NSA Wants a Good Look at Your Photos (Aren’t You Flattered?)

Have you been wondering if
maybe the National Security Agency is just a huge version of
AdultFriendFinder cobbled together by people who know how to work
the federal budgetary process? It just could be. The
latest evidence comes in the form of revelations that the spook
agency is gathering huge numbers of images from around the world
for use in its facial recognition program.

According to James Risen and Laura Poitras at
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.

Facial recognition technology has become something of a law
enforcement must-have in recent years. Cops in the San Diego area
wander around
taking snapshots of passsersby with their smartphones to match
to the federally subsidized
Tactical Identification System. One officer told reporters he
uses his “spidy senses” as a judge of when to try to make a
match.

Separately, the FBI
plans to have 52 million of our mugs in its own Next Generation
Identification database by the end of 2015. (You’re surprised that
the feds have competing and duplicative facial recognition
programs?)

The
specifications for that FBI system allowed that it “shall
return an incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time.” Which
makes you wonder just how accurate the NSA system is in correctly
matching suspected international do-ers of bad deeds. If a state or
federal database wrongly tags a suspect, your door may end up off
its hinges during a wrong-house raid. Drones, by contrast, don’t
even have the good manners to stand on the back of your neck while
they figure out where to pass the blame.

State and local agencies raid drivers license databases and
social media for their images, while the feds have access to that
plus huge databases of passport photos, visa applicants, and the
like. The NSA apparently pulls in images from private
communications, including video, too. Yes,
those videos, through the Optic Nerve program.

A federally funded AdultFriendFinder, after all.