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ACLU slams face recognition technology
Friday, January 04 2002
by Andrew McLindon


Face-recognition technology designed to catch criminals and prevent terrorism has
been abandoned by police officials in Florida after it proved ineffective.



According to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a 12-month
trial of the technology only lasted two months after police officials found that
the system was not working. The ACLU said that it examined systems logs at the
Tampa, Florida police department which showed that during the two months the
technology was in use it failed to identify a single person photographed in the
department's criminal database.



The report also said that the software produced many false identifications.
According to ACLU, the system made what were to human observers obvious errors,
such as matching male and female subjects and subjects with significant
differences in age or weight.



"Face recognition is all hype and no action," said Barry Steinhardt, associate
director of the ACLU and an author of the report. "Potentially powerful
surveillance systems like face-recognition need to be examined closely before
they are deployed, and the first question to ask is whether the system will
actually improve our safety. The experience of the Tampa Police Department
confirms that this technology doesn't deliver."



According to the ACLU, Tampa police officials have claimed that their
discontinuation of the system was due to disruptions caused by police
redistricting and that they planned to resume operation at some point in the
future. However, the ACLU expressed scepticism that redistricting was what really
led Tampa to abandon the face recognition system. Its report notes, "it is
reasonable to assume that the professionals in the Tampa Police Department would
not have let the system sit unused for so long because of a mere redistricting
process had they previously found facial recognition to be a valuable tool in the
effort to combat crime."



The software used in the trial was from one of the biggest makers of
face-recognition systems, Visionics, and it disputed the report's findings.



The company says that the system is only one type of tool available to law
enforcement agencies and points out that a human operator has to verify matches
made by the software. The company also defended itself from the ACLU's
accusations by saying that there were no criminals present in the area covered at
the time the system was turned on. 



The company's partners, clients and investors are not likely to take too much
notice of the ACLU's complaints. Since 11 September the firm's stock has soared
from below USD5 to above USD15. Moreover the company has signed a number of
lucrative contracts for its technology with airports and government agencies such
as the US Department of Defense (DoD) Counterdrug Technology Development Program
Office. More recently Visionics opened two new offices in Washington DC and in
Gloucester, England.

 

According to Visionics, FaceIt Argus is the only commercially available facial
surveillance and identification system that can handle an unlimited number of
camera inputs and an unlimited database size. The system uses a set of biometric
network appliances (BNAs) to capture faces on video, in real-time, convert the
facial images into faceprints (84-byte templates), and then "ship" the
faceprints via a network to a server where the facial matching process is
conducted. 



Many analysts also agree that the biometrics industry, which includes face
recognition systems, is expected to grow an incredible amount over the three
years. A recent report from Gartner said the sector will grow from about USD200
million in revenue in 2001 to about USD2 billion in 2004, and, according to
experts, face-recognition systems could be sold to airports for as much as USD2
million each.



Face-recognition software works by digitally analysing people's facial structures
and then attempts to match them from databases of profiles of convicted criminals
or suspected terrorists. However, their increased use in the US has been
criticised by civil liberties group such as ACLU because of possible
infringements of privacy and wrongful arrests.



ACLU also pointed out that several US government agencies have abandoned
facial-recognition systems after finding they did not work as advertised,
including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which experimented with
using the technology to identify people in cars at the Mexico-US border.