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- The Boston Globe
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- Your face is on its way to becoming your "fingerprint"
- for accessing ATM machines, entering the workplace, checking in at airline
ticketing counters and even getting you into your own computer.
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- Instead of punching in an easily forgotten series of
letters or numbers, or digging through a thicket of plastic cards in your
wallet to fish out an ID, you may soon turn toward a closed-circuit TV
camera to get you into your workplace or gain access to an ATM machine.
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- In less than a second, a face-recognition program will
scan your features while it electronically riffles through millions of
stored "faceprints" to find the proper match and signal an OK
- or a flashing warning sign that the face it's scanning isn't yours.
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- What makes it all possible is artificial intelligence
software that can extract from a video image the unique pattern of irregularities
in the human face, and compare it with facial images stored in a data bank.
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- These programs mimic the way the human brain recognizes
a face. That is, when a video camera captures a face, the programs electronically
analyze the distances between various parts, or landmarks, of the face.
Because every face has its own distinct pattern, the information enables
the programs to distinguish one individual from another.
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- Facial landmarks are on distinctive structures, such
as the eye sockets, the bridge of the nose or the cheekbones, explains
Joseph Atick, a former mathematical physicist who heads Visionics Corp.
of Jersey City, N.J., the maker of a leading face-recognition program called
FaceIt.
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- The face has 60 landmarks, "but it only takes 14
to reconstruct" an individual's distinctive facial pattern, Atick
said.
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- While face-recognition methods may make it easier for
banks and employers to identify you, they have another large and growing
application that many find troubling: The programs, when used with automated
closed-circuit TV, or CCTV, cameras and zoom lenses, become powerful surveillance
tools.
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- Civil liberties activists worry that the technology will
be used to monitor the movements of ordinary citizens and might be unfairly
focused on political activists or minorities.
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- "It has very frightening consequences that we have
only begun to explore," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director
of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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- For starters, he said, the technology could "make
it impossible to maintain anonymity in society, so that even the most innocent
of our movements and activities will be subject to tracking by the public
and private sectors."
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- In commercial use since 1997, the technology is used
for spotting known card sharks in U.S. casinos, catching repeat shoplifters
in England, and checking for known terrorists in international airports.
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- Both CCTV and face-recognition applications are already
used by law enforcement officials in Britain, where high-tech surveillance
by the government is much more accepted than in the United States.
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- Officials in Newham, a borough of East London, have adopted
Visionics' FaceIt system to check people in the streets against a database
of known criminals. In one instance last December, the system was used
to identify troublemakers hanging around a soccer stadium before a big
match. And Newham officials say the system has significantly reduced crime
there.
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- "We don't regard ourselves as 'Big Brother,' "
said Bob Lack, who manages security technology for the East London borough
of Newham, where the cameras watch an inner-city area. "We're more
like a friendly uncle and aunt watching over you" to prevent muggings
and robberies, he said.
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- Last week, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Home Secretary
Jack Straw visited Newham to see its anticrime surveillance in action as
they promoted a new government initiative aimed at reducing crime in Britain
over the next five years. The government has given Newham a grant to expand
and upgrade its CCTV face-recognition system, said Tim Pidgeon, head of
European business development for Visionics.
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- Atick, the Visionics president, said: "FaceIt attempts
to balance individual privacy rights with society's larger expectation
of public safety."
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- And, he noted, face-recognition technology "is blind
as a bat without a database behind it." Meaning: If you aren't a known
lawbreaker, the system will just discard your image.
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- But critics aren't reassured and they are calling for
regulation of high-tech surveillance.
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- "The technology is developing at light speed, but
the law that governs its use is not developed at all," said the ACLU's
Steinhardt.
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- Among his fears, he said, is cameras recording everyone
present at a political rally - and identifying them by matching their captured
images to, say, photos stored by departments of motor vehicles.
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- "Once you create these databases you can expect
they'll be used for a whole host of other purposes," Steinhardt said.
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- So far, high-tech surveillance - at least in the hands
of governmental agencies - has found strong resistance in the United States.
A proposal by the police department in Oakland, Calif., to install face-recognizing
TV cameras in that city was withdrawn in 1997 after the ACLU and other
critics protested. The city attorney, too, held that the system would violate
constitutional privacy protections.
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- Still, US society seems to be more tolerant of surveillance
technologies in the hands of the private sector than the government - the
reverse of the situation in Britain.
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- In several major casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere,
for example, the technology has been installed to identify known card sharks
and cheaters.
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- Security personnel who watch casino play from an overhead
"eye in the sky" previously had to flip through a book of photos
if they thought they saw a cheater at work and wanted to identify him or
her. But Jeff Jonas, president of Systems Research & Development in
Las Vegas, said that the FaceIt face-recognition system can make the process
much faster and more accurate; however, he added, it doesn't always work
unless the person is in a certain position and is illuminated with strong
lighting.
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- Face-recognition technology is just one branch of the
science called biometrics - the identification of people by their unique
features. Among its tools are those that measure hands, laser devices that
scan the eye's iris, and devices that analyze voice patterns, scan the
ear, and even record patterns of heat from a person's body.
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- The FaceIt system grew out of mathematical research that
Atick and others conducted at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
The trick was to write programs that could read the landmarks or "nodal
points" on a face. A major challenge, he said, was to adapt the software
- which originally could be run only by $25,000 computers - to personal
computers.
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- Along the way, Atick founded Visionics and headed development
of its FaceIt system, which was launched in 1997.
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- A rival faceprint system developed at MIT's Media Lab
is licensed to Viisage Technology in Littleton, Mass. Its program measures
128 different points on the face, according to Viisage president and chief
executive officer Thomas Colatosti.
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- The Viisage system is being used at Foxwoods Casino in
Connecticut and in the state Department of Transitional Assistance to make
certain people don't file under multiple names for welfare benefits, Colatosti
said. The company also produces Massachusetts' drivers licenses with a
photo ID, and is working on a pilot project involving ATM machines, he
said.
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- In perhaps the most sweeping law-enforcement application
of face recognition, the Visionics system is being used with a database
in Florida that shares criminal and terrorist information with Interpol,
the organization that coordinates international police operations.
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- "It's a fantastic concept," Atick said. He
said an officer taking video photos live at a crime scene, for example,
can send the images instantaneously to the Florida database that contains
millions of photo records.
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- Richard Norton, executive director of the International
Biometric Industry Association in Washington, said his group is well aware
that the new technology can both invade the privacy of and protect people
at the same time.
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- "We are sensitive that people are going to say,
'What's the government really doing with this technology?' " Norton
said.
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- The industry, he said, is prepared "to tolerate
intelligent regulation on this topic."
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