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Montreal deploying fleet of facial recognition drones for 24/7 patrols

RT | December 4, 2013

The City of Montreal has purchased 24 drones to help law enforcement tackle crime as authorities look to cut back the police force over the next 15 years. The UAVs, equipped with facial recognition technology, will be armed to ‘neutralize suspects’.

“It’s very exciting,” the chief of police for the borough where the drones will be deployed, Montreal North, told the Montreal Journal.

“The drones with facial recognition will patrol the streets 24 hours a day. Officers will interrogate individuals suspected of criminal acts or searched directly through speakers and microphones installed in the drones, but soon they can be provided with equipment capable of neutralizing on-site suspects pending the intervention of the law enforcement officers. It will mainly make our work less dangerous, especially in an area where there is a lot of social tension,” he said.

When asked to clarify what intermediate weapons would be used to neutralize suspects, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesman told the Journal the “UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] will carry persuasive technologies, but non-lethal types, such as electric shock, blinding or paralyzing gases.”

He added that despite the seemingly limitless possibilities, only non-lethal weapons are “intended for the moment.”

The drones are set to be deployed in early 2014.

Despite the $400-million- plus price tag, the drones are intended to facilitate cutbacks to the city’s police force in line with nationwide efforts to curb RCMP expenditures, which have doubled over the last 15 years.

Employing new technology to create leaner, more effective law enforcements agencies, however, remains highly contentious.

A late 2012 poll conducted by Jennifer Stoddart, the privacy commissioner of Canada, found the public remains ambivalent about the use of UAVs in policing.

While 80 percent of those surveyed were comfortable with police use of drones for search-and-rescue missions, only 40 percent of respondents felt comfortable with their use in monitoring public events or protests.

“Considering the capacity of UAVs for surreptitious operation, the potential for the technology to be used for general surveillance purposes, and their increasing prevalence — including for civilian purposes — our office will be closely following their expanded use,” the report read.

“We will also continue to engage federal government institutions to ensure that any planned operation of UAVs is done in accordance with privacy requirements.”

The RCMP national drone is thus far in its infancy, with Mounties promising they will not be used to conduct general surveillance against the public.

A study released last month – Unmanned Eyes in the Sky – found that despite drones’ potential benefits for police, law enforcement had not “sought feedback from the public on how UAVs should or should not be adopted as a tool to serve the public interest,” the Canadian Press reported.

The study concluded that in light of the “potential for intrusive and massive surveillance,” Canadians needed reassurances that they would not be spied on once the drone program goes into full swing.

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December 4, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US govt intel researchers to ‘radically expand’ facial recognition capabilities

RT | November 13, 2013

The United States intelligence community’s research arm is set to launch a program that will thoroughly broaden the capabilities of biometric facial recognition software in order to establish an individual’s identity.

The Janus program of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) will begin in April 2014 in an effort to “radically expand the range of conditions under which automated face recognition can establish identity,” according to documents released by the agency over the weekend.

Janus “seeks to improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections. During daily activities, people laugh, smile, frown, yawn and morph their faces into a broad variety of expressions. For each face, these expressions are formed from unique skeletal and musculature features that are similar through one’s lifetime. Janus representations will exploit the full morphological dynamics of the face to enable better matching and faster retrieval.”

Current facial recognition relies mostly on full-frontal, aligned facial views. But, in the words of Military & Aerospace Electronics, Janus will fuse “the rich spatial, temporal, and contextual information available from the multiple views captured by security cameras, cell phone cameras, news video, and other sources referred to as ‘media in the wild.’”

In addition, Janus will take into account aging and incomplete or ambiguous data for its recognition assessment goals.

IARPA was created in 2006 and is a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The intelligence agency is modeled after DARPA, the Pentagon’s notorious research arm that fosters technology for future military utilization.

In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm run by the Central Intelligence Agency, invests in companies that develop facial recognition software.

In an age of ubiquitous surveillance video amid a severe lag of legal protections for privacy, civil liberties advocates are expressing concern.

IARPA’s effort to significantly boost facial recognition capabilities “represents a quantum leap in the amount of surveillance taking place in public places,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, as quoted by USA Today.

Stanley noted that law enforcement and the like could easily run random facial recognition programs over surveillance video to assess the identities of crowds in public places without oversight.

IARPA gave industry representatives a solicitation briefing on the program in June, according to media reports.

Late last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation published a request for information in developing “a roadmap for the FBI’s future video analytics architecture” as the agency prepares to make its high-tech surveillance abilities all the more powerful.

In September, the Department of Homeland Security tested its Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS) at a junior hockey game in Washington state. When it’s fully operational, BOSS could be used to identify a person of interest among a massive crowd in just seconds.

Over the summer, the state of Ohio admitted it had access to a facial recognition database that included all state-wide driver’s license photos and mug shots without the public’s knowledge.

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November 13, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Industry: biometrics business valued at $10 billion by 2018

PRIVACYSOS – 04/16/2013 

According to a new report published by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., the President and CEO of biometrics firm SmartMetric posits that the industry will be worth $10 billion by 2018. 

SmartMetric, of course, “stands to capitalize significantly on this very large and fast growing market,” so perhaps that projection should be taken with a grain of salt.

But specific figures aside, the industry is undoubtedly booming, and in large part due to US military and law enforcement biometrics programs.

The FBI’s Next Generation Identification biometrics effort, housed in the Center for Biometric Excellence at the FBI-DoD operated Biometrics Technology Center, is the largest domestic operation. Local law enforcement are increasingly also using advanced biometric monitoring equipment, including face recognition and iris scanners.

If you are worried about how powerful biometrics technologies might be used in your city or state, click here to find out how to get involved at the local level to ensure police transparency and democratic accountability.

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April 17, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

FBI’s Facial Recognition is Coming to a State Near You

By Jennifer Lynch | EFF | August 2, 2012

Recently-released documents show that the FBI has been working since late 2011 with four states—Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and possibly Oregon—to ramp up the Next Generation Identification (NGI) Facial Recognition Program. When the program is fully deployed in 2014, the FBI expects its facial recognition database will contain at least 12 million “searchable frontal photos.” (p. 6)

The documents, which the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) obtained from a recent meeting of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Advisory Policy Board,1  shed new light on the FBI’s plans for NGI—the Bureau’s massive biometrics database that combines fingerprints, iris scans, palm prints, facial recognition and extensive biographical data collected from over 100 million Americans.

The Advisory Board documents show that FBI’s database of facial images will provide search results automatically (the system won’t need to rely on a human to check the results before forwarding them to the state or local agency) and that the FBI is developing “Universal Face Workstation software” to allow states that don’t have their own “Face/Photo search capabilities”  to search through the FBI’s images.

After we read through the Advisory Board documents, we quickly sent Open Records requests to several of the states involved in the pilot program. The documents we received from Maryland and Hawaii further flesh out the story. For example, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Hawaii and the FBI shows that the government is building NGI to “permit photo submissions independent of arrests.” This is a problem because, the FBI has stated it wants to use its facial recognition system to “identify[] subjects in public datasets” and “conduct[] automated surveillance at lookout locations” (p.5). This suggests the FBI wants to be able to search and identify people in photos of crowds and in pictures posted on social media sites—even if the people in those photos haven’t been arrested for or even suspected of a crime. The FBI may also want to incorporate those crowd or social media photos into its face recognition database.

And an MOU between Maryland and the FBI will allow Maryland to submit photos in bulk to the database — something that Maryland described in an email as a “photo data dump.” This kind of an agreement could be used in the future to incorporate the same kind of facial identifying information already collected by 32 of 50 state DMVs solely to prevent fraud and identity theft.

The Advisory Board documents contain other concerning information. For example, one document discusses the FBI’s plans to combine civil and criminal biometrics records by giving them a single searchable “master name” or unique identifying number. As we’ve noted, criminal and civil records have always been kept separate in the past. While this may be a function of the differences in how each type of print is collected and stored, it has effectively meant that civil prints—collected for employment verification, for background checks, for federal jobs, and even to become a lawyer in California—have not been automatically searched every time criminal prints are checked against the database. That will all change once FBI implements its unique identity system. Although FBI states that “the criminal and civil files will remain logically separated . . . [to] ensure that retained civil submissions remain untainted by criminal submissions” it’s hard to see how this is functionally true, given that civil files will be searched at the same time as criminal files.

Another document discusses the federal government’s extensive biometrics sharing relationships with other countries. It notes that the FBI’s Global Initiatives Unit has already collected over 990,000 records from foreign partners, with over 600,000 of those coming from Afghanistan. The FBI already has information sharing relationships with 77 countries, (p.2), but CJIS is now trying to partner with “Visa Waiver Program countries” like Ireland, Spain and Australia to allow automatic access to each other’s biometric databases on a “hit/no hit basis.” This kind of access has already been set up to connect the German and U.S. biometric databases.2

And finally, as NDLON has discussed in greater detail, the documents show just how far the FBI and DHS partnership has progressed to maximize datasharing as part of the Secure Communities program. For example, NDLON notes that FBI has mobile devices that permit searches of the entire IDENT database in the field. These mobile devices may subject individuals to immigration background checks without ever being arrested or booked.

The FBI has not updated the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for its photo database since 2008—well before signing MOUs with the states to share face recognition data and before the development and deployment of NGI’s facial recognition capabilities. As EFF recently testified during a Senate Subcommittee hearing on facial recognition, Americans should be very concerned about the government’s plans to build up its facial recognition capabilities:

Facial recognition takes the risks inherent in other biometrics to a new level . . . [it] allows for covert, remote, and mass capture and identification of images, and the photos that may end up in a database include not just a person’s face but also what she is wearing, what she might be carrying, and who she is associated with.

Without an updated PIA, it is impossible to tell exactly how the FBI plans to acquire and use facial recognition data now and in the future. However, given the information in these new documents and the FBI’s broad goals for face recognition data, the time is right for laws that limit face recognition data collection.

To see all the documents, go to our landing page for NGI and click on “Documents” in the middle toolbar.

Notes

1. The FBI’s CJIS Division manages the FBI’s biometrics databases, including its legacy fingerprint database (IAFIS) and NGI. CJIS’s Advisory Policy Board is charged with reviewing the “policy, technical, and operational issues related to CJIS Division programs” and makes recommendations to the FBI’s director. The Advisory Board is made up of 34 representatives from state, local, and tribal criminal justice agencies, and includes representatives from national security, and prosecutorial, judicial, and correctional sectors of the criminal justice system. It meets twice a year—generally in open meetings announced in the Federal Register—though it appears the materials from those meetings are generally only distributed to attendees and through an online system “only available to persons duly employed by a law enforcement, criminal justice, or public safety agency/department, and whose position requires secure communication with other agencies.”

2. The documents state the connection won’t be operational until Germany addresses some “remaining internal details.”

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August 4, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | 2 Comments