FBI launches nationwide facial recognition system

There is always a fine line between maintaining security and respecting privacy.  For security to work you have to give up a little bit of privacy, in the case of criminals that can mean giving up a mugshot and a copy of their fingerprints.  This is an expected outcome for those individuals and is accepted by society. 

The problem starts when privacy is no longer respected in an attempt to find criminals who are trying to hide or are good enough not to get caught.  The result, non-criminals get caught in the crossfire and are often victims of mistaken identity.

According to New Scientist, facial recognition systems have reached the point where they can match a single face from a pool of 1.6 million mugshots/passport photos with 92% accuracy, in under 1.2 seconds [PDF]. In the case of automated, biometric border controls where your face and corresponding mugshot are well lit, the accuracy approaches 100%. Likewise, where DNA or iris records exist, it’s a very expedient way of accurately identifying suspects.

It would seem that before long privacy will be a thing of the past.  There will be naked pictures of us at the TSA and the FBI will have faces of ever American searchable at a moment's notice.  Of course for that information to be useful it must contain meta data such as "who it is"

The author and Zuckerberg might be on to something, next thing you will know Calvin Klein will start making stylish hoodies lined with copper mesh.

Of course the real question most enthusiasts will want to know is.  Does the FBI still use LGA775 or have they finally upgraded to CyberPowerPC based Sandy Bridge Extreme systems using the latest watercooling options from Thermaltake backed by a SSD RAID array? or will they fire up an Android tablet and store their person data in the cloud??

Related Web URL: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/135665-fbi-laun...