Surveillance state: NSW intensifies citizen tracking. The system was signed off in October last year by state and territory governments. Some now need to pass their own laws to authorise state government agencies like NSW Roads and Maritime Services to release photographs and other information to the new federal system. Half of the operation and maintenance costs will be shared by states and territories, on a population basis. There are two parts to The Capability. A Face Verification Service (FVS), which is a one-to-one image-based match of a person’s photo against a government record such as a passport.
This is already operational. The second part is the Face Identification Service (FIS), which is a one-to-many, image match of an unknown person, such as a suspected criminal, against multiple government records to help establish their identity. Access to the FIS will be limited and was expected to come online this year. Related Article "The Capability does not provide automated or real-time surveillance of public spaces," he said. Chinese school uses facial recognition to make kids pay attention. Australia Aims To Be The First Country To Process Air Travelers Via Biometrics Nationwide. By Nicholas West Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced a plan that could make Australia the world’s first country to implement a nationwide “contactless” system for processing its air travelers.
As The Sydney Morning Herald reports: The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has sought technology that would abolish incoming passenger cards, remove the need for most passengers to show their passports and replace manned desks with electronic stations and automatic triage. Officials are looking to use existing databases coupled with iris scans, facial recognition and fingerprint scans as the final phase of a five-year project called “Seamless Traveller” that is slated for completion by 2020. Head of Australia’s border security, John Coyne, highlighted the rapid acceleration of biometric technology, as well as government access to the massive processing power of Big Data which he noted “is increasing exponentially.” Hat Tip: Technocracy.News Image Credit: Pixabay.com. Cameras know you by your walk.
By Jim Giles EVERYONE knows how easy it is to recognise a friend or family member from their walk – even from a distance. But despite more than three decades of research, using gait analysis as a biometric has never taken off. Until now, perhaps. Recent advances in the accuracy of automated gait recognition suggest the technology could soon form the basis for a new generation of security systems.
Gait analysis has attracted attention because of the shortcomings of other biometric security techniques. Iris scans and face recognition require reasonably high-quality images, for example. In one leading technique, known as the gait energy image, computer vision techniques use video images of a person to create a blurred silhouette that is characteristic of their gait. Advertisement Another problem that has troubled researchers is finding a way to identify a person captured at different camera angles, and Daigo Muramatsu and colleagues at Osaka University in Japan are now working on a solution.
Half of Americans in ‘virtual lineup’ face-recognition police programs – study — RT America. To help identify a culprit, police may ask people to volunteer to be in a line-up. But that scenario is fast becoming obsolete, as more than 117 million Americans are now part of face-recognition software programs used by law enforcement, a study finds. Whether they like it or not, about half of all Americans are pictured in a digital “perpetual line-up,” composed of databases handled either by the FBI or local police departments, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law Center finds in a new study published Tuesday.
According to “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” about one in four police departments have access to face recognition technology, but only one of the 52 which acknowledged use of the software had legislative approval, the Miami Herald reported. Furthermore, just one police agency shared evidence its use had been audited. READ MORE: Twitter drops Geofeedia over claims it helped police spy on protesters. Your insurer wants to know everything about you. Loaded: 0% Progress: 0% Four things health insurers would like to track How much would you reveal about your personal health for a cheaper insurance premium? Suddenly insurers want to know everything about you. When you go to bed. I believe there will be people who will be disadvantaged. Speeding down the highway in your Mitsubishi Lancer to get to work on time, they're coming along for the ride.
Technology has opened this window on your life for insurers. Life companies, general insurers and private health providers are keenly watching the development of smart technology such as Fitbits and Garmin Vivofits as they ramp up the use of these devices to improve how they price risk. There is even talk of devices implanted under your skin. The dollars these companies deal in mean any edge is valuable. So it's a no-brainer that they are are scouring for ways to monitor your data, and reward good behaviour if you're safe, hearty and hale. Others are not so quick to agree. On your life. Government Requesting DNA From "Private" Databases - #NewWorldNextWeek. Facebook photos could be taken for use in national biometric database – officials | Australia news. Images harvested from social media sites such as Facebook could be part of the latest counter-terrorism measures, the attorney general’s department has confirmed.
In September, the justice minister, Michael Keenan, announced that the federal government would spend $18.5m to develop the national facial biometric matching capability, known simply as “the capability”. Under questioning in Senate estimates on Tuesday night, senior officials from the attorney general’s department said that photos could be pulled from social media sites and used in the new system. The Greens senator, Scott Ludlam, asked: “Is there any law that would prevent the system from ingesting [photographs] from publicly available sources like social media sites?”
Andrew Rice, the assistant secretary of the department, answered: “It’s possible that still images out of these kinds of environments could be put into the system. That would be a choice for the users of the system.” On the Creation of Giant Voiceprint Databases. Defcon 18 - Facial Recognition: Facts, Fiction, and Fsck-ups. Nationwide Biometric Database Goes Live. Despite the FBI already having been sued by privacy groups amid plans for a nationwide biometric database, it has officially gone live.
The Next Generation Identification system will eventually include iris scans, facial recognition, and a range of other biometric identifiers that are collated into a central database for real-time sharing at all levels of law enforcement and government agencies. As suspected, what began as a border control initiative has now expanded to include everyone. As the video report below highlights, this billion-dollar program was spearheaded by Lockheed Martin, and will invariably include images of even non-suspects in one great sweeping dragnet of digital surveillance.
The fact that Lockheed Martin was involved in developing the program should signal heightened concern given their integral role in drone technology. As this database is being rolled out, drones are set to take to American skies in much greater numbers by 2015. Transcript by Jake Godin. Deepface : closing the gap in human level performance in face recognition. Facecrook: NSA storing your facial web images, millions intercepted daily.
Reuters / Mario Anzuoni The National Security Agency is collecting millions of images of people through its international surveillance network to be implemented in a number of other facial recognition programs, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Read Snowden’s comments on 9/11 that NBC didn’t broadcast Thanks to rapid advances being made in the field of facial recognition technology, the NSA is much better equipped to “exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, video conferences and other communications,” according to an article in the New York Times, co-written by Laura Poitras, who, together with Glen Greenwald, are the only two journalists to have received the leaked NSA documents.
The NSA has the capacity to intercept “millions of images per day,” as well as some 55,000 “facial recognition quality images.” AFP Photo / Angela Weiss The NSA is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications. N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images. One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him.
These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies. It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions. Photo The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.
Never Forgetting a Face. To work, the technology needs a large data set, called an image gallery, containing the photographs or video stills of faces already identified by name. Software automatically converts the topography of each face in the gallery into a unique mathematical code, called a faceprint. Once people are faceprinted, they may be identified in existing or subsequent photographs or as they walk in front of a video camera. The technology is already in use in law enforcement and casinos.
In New York, Pennsylvania and California, police departments with face-recognition systems can input the image of a robbery suspect taken from a surveillance video in a bank, for instance, and compare the suspect’s faceprint against their image gallery of convicted criminals, looking for a match. And some casinos faceprint visitors, seeking to identify repeat big-spending customers for special treatment. Dr. “As a 5- or 6-year old boy, seeing identity as a foundation for trust, I think it marked me,” Dr.
What Will You Do When You Can No Longer Buy Or Sell Without Submitting To Biometric Identification? In some areas of the world, payment systems that require palm scanning or face scanning are already being tested. We have entered an era where biometric security is being hailed as the “solution” to the antiquated security methods of the past. We are being promised that the constant problems that hackers are causing with our credit cards, bank accounts, ATM machines and Internet passwords will all go away once we switch over to biometric identification. And without a doubt, we have some massive security problems that need to be addressed. But do you really want a machine to read your face or your hand before you are able to buy anything, sell anything or log on to the Internet? Do you really want “the system” to be able to know where you are, what you are buying and what you are doing at virtually all times?
Biometric security systems are being promoted as “cool” and “cutting edge”, but there is also potentially a very dark side to them that should not be ignored. Be Sociable, Share! O'Farrell backs school fingerprinting. NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell has backed the right of schools to use fingerprint scanners to track whether kids are skipping class. Several public schools are using hi-tech scanners to record when students enter and leave school across the state.
"I think that's a good thing because it reflects our policy of 'local schools, local decisions', which enables schools to make decisions that meet the needs of their communities," Mr O'Farrell told reporters on Friday Asked whether he had any privacy concerns, the premier said the decision to use the technology was ultimately a matter for individual schools. "If school communities want to make decisions, whether about the opening hours of schools or whether about these sorts of issues, I'm happy to back them," Mr O'Farrell said. Civil Liberties Australia have concerns over fingerprint scanning students. "Schools and education authorities must put robust rules in place for how technology is used and administered, and the data safeguarded.