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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

CIA and NSA’s ‘Black Budget’ Massive, Bloated, and Largely Ineffective at Stopping Terrorism

By DSWright | FDL | August 30, 2013

According to the Washington Post, documents released by Edward Snowden provide insight into the so-called “black budget” of the CIA, NSA, and other off-the-books funded entities. Since 9/11 hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on building a massive intelligence machine that still cannot provide the president with adequate intelligence. It seems the “black budget” has a lot more to do with enriching contractors and building bureaucratic empires than fighting terrorism.

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

A time of austerity? Where were all these budget hawks during the votes for this? Austerity is just for kids who need food stamps, roads and bridges, and the long term unemployed. Disgusting.

The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the 2001 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.

The result is an espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.

No wonder they kept it a secret. $500 billion to build our own electronic prison? Combine that with the money spent on Homeland Security and it seems there is always money for elite interests, just not for the 99%.

The black budget details over a dozen federal agencies with their snouts in the secret trough. The top five beneficiaries being: the CIA, NSA, National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Program, and the Department of Defense’s General Defense Intelligence Program. With the four main spending categories being: data collection, data analysis, management, facilities and support, and data processing and exploitation. Read electronic spying with a special focus on the internet.

What have we gotten for all this money?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcOEOyGnc-0&feature=player_embedded

August 31, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment