excellent (Score:3)
Finally a chance to put my fake tattoo system into production.
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You could also do make-up based tattoo hiding in the downtime.
Re:are fbi badges coprighted? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd go with a QR code that's a SQL string ala Lit'l Bobby Tables.
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+! Funny
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Or that magic dot pattern that (supposedly) prevents photocopying banknotes.
Re: are fbi badges coprighted? (Score:2)
Can I get a free fence? (Score:1)
Re: Facial tattoes (Score:2)
The little darlings certainly look different and special to me. "It's a tribal thing...I have tribal stuff on my face". Yes you do, don't you. I look forward to seeing you hang around train stations in about 15 years begging for spare change when you finally give up at attempting to find a job"
Fuck FBI (Score:2, Insightful)
The advanced tattoo recognition technology aims to determine "affiliation to gangs, sub-cultures, religious or ritualistic beliefs, or political ideology"
Yeah, cuz that's any of their business.
Re:Fuck FBI (Score:4, Interesting)
Tattoo's are the new finger prints. Thank you for making Law Enforcement's job easier by self-identifying.
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Tattoos are less unique than fingerprints, and much easier to change. Lots prior people have similar generic Celtic designs, for example.
I'm more worried about facial recognition.
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A tattoo could confuse it :)
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Presumably you mean "lots of". No idea about "prior". It's a senior monk - like an abbot - but that doesn't fit the sentence.
Perhaps you could ask someone to translate it into English?
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By PAYING someone to put a tattoo on a part of your body that is fully visible while walking around it public, you MADE it everyone's business.
That won't be useful much longer (Score:2)
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Tat location is analyzed, too.
Read a sci-fi book once where a (shadow) government (the bad guys) has a massive system that watched all public cameras and used facial recognition and other techniques, and license plates and car styles, on roads, to essentially create a 100% live, up to date database on where everyone was. They even used stuff that would be trivial nowadays, like WiFi and Bluetooth signals-qua-radar to track positions loosely inside buildings, with some AI guesswork on which floors and rooms
Neck tattoo (Score:1)
Any girl with tattoos on her neck is a slut. Trust me. If you see a girl with a neck tattoo, you can get in her pants no problem.
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Unless she's owned by a MSL gang.
Then you'd be dead if you got into her pants.
I'm gonna get inked (Score:2)
"NOT SURE" (without the quotes) around my wrist. Yup.
(no. not really. If / when I do get inked, it'll be the Warner Bros. and their sister Dot. And it won't be where an FBI camera can see it.)
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"NOT SURE" in barcode around my wrist.
The preview button, it did not save me!
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That's totally insaney.
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Should I also have the show's namey inked in?
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No. Anybody who doesn't know the name of the show isn't worth knowing.
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No. Anybody who doesn't know the name of the show isn't worth knowing.
Truer words have seldom been spoken.
Flamiel!
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Be brave. Get "DO NOT RESUSCITATE" tattooed on your chest.
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Heh, you have no idea how close to the mark you are. I had a CABG done TWICE in one night. Left quite a mark.
I intend to get a zipper inked around the scar, and the zipper pull could read "DNR" or "Do Not Resuscitate"
Probably a very 1930's cartoony zipper with a teardrop-shaped pull with DNR would work.
But that won't mean squat until I put it on paper. Which I will. Someday.
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Re:I'm gonna get inked (Score:4, Interesting)
What about the Recycle symbol?
My license already says to use my body for science, but hey, that is a cool idea!
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Re:I'm gonna get inked (Score:5, Funny)
No user serviceable parts inside.
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No user serviceable parts inside.
Thanks for the laugh, that's great! So many possibilities for gallows humor with this scar.
Re: I'm gonna get inked (Score:2)
And now for my next trick (Score:5, Interesting)
tats with UV ink (bonus if it requires certain bands within the UV range)
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I have tats that no EM frequencies can see, UV or otherwise.
They're all over my body.
I'm not gonna lie (Score:5, Funny)
I sort people by their tattoos all the time. If you have a cute tramp stamp on your hip, like a butterfly or a unicorn, you go to the head of the line. If you've got "Born To Raise Hell" blazoned across your back, you go to the end of the line.
If you have a tattoo of the face of any human, living or dead, anywhere on your body, please step out of line and walk into the sea, because no matter what you think, it doesn't look like them one bit. Instead, it looks like Cliff Howard (unless it's supposed to be a tattoo of Cliff Howard, in which case it looks like a smeared Bazooka Joe).
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"Cute tramp stamp" is an oxymoron.
Re:I'm not gonna lie (Score:4, Funny)
It's OK, I've had all my shots.
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I'm going to take a guess and say there will be a lot of hits for this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.google.com.mx/sear... [google.com.mx]
Oedipus, Schmedipus!
I still love ya, Mom!
-From the late Robin Williams' stand-up routine.
Strat
Individualism (Score:2, Funny)
I'm confused. How can this possibly work when every tattoo is an artistic expression of the bearer's unique, individual personality and life story?
George Carlin said it long ago... (Score:1)
Um, they basically did this on the Shield. (Score:1)
They did this on the TV show The Shield well over a decade ago. Wait until the people who came up with this find out about The Wire.
I wonder what they'd make of Tom Dodge. (Score:2)
"Welcome Aboard"
He did it to get over the "Murmansk Brushing Incident"
If the FBI can see *that* particular tat... we're in deeper shit than we thought.
This story is flak (Score:1)
Distracting from the real story: facial recognition
Ya well ... (Score:2)
Won't work on my tats, that's for sure! (Score:2)
He's in a Gang Called "Mother" (Score:2)
It's a big gang.
BTW, they want to see your junk, too.
Even Simpler Solution (Score:1)
Better yet, someone make the police shrouds from A Scanner Darkly.
Of course these ideas will only work until law "enforcement" come up with biomechanical movement analysis to figure out who you are based on how you move.
Re: Even Simpler Solution (Score:2)
Political ideology? (Score:1)
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Cognitive bias, he only remembers ones that enforce his belief, and also many people have hidden tattoos.
There is also potential that he never stopped a person without a tattoo that wasn't a criminal.
Your dad only stopped criminals, good luck.
Re: As my father who was a cop for twenty-five yea (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't choose to be black.
People choose to have tattoos,
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People don't choose to be black.
I did, but it didn't work.
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Your dad is an idiot for not recognizing his cognitive bias, and so are you for not recognizing the flaw in his logic yourself.
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This. I work IT for a city, and someone thought it was a bug in our system that all of our inmates had tattoos. We did a spot check of about 5% of the inmates, and found that they all had tattoos.