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The FBI's New Facial Recognition System Will Find You Anywhere

TMCnet Feature

April 16, 2014

The FBI's New Facial Recognition System Will Find You Anywhere

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By Joe Rizzo
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Regardless of your age, we are all familiar with George Orwell’s Big Brother. It is a fictional character in Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens. The people are constantly reminded of this by the phrase "Big Brother is watching you."


This concept is sort of re-enforced in a current TV show called Person of Interest. A reclusive billionaire software genius who is living under an assumed identity built a computer system for the government that uses information gleaned from omnipresent surveillance to predict future terrorist attacks. These days, cameras seem to be everywhere; retail security, traffic cameras, ATM cameras, etc.

There is always some truth in fiction. Facial recognition systems have been around for some time. It is basically a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. One of the ways to do this is by comparing selected facial features from the image and a facial database. It is typically used in security systems and can be compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint or eye iris recognition systems.

In September 2012, the FBI said that it was working on a $1 billion public facial recognition system that would be ready for deployment in 2014. This project has been labeled the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. It is designed to use biometric data such as DNA analysis, iris scans and voice identification to track down folks with a criminal history. The plan is that the FBI will literally take NGI on the road. By that I mean that it will use public cameras to pick faces from the crowd and cross check them with its national repository of images.

This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the EFF, which is an international not-for-profit digital rights group based in the U.S. reported that this new facial recognition system will be ready to launch this summer.

The NGI system already contains about a third of the U.S. population in its database. The information that we have is that the NGI system will be combining the FBI’s fingerprint database which contains about 100 million samples, in addition to palm prints, iris scans and mugshots. You are essentially taking into account anyone who has supplied a photo ID for a government job or background check and I would assume anyone who has a driver’s license, since that photo is in a government system.

As you can imagine, groups such as the EFF are having issues with this type of system. We are already seeing instances that almost fringe on our right to privacy as the NSA uses metadata from our phone calls to track possible terrorist plots. The NSA may not be listening to the actual calls, but sufficient information can be collected from metadata that a complete story can be compiled from it.

Who is to say that the same won’t happen with facial recognition? According to documents from the EFF, the system will be capable of adding 55,000 images per day, and could have the facial data for up to 52 million people by the end of 2015. Here is a thought, with all the social media programs floating around the world with a profile pictures, how long will it take to incorporate them in the NGI system?




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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