German Art Activists Get Passport Using Digitally Altered Photo of Two Women Merged Together (vice.com) 129
An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, an activist from the German art collective Peng! walked into her local government office in Berlin and applied for a new passport. "I probably have broken the law," the woman, a chemist living in the Western Saxony region, told Motherboard, "but our lawyers don't know which one." The woman applied for a passport using a photo of two separate people. Using specialized software created by Peng!, the collective merged the facial vectors from two different faces from two different images into one. Billie Hoffman (a pseudonym used by everyone in the Peng! Collective when talking to journalists), she told me how easy the whole process was: "Officials didn't mention fraud at any point." Hoffman's passport application was approved, and now she has an official German passport using the digitally altered photo. The photo is half her, half Federica Mogherini, an Italian politician who is the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. "The software calculated an authentic average of the faces and that's it," Hoffmann recalls.
Hoffman's passport is part of an artwork called "Mask ID," a campaign that's encouraging ordinary citizens to "flood government databases with misinformation" and disrupt mass surveillance programs. Ironically, the project is funded by the Bundeskulturstiftung, the German Federal cultural fund, part one was recently on show in Hamburg accompanied by a photo booth where anyone could upload their image and create their own distorted passport picture in an attempt to confuse government surveillance and circumnavigate facial recognition software. "Passports are tools of oppression" another member of the collective who declined to give me their real name told me.
Hoffman's passport is part of an artwork called "Mask ID," a campaign that's encouraging ordinary citizens to "flood government databases with misinformation" and disrupt mass surveillance programs. Ironically, the project is funded by the Bundeskulturstiftung, the German Federal cultural fund, part one was recently on show in Hamburg accompanied by a photo booth where anyone could upload their image and create their own distorted passport picture in an attempt to confuse government surveillance and circumnavigate facial recognition software. "Passports are tools of oppression" another member of the collective who declined to give me their real name told me.
Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany (Score:4, Insightful)
It's literally all fun and games until someone literally gets hurt ... again ...
Border control will come to matter to you at some point, but it might be too late :(
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Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the idea that passports are 'tools of oppression' is the problem.
Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany (Score:4, Interesting)
Passports in and of themselves are not.
Databases of faces (Passport, Driver's License, Student ID, etc) and ubiquitous facial recognition are more and more frequently being used as tools of oppression.
An art project/political statement to populate these databases with junk data is a valid form of protest.
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The question is, why do politicians control it (or anything, for that matter) as they appear to have no abilities other than those involved in persuading others.
Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's the problem: you go outside, dance around each night, and then when it rains 2 weeks later you claim your rain dance made it rain.
It's infeasible to monitor an entire border; and then people go under it anyway. Talk about terrorists, drug cartels, and other well-funded and heavily-organized threats goes hand-in-hand with apprehending poor women fleeing from a creditor who wants to gangrape them to death and sell their children into sex slavery while the well-funded insurgents bypass all your sec
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Not really.
Current data suggests that America's increased border control in the early 1990s resulted in an increase of 5.8 million resident unauthorized immigrants by 2010, since undocumented migrant workers were coming and going, but then decided to come and stay due to the difficulty and danger of crossing. The numbers piled up.
More to the point, I'm suggesting that the harmless and banal are impeded by border controls, while the dangerous and destructive are merely inconvenienced. Some speculate th
Re:Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did China build the Great Wall? It didn't 100% keep the Mongols out - the just climbed the wall. But their horses didn't, and it limited the amount of loot that could carry back with them after a raid.
Physical security, like digital security, isn't about "all or nothing". Making it harder makes it harder. It's harder to walk across a desert than to drive.
Meh, it's mostly symbolic anyway, and what people are actually arguing about is whether they like the symbolism. Why not just say "globalism is good; no borders" instead of pretending your objection is to the effectiveness of the wall?
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Yes. It's economics.
If it's not worth the effort, even the perceived effort, for the payoff, even the perceived payoff, it won't be done.
Locks don't keep the honest and law-abiding out, they discourage the criminals and prevent the less competent ones.
There is no absolute security for virtually anything. Just a sufficient amount to make the risk acceptable. And less security is needed when the value of the protected asset is less, or when recovery or replacement is cheap enough.
Re: Happy New Year, artsy ladies of Germany (Score:2)
It limited what they took out... so they stole China instead.
Well, actually, it didn't limit them at all. The guards had horses, for a start.
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Why did China build the Great Wall? It didn't 100% keep the Mongols out - the just climbed the wall.
More specifically they bribed a guard to open the gate.
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China built the Great Wall to stop large military forces, not small and scattered refugees and smugglers. It turns out walls and moats place major invading forces at a significant strategic disadvantage, with a hobbled concentrated force facing a large and mobile concentrated force; whereas scattered individuals are more-difficult to notice, and lower-throughput entries can use constricted covert means like tunnels.
Border control is not military defense, and we're not building a wall to keep 45,000 Mexi
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we're not building a wall to keep 45,000 Mexicans from marching into Texas with guns and tanks and brigadier generals.
There are still 45,000 coming through though, probably each month. How is that not an invasion again? Tanks and generals are not needed now, as 20-30 million people have just walked in without any resistance. We've already taken "open borders" to a historically unprecedented extreme, and I'm for any attempt to control the border even a symbolic one.
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Let's try this again.
You put up a piece of 10mm hardware cloth at the window to stop things coming into your basement. That's great: no more rodents, leaves, or driftwood.
Problem: the "things coming into your basement" weren't rodents, leaves, or driftwood; it was water. Hardware cloth doesn't stop water.
These larger, more-durable physical barriers and sparse policing are good at delaying large, organized invading forces which may try to enter at one to three points simultaneously and cannot sustai
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What bullshit. Fewer people will come across a wall. It won't stop everyone, but it will stop some. "Some" is a good start.
But you don't care anyhow, you object to the concept of border enforcement, right?
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Why did China build the Great Wall? It didn't 100% keep the Mongols out - the just climbed the wall. But their horses didn't, and it limited the amount of loot that could carry back with them after a raid.
Why did China build the Great Wall? To keep military forces out.
Why does Trump want to build a wall? Drug trafficking, murderers, and terrorists, so he claims.
It won't stop everyone; it will stop some, mostly people who don't make the new, more dangerous route through the desert in search of a better life. It will patently not slow down the drug cartels and the terrorists.
Why are we talking about building a wall? What do we want to accomplish? It doesn't protect the nation, so it's a waste of res
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Embrace the healing power of "and". We build the wall and we do the other things to close the border and remove 30 million illegal aliens from the US.
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No, you don't.
You have 100 people. It takes 25 to build and maintain a wall. You build a wall and do something else with 75 other people.
Sounds great?
It takes 75 people to operate your regular police force, 25 people to build a wall, and 25 people to perform advanced intelligence and threat tracking and predictive mobilization.
So you can:
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Wall's only a few billion, trivial compared to the economic effect of 30 million people (whether you think that's positive or negative). When you're determined to oppose something, you can always come up with a reason, but the wall is worth it just for the symbolism.
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trivial compared to the economic effect of 30 million people (whether you think that's positive or negative).
For certain. My position on the blunt economics of non-dangerous immigrant labor is neutral: they come in, they work, they integrate with the economy. The labor force grows faster when jobs are more available, and a falling unemployment rate and low unemployment numbers corroborate the suggestion that resident immigrant labor is not impacting the economy.
Each new inflow does compete for jobs; that's a more-complex consideration, since it's not actually efficient (or possible) to slot 100% of job-seeki
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It's more that something is about 0% successful against the problem, and minimally successful against a non-problem.
Think about spending $50 million per year per single violent drug cartel member crossing stopped, while refugees and illegal farm laborers get picked up frequently--yet they still keep coming, and you don't really end up reducing the net flow of harmless illegals into the nation. Meanwhile the violent drug cartels are consolidating, since it takes bigger resources to get around these contro
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Indeed there are sonograpic equipment combos that find tunnels. This isn't about tunnels. It's about failure to acknowledge that countries are often built on the backs of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees, and until recently, slaves. Cheap labor has its value.
The farce is "Build The Wall" believing that other people will suddenly stop their lifestyles and go back to work, because that's how John Calvin envisioned the world. Doesn't work that way.
There are tunnels from Israel to Egypt, Mexico to the USA, Be
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Didn't say anything like that. Can I call you a nutjob, too?
Slavery still exists.... we call it a job at Amazon, these days.
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Hate to break it to you, but that is still true even today.
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As mentioned, we agree. The terminology is just different.
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Shh, we just need to understand their culture.
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Slavery exists everywhere. The context nexus was Germany (see post) and by my citation, the USA.
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Have you seen what happens when people do that? Look on sfgate.com for the District Poop Maps. I suspect many are similarly employed (or not even).
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Indeed there are sonograpic equipment combos that find tunnels
Allegedly [usborderpatrol.com].
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It's a farce enacted by unpleasant people who c should be avoided where possible?
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The German Perspective. (Score:2)
Germans know things about border controls. They invented the modern border wall with motion sensors and death strips.
The country was divided. Remember?
The East spied on people in depth, blackmailing and controlling them to spy on family members, friends and neighbours. They did this with conventional technology. Identity papers were important and often a matter of a life worth living, or death to escape it.
This has left a pension for provocative artwork, a deep respect for privacy and a healthy fear of
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Derp, yeah, I meant a pension. They have piles of loot laying about from dead people and they use it to buy up provocative artwork.
Of course I meant penchant.
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It's probably the database of photos of peoples faces that they don't like. I know I don't like it.
Soon I have to submit to having my photo taken to continue legally driving, I don't mind the drivers license but I do mind the digital copy going into some database to be abused by the government and whoever hacks into it, it'll probably find its way to facebook so they can figure out who I am.
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The new passports are biometric.
That means they contain fingerprint scans.
If the photo half assed resembles you and you put the passport into a scanner and hold your finger over the finger print scanner: what exactly do you think border patrol is going to do? They wave you through!
After all this is still a genuine passport with the correct name matching the finger prints ...
Dumb (Score:1)
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I am dumber for reading this (and that is pretty hard to do for me). WHen you get a passport, the photo is supposed to resemble you, or the person issuing the passport shouldn't give you one. So either the photo looks like her, or the guy giving out the passport wasn't paying attention. Either way, this is dumb, because you are just setting yourself up for problems down the road when some border control guy doesn't think you look like your passport and won't let you in.
The face looks like her (to a human), but the biometrics don't match very well.
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Advantages and disadvantages of unrecognizability (Score:3)
The face looks like her (to a human), but the biometrics don't match very well.
Well hopefully the border control isn't using biometrics to match the photo against the person.
Where the biometrics is going to come in is when the Border Patrol uses biometrics to compare the person traveling to the photo on the passport, to verify that the person on the passport is actually the person traveling.
Basically, the question here is whether she will be able to travel using that digitally-altered passport.
The advantage to her is that if passport photos are sent to a government database of faces that is distributed to facial-recognition systems (say, looking at images from security camera
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The advantage to her is that if passport photos are sent to a government database of faces that is distributed to facial-recognition systems (say, looking at images from security cameras), she won't be recognized, and thus her movements won't be picked up and tracked.
Exactly, there's also a good chance she isn't planning on traveling anywhere where a passport is required.
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UK airports are using passport scanners instead of border guards as you land. Those are using biometrics, and do fail on photographs intended to subvert them.
The fall-back process is to route the passenger through to a border guard. They can look at the photograph, confirm that it matches the person stood in front of them, and allow them into the country.
So the photograph wont prevent her from travelling, just delay her at border control.
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UK airports are using passport scanners instead of border guards as you land. Those are using biometrics, and do fail on photographs intended to subvert them. The fall-back process is to route the passenger through to a border guard. They can look at the photograph, confirm that it matches the person stood in front of them, and allow them into the country.
So the photograph wont prevent her from travelling,
...if the altered photo is enough like her that the human thinks they're the same even if the AI doesn't.
depends, I suppose, on how similar to her is the other person whose image she mixed in with hers to make the composite.
just delay her at border control.
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It is possible that the photo looks similar enough that it'd pass muster from a visual inspection, but be different enough to fool facial recognition software you know.
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Re:Shouldn't crime imply malevolence? (Score:5, Informative)
"Shouldn't crime imply malevolence?"
No. You can still get convicted of manslaughter and have had no intention of doing anything bad.
And this is basically fraud. She is presenting a photo for a passport and saying it is her when it isn't. I'm sure when you sign to get it you state that everything provided is factual, accurate to your knowledge, and correct. The image is NOT of the woman in question, hence, it is not accurate. Its not of her or even of a real person. You can't talk your way around this.
Re: Shouldn't crime imply malevolence? (Score:2)
Whilst you are correct, we already differentiate civil offenses from criminal ones, it might be worth debating whether we should have a different, independent, legal code and punishment system for offenses without intent versus those with.
Compartmentalization is a useful step in reforming how countries like the U.S. deal with crime, as the U.S., China and Australia have some of the least effective systems and it's not possible to deal with the whole thing in one go.
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Not the right well to poison. (Score:2)
Seriously, I'm all for well poisoning. But your passport?
It's not like that's the only, or definitive, picture the government has of you.
You want to poison government and corporate data wells, but not in a way that flags your record for extra attention.
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Never poison any well under your own identity. Make up a new name, every time.
Use as much cash as possible. Stay under the radar. Don't go to Defcon.
Regularly post disinformation, even to pseudo anon accounts like /.
Lie a lot, just for practice.
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I follow all those rules. I also make my own soap.
Yes, but do you use the soap to bath yourself? Using soap on yourself far more important than making it yourself.
Re: Not the right well to poison. (Score:2)
I thought everyone used rest these days.
Quite late (Score:1)
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When I went to college in 1979 the school used our SSN as our student ID. There was a directory you could look in that listed all the students and their ID number. The ID number was used to check books out of the library.
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A group od czech artists did something similar 8 years ago https://artoftheprank.com/2010... [artoftheprank.com]
It's in TFA
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I don't know what your driver's test looked like but mine had two phases.. The written part where I demonstrated I had basic knowledge of traffic laws and vehicle operations. Then the practical driving test where I demonstrated a number of basic skills, like staying in my line, making safe right and left turns, backing up while following the necessary traffic laws.
Driver's tests are designed to verify you have a minimum of proficiency, coordination, mental capacity and skill to handle a vehicle. Which sur
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The test is not without merit, but it doesn't really tell us much other than that the person is able to handle a car going 15 MPH with no traffic when they know they're being watched.
But yes, many states will suspend a license for reasons unrelated to driving, such as failure to appear in court, late child support, non DUI/DWI drug offenses, etc. Further, why does it expire? You can renew without taking a test again. Most of the time they don't even bother with the token vision test in Ga anymore.
easy enough to fix... (Score:5, Insightful)
For passport applications performed in person - change the passport application process so that the picture is taken by the passport delivering authorities - Similar pictures are taken when entering many countries like the U.S. and every European passport already has the passport authorities taking fingerprints.
For mailed in passport renewal applications, make doctoring the picture cause for revocation, force people to pick up their passports in person and only deliver them if the picture is a close match to the applicant and apply a temporary ban on re-applying for a new passport when people attempting to subvert the process are detected.
What? This is overly burdensome? Well subverting the utility of passports by doctoring the pictures has a cost too and it seems to me that making sure that MY right to travel isn't being called into question by these idiots is worth some bother.
Re:easy enough to fix... (Score:5, Informative)
"every European passport already has the passport authorities taking fingerprints"
Citation required -- I certainly didn't need to submit fingerprints when my passport was renewed recently.
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Likewise. It's been at least the best part of a decade, if not more, that the UK has had so called "biometric" passports. From what I can tell, all that really means is they added an RFID & doubled the renewal fees. I've never been asked to give any prints, and until this day, the only places in the UK with any of my biometric records are a couple of datacentres.
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You're right. I Confused my foreign wife entering the U.S. (fingerprint & picture) with my French passport renewal.
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It is not a completely incorrect confusion - Germany had introduced the biometric passport with fingerprints due to the US threatening Germany to remove it from the visa waiver program otherwise.
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There is no "right to travel". In non-totalitarian states you usually have the right to leave the country. The passport is the request from your sovereign (be it a person or a democratically established organ) to other sovereigns to assist, protect and support your safe journey through their territories. If you do not meet the sovereign's criteria for offering such patronage, you are screwed, no passport for you.
The world is rules by fucking 10-year olds (Score:1)
"Passports are tools of oppression"
Really ?
"Don't tell me what to do !" "I do what I want !" "You're only trying to stop us from having fun !" "Passports are tools of oppression !"
Grow the fuck up, stupid libertarian retards. It's called "civilization". The alternatives are tribalism, barbarism and savagery. Take your pick.
And get off my fucking lawn.
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"Passports are tools of oppression"
Really ?
"Don't tell me what to do !" "I do what I want !" "You're only trying to stop us from having fun !" "Passports are tools of oppression !"
Grow the fuck up, stupid libertarian retards. It's called "civilization". The alternatives are tribalism, barbarism and savagery. Take your pick.
And get off my fucking lawn.
You can have civilization without passports though. Passports aren't necessary to run a nation state. The EU hasn't collapsed without requiring people to show passports at the border. Britain left- but that's only because Britain is en route to becoming the rednecks of Europe with people like Farage and Johnson leading the trailers.
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So you're ok with 40 million Egyptians, 20 million Canadians, Australians and South Africans and 250 million Americans all turning up to live in Holland?
It's going to get cosy.
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"Passports are tools of oppression"
Really ?
Yes, that statement is really ironic as one half of Germany remembers very well when NOT giving you a passport was actual opression.
I like this ... (Score:2)
... and advocated back in the day when Facebook got uptight about, Merged Women and oh wait ...
It was about photos showing breasts.
Down went Breast Feeding Moms, Breast Cancer, Breast self-checks ... you name it.
A bunch of us encouraged any and all Facebook members to post breast pictures wrapped in art or social issues but Facebook pulled out early.
I was glad, but some women had a problem with it on another level.
Quite a ruse if I must say so (Score:2)
What, you're not going to ask me for my drivers license, social security number, credit card info, and bank account info, too?
Totally legit
How to get murdered in three easy steps (Score:2)
The photo is half her, half Federica Mogherini, an Italian politician who is the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Wow, doesn't seem like a smart idea to present ID wherever you travel that will hit with relatively high confidence on image recognition databases that may be looking for a high level EU representative on security policy at loose ends with no security detail...
Sounds in fact like a great way to be disappeared and show up on grainy videos later wit
Funny until you use it (Score:3)
This is funny until a software at the border decides this is not you on the passport photo.
At that point, at best you spend the whole day explaining what is going on to custom officers.
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At that point, at best you spend the whole day explaining what is going on to custom officers.
Or worse: If you happen to lose your passport while abroad, the embassy won't issue you replacement travel papers because you can't identify yourself and you don't match the info they have on file. And without that passport or emergency travel papers, you won't even be able to board your flight home. Potentially ever.
S
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Car has tongue (Score:1)
No, I'm Billie Hoffman!
+1 to this whole idea.
How is that possible? (Score:2)
I'm Argentinian, not the top of the pack in terms of government competency, but to get a passport I have to be physically there and they take my picture and fingerprints. You cannot submit your own picture, that's a glaring security hole. They authenticate your identity first and then capture the picture.
Even the camera operators cannot override the input from the camera, at least not easily.