Face the Facts

Facial recognition technology?s troubled past -- and troubling future.

From the October 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Yet "even if the technology worked perfectly," Smith observes, "it would still allow 99 percent of the terrorists through....The biggest problem with face recognition systems is the simple fact that we don?t know who the terrorists are and law enforcement doesn?t have their pictures. Spotting terrorists at airports is simply the wrong use of this technology."

Even if we did know who the terrorists were, we?d have to sit them all down for a session with Annie Leibovitz for FRT to be useful. According to the testers at Palm Beach International, "Input photographs needed to be of good quality to make successful matches." Similarly, people being scanned need to stand still, look straight at the camera, and not wear glasses. As the Palm Beach study acknowledged: "Motion of test subject head has a significant effect on system ability. There was substantial loss in matching if test subject had a pose 15 to 30 degrees off of input camera focal point and eyeglasses were problematic."

Mass face scanning was formally introduced to the American public in January 2001 at Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa, when football fans had their faces surreptitiously checked with a Viisage system and compared to a database of known criminals. The Tampa authorities then began to use scanning in the Ybor City entertainment district. They targeted people strolling down the street or eating lunch, comparing their faceprints to a database of criminals and runaways.

Using open record requests, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) discovered that the system was essentially abandoned within months of its highly publicized rollout. No correct matches had been made to the criminal database. Instead, according to the ACLU, the system matched "male and female subjects and subjects with significant differences in age and weight."

Put another way, FRT can be dumber than Inspector Clouseau: Even he could distinguish a man from a woman, or a short fat man from a tall thin man. The Tampa police, for their part, deny they have abandoned FRT, saying they are revamping it to work with more cameras.

Before they spend the money, they should take a closer look at the experience in the world capital of FRT. The London borough of Newham, with a population of about 250,000, is widely touted by advocates as proof of the technology?s awesome crime-fighting ability. Newham boasts approximately 300 government cameras located in strategic places and linked to Visionics? FaceIt system.

Newham?s FRT is credited by advocates and local government officials with cutting crime by nearly 40 percent since 1998. That effect, if real, was apparently not long-lasting. According to a United Press International report, street robberies and car theft -- two crimes for which FRT is supposed to be an especially powerful deterrent -- were on the rise again in Newham last year.

And as Jeffrey Rosen reported in The New York Times Magazine last October, the Newham spy system has not resulted in a single arrest during its three years of operation. Nor do the people who run the system even know who is in the database. The deterrent effect, to the extent there may be one, appears to lie with the signs posted throughout Newham telling criminals that cameras are watching and that the police know who they are, where they live, and what crimes they have committed. Of course, "it?s not true," as the Newham monitoring chief admitted to Rosen.

Newham is simply a part of Great Britain?s growing spy camera network, which arose as a response to terrorist bombings in London?s financial district in the early 1990s. Britain now has some 1.5 million government cameras in place. As the cameras were first being set up, the government, then under the control of the Tories, insisted that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." Now under control of the Labour Party, the government is spending $115 million for still more spy cameras.

Despite ubiquitous cameras, however, violent and property crime in England is soaring. A three-year government study by the Scottish Center for Criminology recently concluded there is no evidence to suggest that Britain?s spy cameras have reduced serious crime overall. Another study, this one by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, looked at 14 British cities and found that the cameras had little effect in reducing crime. The study suggested that improving street lighting would be a more cost-effective crime prevention method.

This much can be said in favor of the cameras: In some cases, they have been used to convict speeders, other traffic law offenders, and litterbugs. Yet it?s one thing to give up your privacy to catch Irish Republican Army terrorists. It?s another thing to surrender privacy so the police can catch people who litter.

Of course, just because FRT doesn?t work very well today doesn?t mean it will never work. FRT companies are receiving massive amounts of corporate welfare. According to a March General Accounting Office (GAO) report, as of June 2001 the Departments of Justice and Defense had given about $21.3 million and $24.7 million, respectively, to the research and development of FRT. All this research will probably result in much-improved products eventually.

What then? Philip Agre, an associate professor in the Information Studies Department of the University of California at Los Angeles, argues that as FRT gets better the potential for abuse will rise commensurately. "As the underlying information and communications technologies (digital cameras, image databases, processing power and data communications) become radically cheaper (and more powerful)," he writes on his Web site, "new facial image databases will not be hard to construct, with or without the consent of the people whose faces are captured."

Once those databases exist, their uses will doubtless expand, consistent with typical bureaucratic mission creep. Look, for example, at the 2001 Colorado law allowing the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to use biometric technology to map applicants? faces for driver?s licenses. The stated intent was to stop the same person from obtaining multiple licenses. But the law?s language was much broader, allowing access to the DMV database to "aid a federal, state or local government agency in carrying out such agency?s official function" -- in other words, for any government purpose whatsoever. Illinois and West Virginia also have turned their driver?s license bureaus into mandatory faceprint collection points.

In March, after national criticism, the Colorado legislature refined the face mapping scheme, declaring that before a government agency can tap into the image database, it must have "a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed or will be committed and a reasonable suspicion that the image requested is either the perpetrator of such a crime or the victim of such a crime." Like Colorado, states can establish guidelines that ostensibly limit government use of your faceprint. But once your faceprint is in a state database, the federal government has legal authority to use it for any purpose at all. By federal statute, every state driver?s license record is available to every federal agency, "including any court or law enforcement agency, in carrying out its functions." Because of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a state government cannot limit the uses to which federal agencies put these state-gathered faceprints.