Facial Recognition Technologies Will Backfire on Undercover Police and CIA
The other day, I was looking at a surveillance photo of a giant gathering in Canada. There must have been 100,000 people on the main Street, and this was right before the big riots after Canada lost the big hockey game. In this surveillance photo you could zoom-in to each individual and look at their face and it was so vivid, crisp, and clear you could easily recognize everything about the individual, and perhaps close enough to even read the label on their shirt tag had it been open and in plain view. Okay so, let’s talk a little bit about facial recognition technologies.
It would be easy to run every single person’s face, all 100,000 of them on that main street, through a facial recognition technology scanning machine. If you had a supercomputer it could take each one of those images and pit them against all the known pictures of everyone in their country. Then you could then identify each individual by name, Facebook page, and put them at the scene. With a super computer you could do this and put it all into a spread sheet in a few minutes.
Now if you’ll recall in that particular case there was a riot, store windows broken, cars overturned, and bonfires started in the middle of the street. It would be rather easy to catch each of these people. Just as it would be very easy to identify every single person who went to the occupy protests in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, and should I go on?
What I’m trying to say to you is this facial recognition technology is a wonderful tool for the police and the CIA. Unfortunately, it may come back to bite them and let me explain. Let’s say you are with the CIA, and you are undercover in a foreign nation. Let’s assume that; that nation has facial recognition technologies just as we have here, and they catch you on that footage. They can run your picture through a database, and find out that your hometown is in Oklahoma, you went to school in Virginia, and that you work for a certain company which is a CIA front.
That would give you away, and everyone you work with. Are you beginning to see the challenges, and don’t think that other people won’t have this technology such as drug cartels with billions of dollars – they will easily be able to find out who the mole, undercover police, FBI agent, DEA agent, or CIA spy is.
Whereas today, this is great technology, and these are great software tools to catch people doing illegal activity, the authorities should be well advised that everyone else will have this technology sooner than later. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.