Technocreep (4 page)

The researchers acknowledge that neither of the commercial facial recognition systems they tested is ready for routine deployment in law enforcement applications, largely because of issues with different poses, resolution, and factors as simple as wearing sunglasses. However, you can be sure that work on improving facial recognition for law enforcement is moving full speed ahead.

Soon after the Boston Marathon bombings, Joseph Schuldhaus, vice president of information technology Technology for Triple Five Group, which runs the sprawling West Edmonton Mall and as well as Minnesota's Mall of America, suggested that video analysis is going to become even more important in fighting crime. “I think we're going to see the further miniaturization of algorithms at the edge of the device,” he told IT World Canada editor-at-large Shane Schick, “and what I mean by that is when the video comes into the camera these algorithms are going to help law enforcement better process that information, much like when you use Shazam to identity a song.”
28

Schuldhaus clearly believes that the public safety and security advantages of surveillance cameras outweigh the risks they pose to privacy. Others are not so sure; but this has not stopped cameras, both public and private, from proliferating around the world.

According to a report in
Forbes
, “In the United States, it is estimated that there are 30 million surveillance cameras, which create more than four billion hours of footage every week.”
29
They are also sprouting a lot of intelligence and new functionality. Their images are processed, in real time, to highlight suspicious packages at airports, to discover people who go where they are not supposed to be, and, even, as proposed by some Japanese researchers, to catch kids smoking in the schoolyard.
30

For many years, a conference called Computers, Freedom, and Privacy featured a post-conference tour of the host city's surveillance cameras. I vividly remember going on the tour of San Francisco in 2004. We stopped after we found about a hundred cameras peering down at unsuspecting people in Union Square and other public venues.

Dedicated volunteers from the New York Civil Liberties Union walked around Manhattan in 1998 noting camera locations, producing what they called “a comprehensive map of all 2,397 surveillance ­cameras in Manhattan.” When they re-did the same study in 2005, they “found 4,176 cameras below Fourteenth Street, more than five times the 769 cameras counted in that area in 1998.”
31

They are fighting an uphill and ultimately hopeless battle. Modern surveillance cameras can be tiny, totally wireless, solar powered, and cost a few dollars. Good luck spotting one of those pointing out of a window or hiding in the pore of a ceiling tile.

It is hard to deny that the presence of video cameras in public places has deterred some criminals and solved or prevented certain crimes. In one case, a bandit robbed a local wholesale club, and was caught on the surveillance camera. A simple scan through the membership records turned up a match for his photo, yielding his name and home address.

The heavy camera coverage of New York's Times Square is credited with helping police thwart the plot to detonate a bomb there in 2010. However, just as in the Boston Marathon bombings, a tip from a citizen also played a major role. Once, while watching a camera pointed at Times Square, I saw an entire drug deal transpire in plain sight.
32
I managed to capture several screen shots and use it as an example of people who obviously did not realize they were being watched. Or who did not care.

Do cameras really earn their keep as crime fighters? The best data on this comes from the United Kingdom, which has had extensive camera coverage for over a decade. The results are not as encouraging as camera advocates would like us to believe. A 2009 Scotland Yard report estimated that only one crime was solved per year per thousand cameras.
33
The resulting bad press for cameras was met with claims in 2010 by the London Metropolitan Police that they were actually able to solve six crimes a day with camera evidence.
34
Commentators scoffed that most of them were probably jaywalking.

A recent scientific review of various crime prevention techniques looked at thirty-six U.K. studies, ten in the U.S., and one in the Netherlands. These researchers found that “there is little evidence that the following reduce fear of crime: street lighting improvements, closed-circuit television (CCTV), multi-component ­environmental crime prevention programs, or regeneration programs.”
35
Many securities cameras are, as Bruce Schneier famously puts it, “security theatre.”
36

A number of motor vehicle registration operations now run an applicant's photo through facial recognition to see if a driver's license has already been issued to the owner of that face. In British Columbia, Canada, the government-run monopoly auto insurer, Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC), uses facial features including the distance between the eyes as well as cheekbone geometry to root out fraud. Their photo database is of great interest to law enforcement, but there are some thorny privacy issues there.

On June 15th, 2011, downtown Vancouver was engulfed in riots after the home team lost the final game in the Stanley Cup hockey series. People were stabbed, police officers were injured, and there was extensive property damage. Digital devices helped to feed the ­violence, as rioters reacted to the presence of media and personal cameras. However, digital photos also played a key role in tracking down the offenders.
37

British Columbia's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, had to decide if using the ICBC's motor vehicles registration database to try to identify offenders would violate the province's privacy laws. She ruled that it was acceptable for the police to provide candidate images to ICBC for possible matching. However, a court order would then be required for the matched-up results to be revealed to the police.
38

Police in Vancouver also put out an appeal to the public to assist in the massive post-riot investigation. They set up a special website,
riot2011.vpd.ca
, with photos of “people who are alleged to have committed criminal offences.” The public was offered a simple “click and identify” system to provide information.

Did it work? In July 2013, two years after the riot, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) announced that they had recommended charges against 352 alleged rioters for 1,204 offenses. The accused were as young as fourteen years old. As an example, the report describes three high school friends from Victoria, British Columbia, who “were captured on video committing multiple crimes throughout the night, including break-ins to four separate businesses.” VPD Superintendent Dean Robinson says they are not yet finished ­hunting down suspects, and “those rioters out there that believe they can wait us out and hide with anonymity, we will find you and you will be brought to justice.”
39

There are a number of reasons why the Vancouver Police Department turned to the public for help. One is just good public relations—hooligans trashing the city's downtown does not sit well with most law-abiding citizens. Also, some of the demonstrators had no criminal record, and may have been too young to be in the motor vehicles system.

While the surveillance camera and cell phone videos used by the VPD were certainly helpful, they are nowhere near the state-of-the-art in surveillance camera technology. A remarkable photo of the crowd on Georgia Street taken a few hours before the riot was posted by a company called Active Computer Services. It is actually a composite image of 216 high-resolution photos stitched together, and it reveals an uncanny level of detail.
40
You can zoom in from the massive scene to identify individual faces with ease. Active Computer Services has a particularly telling motto on their home page (“I spy with my little eye … ”) and they tout the “forensic science” applications of their technology.

According to Charlie Savage in the
New York Times
, scanning for a wanted face in a crowd is still a tough computer science problem.
41
However, Savage writes, progress is being made: the U.S. government–backed Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS) works with two cameras, equipped “with infrared and distance sensors. They take pictures of the same subject from slightly different angles. A computer then processes the images into a ‘3-D signature' built from data like the ratios between various points on someone's face to be compared against data about faces stored in a watch-list database.”

The Department of Homeland Security ran a test of BOSS in September 2013, using it to scan about six thousand fans attending a hockey game in Kennewick, WA. The faces of twenty volunteers were placed in a database. The challenge was to find them among the hockey fans, at a distance of fifty to one hundred meters, quickly enough so that if any were terrorists they could be located and intercepted. The results have not yet been disclosed.

Several commentators have noted that this type of surveillance system is often launched for crime-fighting or anti-terrorism purposes, but people quickly find other uses for it, including commercial ones. The day is not far away when the kid selling soft drinks at a stadium may pass you a note that says your car's lights are on, having linked your face in the crowd to your license plate. They might even figure out a way to charge you for that service.

While this BOSS technology is not yet operational, experts say it will be deployed within five years. Privacy advocates suggest that we need to make rules now about how it can be used in the future, or we will simply default to ubiquitous surveillance.

The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. State Department are very enthusiastic about facial recognition. According to Brian Merchant, writing for
Motherboard
, “the Department of State currently runs one of the largest facial recognition operations in the world. It uses a database of 75 million photos or so to cross-check visa applications.”
42

While we hear a lot about the prevalence of cameras in the U.S. and the U.K., another country is on track to become the world leader in video surveillance. China is already estimated to have one surveillance camera for every forty-three of its citizens.
43
I have been taken into a secret monitoring center in a major Chinese city where operators watch a gigantic wall of monitors covering every major intersection. The Chinese have a significant home-grown surveillance camera industry, ironically boosted by the United States, which slapped export restrictions on surveillance technology in 1989. That fueled China's own research and development in this field.

Private use of facial recognition technology is also growing daily. The contours of this expansion were neatly summarized by
Motherboard
's Jordan Keenan, who wrote, “If you use social media, have a driver's license, shop in stores, and walk in public, chances are good that your faceprint will soon be assigned to your identity, and eventually be used on a daily basis to build a profile of you at a level of detail you hoped would never be possible.”
44
Improving facial recognition is also the reason you have to maintain such a stern expression for your passport and visa photos.

On August 8, 2000, a woman wearing a toque and dark sunglasses entered a Safeway store near downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada, pushing a toddler in her shopping cart. She wrote a note addressed “To Whoever finds my son,” wheeled him into the cookie aisle, and simply left the store. According to media reports, the two-year-old kept saying “where is my Mommy?” but she was nowhere to be found.
45

Police were called, and appealed for the public's assistance on the television news. When the mother did not come forward, Alberta's Minister of Children's Services ordered publication of this photo, shown here at reduced quality to preserve privacy.

Figure 5. Woman in Safeway with baby. Government of Alberta.

The baby's mother was soon tracked down in the State of Washington. But how was Safeway able to supply that picture? I ­visited the store and found the inconspicuous camera posted over the entrance. Sure enough, everyone who entered was being captured on video.

Back in 2000, this was a shocking discovery for me. It seemed unnecessary for a grocery store to capture the arrival and departure of every customer on video. What else were they watching? Now, it is hard to imagine an urban space that is not within the reach of a surveillance camera. It's not just that they're capturing your image: it's what might they might do with it, now and in the future.

Just what are all those surveillance cameras doing when they are not taking pictures of suspected terrorists, shoplifters, or mothers who abandon their kids? They are watching us, creating a potentially eternal archive of everything we do. The same technology that allows law enforcement to zoom in on bad guys can impinge on the privacy of law-abiding citizens in some very creepy ways.