US Military Seeks Non-Cooperative Biometric Tracking Technology 98
An anonymous reader writes "Interesting article on the upcoming efforts of the Department of Defense biometric capabilities and the ability to non-cooperatively tag, track, and locate individuals from a variety of military UAV platforms. Quoting Wired: "[The] Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot 'adversarial intent.' 'If this works out, we'll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas', says Dr. Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts. 'A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we'll know it was the same guy that went in.'"
Non-Cooperative Biometric Tracking Technology (Score:1)
It's really scary!
Sounds like tortures or unlawful inspection.
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INSERT INTO terror_watch_list (select * from all_people);
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Having duplicates is not an issue here.
Checking twice is better that checking once.
Interesting (Score:3)
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Facial recognition is a difficult problem. Not just technically either. Too many people want this too much. They also don't appreciate all the difficulties. They're plums ripe for being taken in by scams.
Something I've come to appreciate is that comparisons are relatively easy. It's the representation that's the killer. Pixels are a completely brain dead way to represent an image. Very easy to do, but not useful for the kinds of comparisons needed for facial recognition.
Then there's the matter of
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Wow, really? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess until they all just wear mask... Got to love multi-billion dollar systems that get defeated by a $3 piece of clothing.
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All wearing the same mask? That sure would be stealthy and make it easy to blend into a crowd!
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Suddenly the market for my Darth Vader costume/portable air conditioning system hybrid opens up!
"This isn't the suspect you're looking for."
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Yeah.... having a bunch of people wearing the same mask would be a wonderful way to blend in with the natives and make it difficult to figure out who you are and who you are associated with....
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Depends on the mask. Pick the right one, and they'll just think you're from 4chan.
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A face is only one way to identify someone- one which humans use extensively. But not the only one. The way you walk, the way you hold yourself, your body size and shape, your voice, and a host of other attributes are all fairly unique, when you look closely enough. Combining a group of them makes it even more powerful.
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Although TFS specifically mentions faces, they could get trickier than just face recognition, e.g. gait analysis, etc. But those are easy to defeat too, possibly as simply as putting a rock in your shoe. (See Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.)
But if the thing's in an overhead UAV, a hat with a big floppy brim might work just as well as a mask. Or they could wear burkas.
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I guess until they all just wear mask...
http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/259/1202666100024xy5.jpg [imageshack.us]
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http://www.google.com/search?q=burqa
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Didn't you read Sherlock Holmes ?
It is not to track the face... it is to track the hands! They never change the hands....
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That also assumes other bio-metrics such as height, build, gait, etc are not analyzed to determine if the person is the same. There are more to biometrics than simply recognizing a face.
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That also assumes other bio-metrics such as height, build, gait, etc are not analyzed to determine if the person is the same.
None of which can be defeated by anything as simple as a mask, like wearing a fat suit and/or platform shoes...
That said, I've done a lot of work in various pattern analysis applications and have to wonder if it isn't my moral duty to separate the security-industrial complex from some of the American taxpayer's money...
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And if you can follow multiple people, how many people will be walking around with a mask, a rock in their shoe, a body suit and high heels? It could perhaps make it harder to do, but it isn't exactly practical to do that all the time and that assumes that the target knows what measures are being used and can adequately compensate for all of them. Also, once the system is built, it requires many $3 masks and rocks and body suits and heels, etc and adds considerable extra time costs to evade. It makes lif
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Unless they do skeletal tracking and can tell by your gait who you are.
And at least criminals would have to change clothing every 10 minutes to evade detection. And if you see someone walking down the street with a mask on... time for a friendly close inspection on foot.
Expect a lot of soldiers to pay double attention to anyone wearing a mask.
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Margin of error... (Score:1)
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Scary question: at what level of certainty do they let the guy piloting the UAV push hellfire missile button based on this platform's "identification" of an enemy?
I think the idea of this is "higher then currently employed". For example, an analyst tracking a target that walks under a bridge and out the other side might be confident enough to give the go-ahead but assisted by a software bio-metrics package the analyst can be warned that based on height calculations the guy that just came out on the other side of the bridge isn't the target being tracked unless he just grew 3 inches.
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Trust us (Score:5, Insightful)
It's for military combat only. We'd never use it on our own people*
* unless those people are assembled in mass numbers representing a potential for threatening movement or when regarded by law enforcement as a public safety concern or causing a public disturbance.
Re:Trust us (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wall Street Protests?
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but given that police are already begging for(and getting) UAVs of their own.
We don't need any exotic new scenarios to be sure it will be used against us; a hundred years ago the National Guard made it clear by turning machine guns on striking workers. They'll never shy away from violence, whether it's overseas or right here at home. Anything to keep the profits coming and above all, the system intact.
Once they feel threatened, it only takes a minute for them to show their true face.
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a hundred years ago the National Guard made it clear by turning machine guns on striking workers
And 41 years ago, they turned the guns on unarmed students.
If you consider non-lethal weapons, then you can look at the videos earlier this week of police pepper-spraying people for the crime of standing on the sidewalk looking like a protester.
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But the potential for abuse of this technology is just chilling. It can be used to identify rioters... but to a repressive regime, people assembling in public to protest the regime would be classified as "rioters".
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Yep, and the whole concept of a "free speech zone" is just insane. We won't restrict your free speech...unless it's here, here, or here. Hiding protesters in places where almost no one sees them isn't how the TPM restrictions are supposed to work, but it's often the case.
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As for this BS of bailing out billionaires, name one.
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SSDD.
First it will be used on "the enemy".
Then on "dangerous criminals".
Then on "senior citizens, children, and others at risk". For their own good, of course.
Then...
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Never enough. (Score:3)
And from the right-wing lovers of the constitution, and haters of government spending: Complete silent obedience.
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When it comes to the military industrial complex, there is never enough money that can be dumped down the hole. And from the right-wing lovers of the constitution, and haters of government spending: Complete silent obedience.
Sad but true. "Keep the government out of our medicare." "Don't tax the job creators."
But any time something is spun towards the big bad terrorists, they'll be silent when we dump billions to accomplish nothing and even bend over and spread them (literally).
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walk without rhythm it won't attract the worm (Score:2)
see subject!
I think I know where this is going (Score:3)
They use a pagerank like algorithm to analyze the person's social network (links in an out) and the person's actions (page content) and then compute a "TerrorScore" much like a google "Page Rank". They then knock these guys off one by one with UAVs. The whole thing runs unattended. Nobody knows exactly why people get killed, that's just the algorithm. They can't turn it off either unfortunately, because then the terrorists would win! Quick, somebody write a screenplay :).
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A terrorists wet dream. (Score:1)
A programming glitch swaps the 'Dangerous/Auto Kill' tags in the hunter/killer drone targeting databases using these technologies with the 'Officers/Senators' ones.
Technology, making more high tech ways for idiots on your side to kill you.
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Lame text to defeat the lameness filter. Slashdot, make friends with acronyms wouldaplzjusthisoncekthxbai?
I'd love to see this go FOSS (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been thinking about just sticking some cameras on my property and creating a database of every face they see and when, and every license plate that drives by.
I figure everybody else is doing it, so why not private individuals.
Post it all in one big free database online, and now everybody knows where everybody lives and works and what they're doing. Maybe the solution to privacy is for nobody to have it. Since, right now the only thing I can be sure of is that ordinary people don't have it. Equality would keep everybody more honest. Social norms/etc would just have to change.
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Watchbird by Robert Sheckley (Score:2)
Hey Dr. Tim Faltemier, (Score:2)
Adversarial Intent, really? (Score:1)
Two Iraqi farmers minding their own business :
KABBOOOOM! Flying crops, cows, and Iraqi farmers' body parts.
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Intelligence cannot create intelligence equal to or greater than itself.
Have you never heard of intelligence fusion? Or even basic probability, statistics, and confidence modeling? There's a whole science based around enhancing the confidence of uncertain information.