I saw this article at boston.com yesterday. A man named John Gass received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles telling him that his license had been revoked. Gass made some frantic calls, had a hearing and realized what happened. A facial recognition system had pulled his picture from a database of millions of state driver’s license images and identified his as a possible fraud.
Gass, after ten days of hearings, managed to get his license reinstated. The computer thought that he looked like another man. Gass is unfortunately not alone. Last year, in Massachusetts alone, over 1000 individuals were wrongly tagged by the facial recog system, because they looked like other people.
“We send out 1,500 suspension letters every day,’’ said Registrar Rachel Kaprielian, who says the system has been a powerful weapon to fight identity fraud since it was installed in 2006 but that it is not without problems. “There are mistakes that can be made.’’
Massachusetts does not keep records on how many licenses have been wrongly revoked. Gass has filed a lawsuit and his lawyer estimates that it is at least in the hundreds.
Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue.
At least 34 states are using such systems. They help authorities verify a person’s claimed identity and track down people who have multiple licenses under different aliases, such as underage people wanting to buy alcohol, people with previous license suspensions, and people with criminal records trying to evade the law.
The system looks at each driver’s license photograph stored in the state’s computers, mapping thousands of facial data points and generating algorithms that compare the images to others in the mathematical database, said State Police spokesman David Procopio. The software then displays licenses with similar-looking photographs - those with two or more images that have a high score for being the same person. Registry analysts review the licenses and check biographical information, criminal records, and drivers’ histories, in part to rule out cases with legitimate explanations, such as drivers who are identical twins.
“No one is angry about the work they have to do to track fraud, but once they saw the error, even the words sorry would go a long way. But I got nothing,’’ he said. “The overwhelming attitude was they couldn’t care less.’’
Kaprielian said the Registry gives drivers enough time to respond to the suspension letters and that it is the individual’s “burden’’ to clear up any confusion. She added that protecting the public far outweighs any inconvenience Gass or anyone else might experience.
“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege,’’ she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too.’’
This sounds very Big Brotherish to me. Mr. Gass is guilty until proven innocent, the burden resting squarely on his misidentified shoulders. He had to jump through numerous hoops to clear himself according to the full article, because it is easier for his state to use a technology that misidentifies one or two percent of the population base and then makes it that individual's problem than to worry about turning an individual upside down. Your turn to eat the shit sandwich, Mr. Gass. And besides, you are probably guilty of something. No one would apologize to the man, he was just an inconsequential smudge in the machine. Kaprelian's justification for the state's Orwellian tactics and then her glib disavowal of any responsibility and the horror of identity theft makes this Massachusetts democrat my stooge of the week.
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If my memory serves correctly, facial recognition was used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to identify young protesters during the foment in Iran two years ago. They combed Facebook in order to ascertain people's identities. If the technology is in the wrong hands, lots of bad things can happen. Especially by our governments.
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Facebook recently raised hackles by enabling face recognition on their zillions of users without notifying them. Hard to opt out when you don't know that you have been opted in. Read about it here. Raises all sorts of privacy questions. Maybe a great tool for pedophiles, especially pedophiles with access to the name and address databases.
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Google has its own Facial Recognition company this week since it bought PittPatt. See what the company that vows not to do evil has up its sleeves.
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Civil liberties are like gas prices that go up but never really come back to the original base line. Once they have been ceded, you never get them back. We casually discard them at our peril.
