The new NGI database will also allow law enforcement to submit public and private security camera photos that may or may not be linked to a specific person’s record. This means that anyone could end up in the database—even if they’re not involved in a crime— by just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or by, for example, engaging in political protest activities in areas like Lower Manhattan that are rife with security cameras.

The Problem of False Positives in Large Data Sets

As the FBI's facial recognition database gets larger and as more agencies at every level of government rely on facial recognition to identify people, false positives—someone being misidentified as the perpetrator of a crime—will become a big problem. As this 2009 report (pdf) by Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna notes, facial recognition performs rather poorly in more complex attempts to identify individuals who do not voluntarily self-identify . . . Specifically, the “face in the crowd” scenario, in which a face is picked out from a crowd in an uncontrolled environment, is unlikely to become an operational reality for the foreseeable future.

(p. 3). The researchers go on to note that this is not necessarily because the technology is not good enough but because "there is not enough information (or variation) in faces to discriminate over large populations." (p.47) In layman's terms, this means that because so many people in the world look alike, the probability that any facial recognition system will regularly misidentify people becomes much higher as the data set (the population of people you are checking against) gets larger. German Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar has noted false positives in facial recognition systems pose a large problem for democratic societies. "[I]n the event of a genuine hunt, [they] render innocent people suspects for a time, create a need for justification on their part and make further checks by the authorities unavoidable.”(p.37)

It appears it will take a few years for the FBI to bring NGI up to its full potential. In the meantime, we will continue to monitor this troubling trend.

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Chowderhead wrote:

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Correct. This isn't a problem if you haven't been downloading Child Porn and stalking around school children.

Chowderhead wrote:

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Correct. This isn't a problem if you haven't been downloading Child Porn and stalking around school children.

Chowderhead wrote:

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Correct. This isn't a problem if you haven't been downloading Child Porn and stalking around school children.

BrassScorpion wrote:

Chowderhead wrote:

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Correct. This isn't a problem if you haven't been downloading Child Porn and stalking around school children.

That is quite naive in the extreme. Apparently, some people didn't read the fine print nor have any idea how the world sadly really works. Once an innocent person has been identified (falsely) as a suspect in a crime their life can be destroyed.

And there are hundreds of documented cases, more than a hundred people have been released from DEATH ROW since DNA testing came along and many more from long, long prison sentences. That's more than 100 innocent people who would have been executed before DNA testing existed and hundreds more who were rotting in prison for something they didn't do. Then there's Richard Jewel, Steven Hatfill, Duke Lacrosse...

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:Chowder, you believe the FBI always has everyone's best interest at heart?

Chowderhead wrote:

BrassScorpion wrote:

Chowderhead wrote:

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Correct. This isn't a problem if you haven't been downloading Child Porn and stalking around school children.

That is quite naive in the extreme. Apparently, some people didn't read the fine print nor have any idea how the world sadly really works. Once an innocent person has been identified (falsely) as a suspect in a crime their life can be destroyed.

If they're aquitted, they don't have to put it on an application.

daedalus wrote:

Chowderhead wrote:

BrassScorpion wrote:

Chowderhead wrote:

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Correct. This isn't a problem if you haven't been downloading Child Porn and stalking around school children.

That is quite naive in the extreme. Apparently, some people didn't read the fine print nor have any idea how the world sadly really works. Once an innocent person has been identified (falsely) as a suspect in a crime their life can be destroyed.

If they're aquitted, they don't have to put it on an application.

Let's hope they have a lawyer good enough to get to the bottom of it. Your public defender won't care.

There are also quite a few things that look at ARRESTS, not CONVICTIONS. Unless I'm mistaken, security clearance comes to mind. You're hosed at that point.

And even then, that still doesn't change the fact that you've spent at least a night in a holding cell and all of your friends and family know that you've been arrested for doing x, whatever horrible and terrible thing that might be. Hell, say it's even an open and shut case, they realize you're not the guy, end of story. They figure it out themselves and let you off a week later into the investigation cause the guy who really did it bought space on a TV station to confess to the world. That still doesn't change the fact that now you've got all of your neighbors remembering that you've been arrested. Acquittal is kind of a Pyrrhic victory when the neighbors call their kids in every time you go mow the lawn.

daedalus wrote:
There are also quite a few things that look at ARRESTS, not CONVICTIONS. Unless I'm mistaken, security clearance comes to mind. You're hosed at that point.

BrassScorpion wrote:. False positives are extremely likely using that system and once an innocent person has been identified (falsely) as a suspect in a crime their life can be destroyed.

Chowderhead wrote:

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:Chowder, you believe the FBI always has everyone's best interest at heart?

Well, no. But honestly, I expect the FBI not to feth up more than the ATF.

And as a Bostonian, I have a renewed sense of faith in them for finding Whitey.

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

Chowderhead wrote:But honestly, I expect the FBI not to feth up more than the ATF.

And as a Bostonian, I have a renewed sense of faith in them for finding Whitey.

The Fourth Paragraph Of the Article wrote:NGI will allow all levels of law enforcement, correctional facilities, and criminal justice agencies at the local, state, federal and even international level to submit and access photos, and will allow them to submit photos in bulk. Once the photos are in the database, they can be found easily using facial recognition and text-based searches for distinguishing characteristics.

AustonT wrote:

Chowderhead wrote:

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:Chowder, you believe the FBI always has everyone's best interest at heart?

Well, no. But honestly, I expect the FBI not to feth up more than the ATF.

And as a Bostonian, I have a renewed sense of faith in them for finding Whitey.

Where did this strange sense that the FBI was less of a group of fethers than the ATF come from? I seem to remember that the ATF entrapped a guy in Idaho. The US Marshals shot his kid, and the FBI shot his wife. A few months later in Texas after the ATF failed to execute a search warrant and started a firefight that resulted in 10 deaths, so the FBI one upped them by assaulting the same compound killing 75.
Since the mid 90s at least they've managed not to feth up on such a grand scale, but to expect them not to be as bad as the ATF. they push the ATF out of the way to say, "this is how you feth up and create a public relations nightmare"

daedalus wrote:Well, if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no reason to worry... right? Right?

I don't need to have something to hide to demand my rights not be violated. But hey that's just me right?

Wow, and you went out of your way to find an obscure one. This is much more current:

AustonT wrote:

Wow, and you went out of your way to find an obscure one. This is much more current:

Obscure and old are not the same.

AustonT wrote:
I don't need to have something to hide to demand my rights not be violated. But hey that's just me right?

dogma wrote:

AustonT wrote:
I don't need to have something to hide to demand my rights not be violated. But hey that's just me right?

In this particular instance, what right is being violated?

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

FRONTLINE asked the question a year ago when we first aired Death by Fire, which rebroadcasts tonight (check local listings). The film examines whether Cameron Todd Willingham deliberately set a 1991 house fire that killed his three daughters. Willingham was executed for the crime in 2004.

But the question has reverberated over the past year, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry seeks the GOP nomination for president. Perry has defended the execution, describing Willingham as a “monster,” and saying in a GOP debate that he’s never struggled with the thought that an innocent person has been executed during his time in office.

At the heart of the debate over Willingham’s guilt is fire science: “A fire does not lie,” wrote the Texas investigators who originally determined the blaze was a classic case of arson. But more than a decade later, fire scientist Gerald Hurst reviewed the evidence and found that the fire could not have been purposefully set. “One might well wonder how anyone could make so many critical errors in interpreting the evidence,” he wrote questioning the original investigation.

Recent developments make it unlikely that we’ll ever get a definitive ruling on Willingham’s guilt or innocence. The Texas Forensic Science Commission [TFSC] was charged with evaluating the case; it concluded in a draft report [PDF] that the evidence used to convict Willingham was problematic. But shortly afterward, the Texas state attorney general ruled that the TFSC did not have the jurisdiction to examine the case. After the attorney general’s ruling, the commission did not feel it could move forward with a definitive finding of wrongdoing.

At the same time, the TFSC reached an agreement with the state fire marshal’s office to review other past cases. But critics say that any review involving current state fire marshal Paul Maldonato might be problematic because he stands by the original findings in the Willingham case.

Differences over arson investigations aren’t uncommon. John Lentini, a leading fire scientist, told FRONTLINE that “the fire investigation community largely consists of people who are firemen. They’re not scientists. They don’t have any formal scientific training. Extinguishing a fire and investigating a fire involve two different skill sets and two different mindsets.”

For more on this divide, and on how fire scientists are trying to better understand arson, take a look at this recent Discover Magazine feature. It traces the field’s history, explains some of the more recent developments in what we know about how things burn, and highlights what’s lacking around the country. In particular:

Most states have no legal requirements for a person to become a fire investigator, although they prefer him or her to take in-person or online training courses and pass rudimentary tests. In some states … a private investigator’s license is enough to give you legal authority to investigate a fire and testify about its origins. In other words, someone who makes his living spying on his clients’ spouses in hotel rooms can become an expert in fire analysis after an optional training period of just a couple of weeks.

Dig Deeper: Read David Grann’s exceptional New Yorker feature on the case, “Trial by Fire,” and Michael Hall’s Texas Monthly story on Ernest Willis, who was sent to death row based on arson evidence almost identical to that in the Willingham case. The only difference? Willis was eventually exonerated.

biccat wrote:

dogma wrote:

AustonT wrote:
I don't need to have something to hide to demand my rights not be violated. But hey that's just me right?

In this particular instance, what right is being violated?

Presumably some right arising from the penumbras formed by emanations of the Bill of Rights.

AustonT wrote:
Yes the extension of the rights specified in the 4th amendment to be secure in my person from warrantless surveillance. I'm not even sure it fits a constitutional argument, I just feel it does so I said so.

dogma wrote:

AustonT wrote:
Yes the extension of the rights specified in the 4th amendment to be secure in my person from warrantless surveillance. I'm not even sure it fits a constitutional argument, I just feel it does so I said so.

It is a significant stretch to consider general surveillance footage (ie. not surveillance footage that was explicitly directed at a single person) a "search." Such a broad interpretation of the 4th Amendment would probably also call into question the Constitutionality of patrolling police officers.