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Ongoing tests of facial recognition technology continue to show that the technology is baffled when people wear masks of the sort that have become widespread (and even mandatory) in some places during the current pandemic. Forty-one newly tested algorithms—some of which were designed to compensate for face coverings—show the same dramatically elevated error rates as those examined earlier.

The tests have important implications for privacy at a time when surveillance technology is growing increasingly pervasive—but so is mask wearing. These studies are of interest, too, in an era of political instability and growing concern over law enforcement excesses, when people may have a strong interest in making identification of opponents and protesters difficult for the powers-that-be.

The tested facial algorithms are additions to those scrutinized by the U.S. government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in a report issued in July. “Now that so many of us are covering our faces to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, how well do face recognition algorithms identify people wearing masks? The answer, according to a preliminary study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is with great difficulty,” NIST summarized its findings at the time. “Even the best of the 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms tested had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching digitally applied face masks with photos of the same person without a mask.”

While an error rate of 5 percent at the low end may not sound like much, that’s under near-ideal conditions. The algorithms were tested in one-to-one settings, of known subjects, like you might find at a passport checkpoint. And most of the systems suffered much higher error rates when dealing with covered faces.

Because of the growing popularity of face masks even before the pandemic, and their booming and often mandated usage since COVID-19 spread worldwide, facial recognition companies have raced to develop algorithms that can identify people despite coverings. NIST plans to test such technology in the future to see if it delivers as promised. But this latest round of algorithms isn’t part of that study.

“These algorithms were submitted to NIST after the pandemic began,” Chad Boutin, a science writer for NIST, told me by email. “However we do not have information on whether or not they were designed with face coverings in mind. The research team plans to analyze the data and issue its next [Face Regnition Vendor Test] report in the next few months, and will continue to report results on new submissions on the face mask webpage.”

But some of the 41 newly examined algorithms are very clearly intended to compensate for face mask usage.

Dahua, a Chinese company, boasts that its facial recognition technology allows for “attributes including gender, age, expression (happy, calm, surprised, sad, and angry), glasses, face masks, and beard & moustache, which makes searching and tracking subjects of interest more efficient.” In the NIST test, the error rate of Dahua’s algorithm went from 0.3 percent with an uncovered face to 7 percent with a face mask.

Likewise, Rank One insists that “accurate identification can be achieved using solely the eye and eyebrow regions of the face.” The company’s error rate went from 7 percent without masks to 35 percent with them in the NIST study.

Vigilant Solutions, which is well known for its vast license plate reader network but makes no claims about compensating for covered faces, went from a 2 percent error rate without masks to 50 percent with them.

Some of the products had error rates approaching 100 percent with covered faces, although these were generally less-accurate algorithms to begin with.

Again, these are facial recognition algorithms tested in one-to-one settings of the sort used to confirm an identity to unlock a phone or at an access control point. “Future study rounds will test one-to-many searches and add other variations designed to broaden the results further,” according to NIST.

Even before that future study, however, we know that one-to-many comparison of strangers on the street or in a crowd to databases of images is much more challenging. It can be thrown off by many factors—including age, sex, and race—even when people’s faces are uncovered.

Such “systems tend to have lower accuracies compared to verification systems, because it is harder for fixed cameras to take consistent, high-quality images of individuals moving freely through public spaces,” noted William Crumpler of the Center for Strategic and International Studies earlier this year.

Getting high-quality images is especially difficult when people are actively trying to avoid identification. And while such avoidance is difficult to pull off at a passport checkpoint or when trying to unlock a device, resisting identification is par for the course at a protest or on a sidewalk. Last year, police in the U.K. stopped pedestrians who covered their faces when they approached facial recognition cameras precisely because that was seen as an effort to thwart identification.

Now, governments are simultaneously ordering the public to mask-up in public places under threat of stiff fines and fretting over the resulting impact on surveillance. “We assess the widespread use of masks for public safety could likely continue to impact the effectiveness of face recognition systems even after federal or state mandates for their use are withdrawn,” a Department of Homeland Security notice warned in May.

Given that the algorithms designed to compensate for face masks necessarily rely on the remaining exposed portions of the face—specifically, the eyes and eyebrows—donning hats and sunglasses may be all that’s necessary to curtail the effectiveness of facial recognition technology.

The technology has raised enough privacy concerns that there has been enormous push back against its deployment. Boston and San Francisco are the largest of the U.S. cities that have banned the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies. Early in August, in a decision that could have wide ramifications for the U.K.’s growing surveillance state, a British court ruled against the use of the technology by the police.

The news that facial recognition technology can be defeated by cheap and ubiquitous face masks may well come as good news to Americans in the streets protesting biased and abusive law enforcement, or just in favor of reforming the way police do their jobs. Such news may also be welcomed in a country bitterly divided into hostile political factions. Half of the country is bound to distrust surveillance technology in the hands of whoever wins the November election.

That means large numbers of Americans should be pleased to know that they have a good chance of preserving their privacy with cheap pieces of fabric stretched across their faces.

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“When terror is seen as justified, I think it’s inevitable that something terrible is going to happen,” journalist Nancy Rommelmann told Nick Gillespie last week about the Portland protests she’s been covering for Reason. (Watch excerpts above, or listen to the full-length podcast interview.)

Her pessimism proved prescient: A man was shot and killed in Portland on Saturday, August 29, during a showdown between Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump supporters. This follows the killing of two men and the wounding of a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin during protests of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Things seem to be intensifying in the nation’s capital as well, with D.C. protesters intimidating Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) while walking away from Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, demanding that diners raise fists in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and displaying a guillotine outside Amazon founder Jeff Bezo’s Washington residence.

Rommelmann explains how the protests in Portland, which have already lead to the burning and vandalizing of municipal and federal buildings and many businesses, are fanning out into residential neighborhoods, with demonstrators shining lights into houses in the early-morning hours and demanding that sleeping families “wake up” to racism, income inequality, and other issues.

“If you’re a 22-year-old and you’re home and you’re not in school anymore, and maybe your job has gone away because a lot of jobs were lost in Portland” due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, “you’re looking for identity and you’re looking for people to hang out with,” says Rommelmann, who has interviewed dozens of protestors. “Then you put on an outfit and you go out every night and you feel energized and part of something.”

She worries that as the protests in Portland meet minimal resistance from the city government, demonstrators are becoming emboldened even as they become less focused on specific reforms.

“When the definition of free speech or a peaceful protest starts to become very elastic, when terror is seen as justified, we’ve seen how these things go,” she says. “People justify the things in their mind. They blame the white supremacists of Portland, or the city government, or the cops. And they see what they’re doing as creating some sort of justice.”

Written by Nick Gillespie; edited by John Osterhoudt; thumbnail graphic by Lex Villena.

Protest video by BG On the Scene/Brendan Gutenschwager; Photos: Caitlin Ochs/Reuters/Newscom; Allison Dinner/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Terray Sylvester/Reuters/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Ted Nieters/Polaris/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Amy Katz/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Mark McKenna/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Allison Dinner/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Nathan Howard/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Mark McKenna/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Mark McKenna/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Amy Katz/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom

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So ends the summer without summer movies. For the first time in my lifetime, there were no sequels, no remakes, no reboots, no high-concept thrillers, no animated hits, no big-budget adaptations, not even any superhero movies to be found in America’s movie theaters. That is, of course, because, for much of the summer, those theaters were closed as a result of the coronavirus, and the pipeline of new releases—even those already completed and ready to show—was shut down. 

Even today, as new releases like The New Mutants and Unhinged once again begin to play on big screens, many theaters remain closed, including those in large urban markets such as New York and Los Angeles. And those that are open have been saddled with capacity limits, so when Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, the first studio blockbuster to open in months, hits theaters this week, the seats will remain half empty. 

In one way, summer movies remained slightly alive: on streaming video, particularly Netflix, but also Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, as well as newer subscription services such as Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Peacock. From April to August, Netflix released a quartet of summer action movie stand-ins: Extraction, The Last Days of American Crime, The Old Guard, and Project Power. 

Each was vaguely summer-y in its own way: Extraction, an international beat-’em-up from the fight choreographer behind several Marvel superhero films, also starred Chris Hemsworth, the actor who plays Thor. The Last Days of American Crime was based on a comic book and directed by Olivier Megaton, the guy who directed Transporter 3 and a couple of the Taken films. The Old Guard was a high-concept comic-book-based film about a group of immortal warriors, one of whom is played by Charlize Theron. Project Power was a twist on the superhero picture, about a drug that delivers five minutes of superpowers (and you don’t know what you’ll get until you take it), starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The screenwriter also penned the script for a forthcoming Batman film.

It’s easy enough to imagine any of these casts and concepts opening wide on 4,000 screens and dominating the box office for a week or two. None were part of existing franchises, but all of them had franchise potential (The Old Guard closed with a scene strongly hinting there was more to come). The budgets involved weren’t on the scale of a typical summer movie, which these days often costs $150 million or more, but The Old Guard, Extraction, and Project Power both came in above $65 million; these were far from shoestring productions. And while none of them were based on properties with huge cultural cache, all of them had some recognizable element—a star, director, or source material you might have heard of before. 

Yet none of these movies quite managed to worm its way into my cinematic consciousness the way even a B-rate blockbuster often does: The Old Guard, the best of the bunch, boasted a steely performance from Theron and a couple of better-than-average action sequences, but even those scenes felt like echoes of the stylized action of John Wick and The Matrix. Project Power‘s concept felt sorely underdeveloped, an idea in search of a story, or even a single great scene; it coasted on Jamie Foxx’s natural charm. Extraction had a cleverly stitched-together single shot action scene in the middle, and Hemsworth’s considerable glower, but came across more like a stunt reel than a movie. The Last Days of American Crime was bloated, grim, and virtually unwatchable, a crude hodgepodge of pointless action wedded to an interesting premise—the implementation a government system to prevent all crime—that went nowhere. 

You can easily imagine any of these films as traditional big-screen affairs, but not in the form they arrived in; all of them felt like they needed a little more time, a little more care, in the development phase. They needed stronger characters, more warmth and charm, smarter extrapolations of their concepts. They were all good ideas for movies, but they weren’t particularly good films. Something was missing—the electric combination of thrills and novelty, comfort and familiarity, awe and absurdity, that the best summer movies trade in effortlessly, and that even stumbling efforts tend to aim for. 

These weren’t real summer films; they were simulated versions of the real thing, a poor man’s substitute for the sort of studio offerings that typically show up in theaters a dozen times or more from April to August. In many ways, I was grateful to have them (well, other than American Crime), because the alternative probably would have been no new movies at all. Yet they also served as a reminder of what I, and anyone who goes to the movies during the summer, was missing. 

Movies have been a constant in my life for almost as long as I can remember. I typically see at least 50 a year in the theater, and in normal times, it’s rare for me to go as long as two weeks without spending some time in a cineplex. Even as a teenager, I organized my summers around the studio release schedule, building plans weeks in advance to see the latest offerings as soon as possible after they opened. It’s now been almost six months since I saw a movie on the big screen. The last time I went this long without seeing a film theatrically, I was probably in grade school. The closure of theaters has thus been a significant disruption to the rhythm of my life: The constant I took for granted was gone. 

What I realized during this summer without summer movies was how much I missed—and how much I value—the endearing and accessible fruits of giant, corporate, studio filmmaking; the splashy, showy competence; the impeccable craftsmanship and simple populist appeal of two hours or so of well-made entertainment, honed and polished in a way that is only possible with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend and decades of institutional experience crafting cinematic confections.

I have complained in the past about Hollywood’s propensity for pretty good movies, for safe bets on familiar ideas, designed to give viewers exactly what they already want but not challenge them in any way. But after this sad and empty summer, I am very much looking forward to being able to make such complaints again.

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Your speech is free; now here’s the bill. The Black Lives Matter protest that Emily Gils organized last month in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, seemed to go well. Then Gils, 18, got the bill.

The city wanted Gils to pay $2,500.

This wasn’t a fine for violating any criminal laws or civic codes. Gils had even “notified local officials about the protest” in June and “met with the police chief to iron out logistics,” says WLNY.

The protest itself wasn’t much—a small gathering of people in front of Gils’ home for about an hour and a half, holding signs in support of Black Lives Matter and affordable housing—but Gil said she wanted to do something to show that people in her area cared about the issues. “I would say it went really well,” Gil told WLNY. “We stood there with our signs and people were honking and showing support.”

But the city apparently decided that this event required extra policing—and that Gils should have to pay for the service. The bill she received from city Mayor Mario Kranjac said the fee for was for police overtime pay required because of Gils’ 90-minute front-yard protest.

“I was shocked when I read that I had to pay to exercise my First Amendment right,” Gil told WLNY.

Mayor Kranjac told WLNY the bill was not politically motivated but normal protocol: Englewood Cliffs residents must effectively pay for the right to protest—even on private property—due to a law that requires all protests to receive special police attention and requires citizens to pay for this special protest “protection” and monitoring.

“We made sure that we fulfilled and satisfied our obligation to make sure that they can exercise their freedom of speech and to peaceably assemble,” Kranjac told WLNY. “We always bill…the bicycle race or running race or any other event, where our police are used, including utility work, people pay for the overtime,” he explained.

The city’s (all too common) policy is especially galling when it comes to First Amendment–protected issues like protests. But it’s more broadly ridiculous as well. If a police presence is really required for these normal community activities—and that’s a big if—why isn’t this considered simply part of the normal function of police?

It’s another sad commentary on the state of U.S. policing in 2020. Sting operations of all sorts are considered baseline operations, but people are expected to pay extra for basic peace-keeping.

At least Gils won’t have to pay. After WLNY reported on the bill sent to the teen organizer, the mayor said she wouldn’t have to pay it. “I have researched the issue further with my own counsel and I am hereby rescinding the bill, subject to our Council’s ratification of my action,” he wrote. “I always want to make certain that everyone’s Constitutional Rights are fully respected. We will have to adjust the Borough’s ordinances accordingly.”

FREE MINDS

Congress to vote on decriminalizing marijuana. A U.S. House of Representatives vote on marijuana decriminalization will take place in September, according to Rep. Jim Clyburn (D–S.C.).

The legislation, called the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, would remove marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act, expunge some past drug convictions, and leave it up to the states how to regulate the substance—all of which would be hugely positive steps.

Alas, the bill would also set a 5 percent federal tax on marijuana sales in states that choose to legalize.

FREE MARKETS

Tech worker visas getting harder to come by. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “continues to deny H-1B visas at high rates, including for high-skilled foreign nationals sponsored by many of the best companies in the world,” notes Stuart Anderson at Forbes, pointing to a recent policy brief from the National Foundation for American Policy.

“All the top 25 employers of new H-1B professionals had higher denial rates for H-1B petitions for initial employment in FY 2020 (through the second quarter) than in FY 2015,” the report states. And “20 of the 25 top companies had H-1B denial rates for initial employment at least 10 percentage points higher in FY 2020 (through the second quarter) than in FY 2015. That includes large technology companies such as Cisco and Google.”

QUICK HITS

• Police PR departments are coming under well-deserved scrutiny.

• Colleges are cracking down on returning students who party without taking COVID-19 precautions. USA Today talks with experts who say it’s a bad idea.

• Massachusetts parents are protesting public schools’ new requirement that every student receive a flu vaccine.

• A man in Portland was fatally shot on Saturday night, after a caravan of Trump supporters showed up to protest Black Lives Matter protesters. The “man was wearing a hat bearing the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a right-wing group whose members have frequently clashed with protesters in Portland in the past,” the Associated Press reports. A Portland Police Bureau statement says that “Portland Police officers heard sounds of gunfire from the area of Southeast 3rd Avenue and Southwest Alder Street. They responded and located a victim with a gunshot wound to the chest. Medical responded and determined that the victim was deceased.”

• Three public housing tenants “were never told that their interviews would be edited into a two-minute video clip that would air prominently on Thursday night at the Republican National Convention,” reports The New York Times.

• Polling data suggest “Biden’s electoral prospects and the popularity of Black Lives Matter are not closely linked.”

• California continues to be California:

Newsom says he will sign Sen. Jerry Hill's bill to ban the retail sales of flavored tobacco products.

— Taryn Luna (@TarynLuna) August 28, 2020

• Just a Chicago Teachers Union local tweeting in support of guillotines:

We are completely frightened by, completely impressed by and completely in support of wherever this is headed. #Solidarity https://t.co/IfsQgJaD1z

— ChicagoTeachersUnion (@CTULocal1) August 27, 2020

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8/31/1995: Students at Santa Fe Independent School District voted to allow a student to say a prayer at football games. In Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Doe (2000), the Supreme Court declared this prayer unconstitutional.

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The San Diego police department has issued 82 citations for seditious language since 2013. But after an investigation by local media, the police department has ordered officers not to enforce a century-old city ordinance banning such speech. Because such citations are considered infractions, those cited under the law are not entitled to a jury trial or legal counsel. The city attorney’s office is drafting a repeal of the law.

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