Add this to the latest
revelation about secret government programs that have come to light
thanks to Edward Snowden (what
a year it’s been since the contents of his thumb drive, iPod
Nano, or whatever he used to transfer his cache of documents).
Turns out that the NSA is hoovering up huge amounts of pictures and
images of people from every possible source, the better to
identify, track, and capture terrorists, persons of interest, and,
well, just about everyone else on the planet.
From
The New York Times:
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge
numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts
through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated
facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has
grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has
turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in
emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other
communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials
believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way
that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the
documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive
ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been
disclosed.The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including
about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate
into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents
obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While
once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now
considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as
important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other
intelligence targets, the documents show.
Back in the October 2002 issue
of Reason, David Kopel and Michael Krause of Colorado’s
Independence Institute wrote about
facial-recognition technology (FRT). At that stage, FRT didn’t
work very well (if at all) and was spooky enough to most people
that its widespread implementation seemed unlikely.
Ultimately, the future of face scanning will depend on the
political process. There is almost no chance that the American
public or their elected officials would vote in favor of tracking
everyone all the time. Yet face scanning is typically introduced
and then expanded by administrative fiat, without specific
legislative permission.So there is a strong possibility that future Americans will be
surprised to learn from history books that in the first centuries
of American independence citizens took for granted that the
government did not and could not monitor all of their movements and
activities in public places.
Of course, if FRT is conducted in secret, uses social media and
Web sources in addition to surveillance cameras, and is used “only”
on “terrorists,” well, it may be hard to see how politicians would
ever vote against such a system. Or, even scarier, that
they would even be required to vote on the matter.
Here’s a scene from Blade Runner
(1982), in which the replicant named Leon gets touchy about his
mother while being undergoing a high-tech test to establish his
humanity (or lack thereof). This story reminds me of that for some
reason. Blade Runner is set in 2019. What does it mean if
the only thing director Ridley Scott and crew got wrong about the
future is an inability to anticipate vaping?
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