Say Cheese!
by Paul McGoldrick
About 7 years ago I was invited to a company in San José (Calif.) for discussions. The business was located in a converted food warehouse, off the main drag, and the building was rather unremarkable in looks. There was no large corporate sign at the roadside and it would have been impossible to guess the nature of the business. Later, it was obvious why the company had located in a building with no external windows in the lower two floors.
Entrance to the lobby was by an intercom system confirming that you had an appointment; the door opened and you entered the bare lobby while a very obvious camera watched your movements. A few minutes later a human emerged from a card-protected door and demanded picture ID - which was very carefully scrutinized - before escorting you into a conference room immediately behind that first door. The only other door out of the conference room was also card-protected and there were no windows anywhere in the room.
After some extensive questioning and the signing of non-disclosure agreements (which have long-since expired) I was shown the technology that this secure building contained: Face recognition equipment.
Beyond the work of the U.S. Government in ear recognition (that's why the right ear has to be turned towards the camera with no hair covering it in all Federal IDs) I had no previous knowledge of work being done on face recognition systems - except for some primitive work (which is certainly primitive no longer!) that had been reported from MIT. This company's work was extremely clever but the nature of the records that it was using disturbed me. They were the Corrections Department's induction records for individuals currently or previously incarcerated in the State of Washington system. Who authorized the use of such records for commercial reasons was, and is, a mystery to me but I felt at the time - and still feel - that it was crossing the line of personal intrusion.
With the spate of face recognition systems surfacing with a furious pace after 9-11 I have had to ask myself whether it is an intrusion of privacy for such systems to be used in public places - with, or without, the knowledge of the individuals concerned. Cameras in public places are extremely commonplace (I have even installed one myself, locally, to protect a piece of public art) and in some countries like the U.K. you can expect to be tracked throughout the center of the major cities. And an awful lot of bad guys have been identified and picked up based on such recorded evidence.
Similarly, we all expect to be under the observation of cameras in stores, casinos, airports and the like and to some extent it is a comfort to have some surveillance in places where crime seems to be most popular. We do not expect surveillance in locations like public restrooms or store changing rooms and most of us would be outraged if such practices were started. Civil rights organizations are outraged most easily, of course, and they were furious when the first public "outing" of the PelcoMATCH face recognition system detected 19 known "suspects" at the 2001 Super Bowl. But a Supreme Court decision (U.S. vs. Dionisio) has earlier said, "No person can have a reasonable expectation … that his face will be a mystery to the world" in a decision to allow a voice and handwriting subpoena.
Now that same system (PelcoMATCH) is in daily use at Fresno Yosemite International Airport, and has been since late October 2001. Systems are also being installed at San Francisco International Airport, and the industry is in a full flux of expansion. This particular system comes from Pelco (Clovis, Calif.) using the software refined at MIT and further developed by Viisage (Mass.) Two other major players in the industry are Photon-X (Alabama) and Visionics Corporation (New Jersey.)
The systems are not perfect; they give quite a few "false-positives" that need to be resolved by human security and they give far less than 100% accuracy depending on the angle that results with the camera/face, lighting, hair changes, spectacles, jewelry, etc.
My problem isn't with the equipment, though: It is, in my opinion, advanced technology that the designers should be proud of. My problems are with the databases and the use that is made of them. Should every person with a criminal record be pulled out of a line just because that person once "did something?" Isn't that a major presumption that once guilty, always guilty - isn't that profiling in the worst possible way? And how are these databases protected? They appear to be in commercial hands and I find that very disturbing both from a privacy and moral viewpoint.
Presumably the databases have been put together from Federal and State records, together with intelligence service input from the U.S. and co-operating countries. But as for the people we really want to stop - do we even have photo images of most of them anyway? And are we so completely sure that these databases will be used only for the purposes of security? Will immigrants be automatically added to these databases if they come from certain countries or they have particular training?
I remember that in earlier years (and it probably isn't the case anymore because most European countries don't care who leaves, or even if they remembered to take their passports with them) you were not allowed to leave the Netherlands though Amsterdam's Schiphol airport if you had any unpaid traffic or other fines. To get past the desk you had to pay the fine on the spot. You can guess the agencies who would love to track the travels of the taxpayer who owes, the non-paying child-support parent, the…well you get the point; these might be people who owe society something but they don't deserve to be publicly pilloried at a security check point, or to be tracked by security cameras as they do their grocery shopping.
So, I would suggest that if you have a belief that your image might be
in one of these databases do the following as you approach such a system:
Wear glasses, tilt your head to one side and rotate it slightly to make
sure the camera catches your nose at an angle - and give that camera one
big, cheesy smile!