FBI, Pentagon Helped Research Facial Recognition for Street Cameras, Drones (washingtonpost.com) 13
The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government's ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance. WashingtonPost: The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent. Many of the records relate to the Janus program, a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or IARPA, the high-level research arm of the U.S. intelligence community modeled after the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the nation's leading computer-vision experts to design and test software that would quickly and accurately process the "truly unconstrained face imagery" recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared with The Washington Post.
In a 2019 presentation, an IARPA program manager said the goal had been to "dramatically improve" the power and performance of facial recognition systems, with "scaling to support millions of subjects" and the ability to quickly identify faces from partially obstructed angles. One version of the system was trained for "Face ID ... at target distances" of more than a half-mile. To refine the system's capabilities, researchers staged a data-gathering test in 2017, paying dozens of volunteers to simulate real-world scenarios at a Defense Department training facility made to resemble a hospital, a subway station, an outdoor marketplace and a school, the documents show. The test yielded thousands of surveillance videos and images, some of which were captured by a drone. The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces, the documents show. The Horus tool has since been offered for use to at least six federal agencies, and their feedback is "continuing to be used to refine the tool," Department of Homeland Security officials said last year.
In a 2019 presentation, an IARPA program manager said the goal had been to "dramatically improve" the power and performance of facial recognition systems, with "scaling to support millions of subjects" and the ability to quickly identify faces from partially obstructed angles. One version of the system was trained for "Face ID ... at target distances" of more than a half-mile. To refine the system's capabilities, researchers staged a data-gathering test in 2017, paying dozens of volunteers to simulate real-world scenarios at a Defense Department training facility made to resemble a hospital, a subway station, an outdoor marketplace and a school, the documents show. The test yielded thousands of surveillance videos and images, some of which were captured by a drone. The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces, the documents show. The Horus tool has since been offered for use to at least six federal agencies, and their feedback is "continuing to be used to refine the tool," Department of Homeland Security officials said last year.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
People keep fearmongering about China, and yet fail to see US has basically become China. US ability to peer into everyone's private lives is even more powerful than the Stasis and the USSR KGB.
best put a pebble in your shoe (Score:1)
Decima Technologies has developed Samaritan which can track people by gait analysis, and that was nine years ago.
China did this years ago. (Score:2)
I'll miss the fourth amendment to the Constitution (Score:2, Informative)
Well, yeah (Score:3)
If there are any two departments that are going to be looking to implement this technology its going to be the FBI and the DoD, that much is obvious.
Now are concerns about how this is used are very real and very legitamite but these are political questions and legislation is really the answer here. If there isn't clear court precedent on how they are allowed to use it then they are going to naturally push the envelope, not because they are "evil" but they have a goal assigned to them and are going to use the tools given to them.
Much like we can't really expect businesses to act ethically on their own these are organizations that are designed to be boxed in by laws, laws we elect people to make.
I bet the system works great... on white people (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be very surprised if the subjects used to demonstrate the system were folks of color: hispanic, middle eastern, asian, or black. As Timnit Gebru showed in 2017, auto facial recognition performs poorly on folks whose skin isn't as reflective as caucasians. Unfortunately, they're also the folks the FBI generally want to track most. So what's the value of system that can't reliably recognize the typical targets of interest? Propaganda, most likely.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
auto facial recognition performs poorly on folks whose skin isn't as reflective as caucasians. Unfortunately, they're also the folks the FBI generally want to track most. So what's the value of system that can't reliably recognize the typical targets of interest?
Oh please. The FBI is going after religious wingnuts, "dissidents," "domestic terrorists," all presumably white, and older.
Where was the FBI after the "pEacEfUl pRoTeStS?" Nowhere. Those people, they're allowed to carry on with their destruction, but if you have a Gadsden Flag now you're a Seditionist.
FBI stopped looking for *actual* criminals long ago, and is now used to persecute those who don't Toe the Party Line.
Submitted as evidence: All the "active shooters" and "mass shooters" that were sending u
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately, they're also the folks the FBI generally want to track most.
Huh. And here I thought the FBI would be more interested in all those caucasion Christian domestic terrorists [nytimes.com]. The ones bombing mosques [newsweek.com] and synagogues [go.com], shooting up businesses [cnn.com], and plotting to destroy [nbcnews.com] infrastructure [go.com]. You know, the things they've been chartered to investigate.
Really? (Score:2)
Really? - that doesn't sound like them...
The United States of America (Score:1)