Google, Facebook and others do facial recognition since decencies, and
use it for worldwide formating, Snowden as also revealed how agencies,
US and world-wide, use those datas. China is very late compared to US
practices.
https://switching.social/
https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
JN
Le 08/07/2019 à 04:10, Christopher Leslie a écrit :
Dear Friends,
A news report from the Washington Post gave me pause today (quotes below).
Pundits and scholars are quick to evoke China’s effort to automate
surveillance, often mixing science fiction with rumors, as some sort of abyss
at the end of a slippery slope we must avoid for the moral benefit of humanity.
How many times have you read news reports that surveillance in China is a
danger to free people everywhere because once the Chinese perfect it, it will
be exported to other countries? Yet, according to the WP, for the past five
years, U.S. federal law enforcement has been making hundreds of thousands of
requests for photographs and other biometrics from state agencies.
Nettime has not been immune to this scapegoating. Mentions of surveillance on
this list have, for instance, induced readers to share links about China and
the so-called social credit system (which seems to be a vague proposal, not an
established technology, if you read the stories carefully). Meanwhile, the U.S.
has been the home of law enforcement’s use of this kind of technology without
any approval from elected officials, even for investigation of petty crimes.
Maybe it was hard for journalists to hear about this use of technology … but
why? Maybe they are so distracted by the official story about China as the
ideological enemy that they cannot hear the facts being uttered closer to home.
It is not as if there is no discussion about this topic in the U.S. For
instance, the Yale Privacy Lab, for a few years now, has offered information
about surveillance in New Haven (see
https://privacylab.yale.edu/surveillance-map.html).
Is it possible for a critical discussion about media to take place when
scholars are obsessed with China as a bugbear? To me, it seems like people who
worry about surveillance within the U.S. are labeled as cranks and offered
tinfoil hats while people who complain about surveillance in China, even if
they don’t really know much about it, are lauded as protecting liberty.
Chris
= = = = = =
FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for
facial-recognition searches
By Drew Harwell
July 7 at 3:54 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/07/fbi-ice-find-state-drivers-license-photos-are-gold-mine-facial-recognition-searches/
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a
facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos
without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.
Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over
the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law
researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal
investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into
the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure. …
Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such
a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are
criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone
surveillance tool. …
Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned facial recognition into
a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000
facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV
databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the
records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships
with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000
facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and
other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having
returned a “possible match.” …
The records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of
modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to
track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and
petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an
email from a federal agent to a local contact, the records show.
“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” said Jake
Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government
Oversight. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but
these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The
FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state
DMVs.”
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