The Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s plan to tag and track us all is going swimmingly,
from a creepy, voyeuristic perspective, according to federal
documents. Released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF), the records reveal plans to stick the mugs of almost one in
six Americans into the
Next Generation Identification (NGI) program’s facial
recognition database by next year.
Combined with the
more than 120 million faces in state databases and the feds’
tolerance for a remarkably high false-positive rate, your chances
of getting fingered for somebody else’s misdeeds are getting pretty
good.
According to Jennifer Lynch, Senior Staff Attorney with the EFF,
the FBI plans to have 52 million photos in its database within
months:
The records we received show that the face recognition component
of NGI may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. By
2012, NGI already contained 13.6 million images representing
between 7 and 8 million individuals, and by the middle of 2013, the
size of the database increased to 16 million images. The new
records reveal that the database will be capable of processing
55,000 direct photo enrollments daily and of conducting tens of
thousands of searches every day.
Those 52 million images will include a planned 4.3 million faces
photographed for non-criminal purposes, but included solely for
identification purposes. Searches will be run against all records
in the database, no matter how they were obtained.
The sources for the images are varied, and a bit vague.
- 46 million criminal images
- 4.3 million civil images
- 215,000 images from the
Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) - 750,000 images from a “Special Population Cognizant” (SPC)
category - 215,000 images from “New Repositories”
“The FBI does not define either the ‘Special Population
Cognizant’ database or the ‘new repositories’ category,” Lynch
warns. “This is a problem because we do not know what rules govern
these categories, where the data comes from, how the images are
gathered, who has access to them, and whose privacy is
impacted.”
Also, identification is a tad dependant on getting it right, and
that’s not a certainty. Last year, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center
extracted a separate set of documents from the FBI revealing
that federal specifications on the Next Generation Identifiication
system facial recognition software allow for tagging “an incorrect
candidate a maximum of 20% of the time.”
Well, so long as it’s no more than one in five, I guess that’s
OK.
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