Politech facecam archive: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=facecam ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 21:30:01 -0500 From: Barry Steinhardt <BSteinhardtat_private> To: declanat_private Cc: jstanleyat_private, ewhitfieldat_private Subject: ACLU Feature on Face Recognition Declan, Many FC list members may remember the use of video surveillance and the biometric face recognition at last year's Super Bowl. This chilling combo is now being contemplated for use at airports. The ACLU has just posted a special web feature on face recognition. An excerpt appears below. The full feature can be found at http://www.aclu.org/features/f110101a.html Barry Steinhardt The terrorist attacks of September 11 have led airports and other institutions to look for new ways of improving security, many of which the American Civil Liberties Union supports. However, we believe that the use of intrusive new surveillance technologies must be subjected to a process of thoughtful and deliberate scrutiny. In particular, a technology's intrusiveness must be balanced against the security benefits it would bring. The burden is on the technologists to demonstrate that their solutions will actually be effective in making us safer. On solution that is under consideration at a number of airports is to conduct widespread video surveillance of airport patrons and to use "face recognition" technology - dubbed "Ferret" by the Department of Defense - in an effort to check the identity of passengers. But it is abundantly clear that the security benefits of such an approach would be minimal to non-existent, for a very simple reason: the technology doesn't work ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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