DHS begins using facial recognition technology at sporting events claims its for research
Richland, Washington - Hockey fans at the season opener of the Tri-City Americans will have a chance to help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security improve its facial recognition capabilities.
Video will be taped by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at the Sept. 21 game in a portion of the Toyota Center in Kennewick.
It is planned to be used by the U.S. government to test the capabilities of facial recognition software that is available or in the prototype stage.
Eventually, state-of-the-art facial recognition technologies could be used to identify terrorists and criminals in public areas, according to the national lab in Richland. The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate works to make technology available to agencies ranging from local police offices to the U.S. Border Patrol, Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
PNNL previously has collected video at the Toyota Center for work with the Department of Homeland Security. But past video either has not captured members of the public or has been too low resolution to identify faces.
Hockey fans who don’t want to be on the video will be given options to avoid the cameras. (won't that flag them as "suspicious" by law enforcement)
Spy cameras on street corners and in public places, could be used to monitor the movements of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.
No video will be shot in the arena and signs will be set up in the corridors around the arena to direct people to areas without cameras. PNNL staff will be available to answer questions.
PNNL has purchased 46 seats at the arena to make sure walking areas are clear for those who don’t want their video captured, said PNNL engineer Marcia Kimura. Information explaining the project also has been mailed to season ticket holders.
“If they didn’t want to be videotaped, they could very easily not be videotaped,” said Nick Lombardo, a PNNL project manager.
Critics of how surveillance powers are increasingly being abused in light of the plethora of recent NSA scandals probably won’t see facial recognition technology being in the best interests of those who still value privacy.
The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.
DHS’s ‘Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS)’ has no in-built privacy safeguards and that databases of facial profiles may not be limited to just criminals and terrorists.
“Based on the documents that we received, that’s an educated guess or a speculation and not a certainty that’s what DHS intends to do,” said EPIC’s Julia Horowitz
It is strongly suspected that facial recognition cameras are already being used to track people around major cities as part of the Trapwire surveillance program, details of which were leaked last year.
A lawsuit against the FBI filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the NGI program is currently pending. In a complaint filed earlier this year, the EFF wrote that “The proposed new system would also allow law enforcement ‘to collect and retain other images (such as those obtained from crime scene security cameras’ and from family and friends) and would allow submission of ‘civil photographs along with civil fingerprint submissions that were collected for noncriminal purposes.”
"NGI will result in a massive expansion of government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes," EFF staff attorney Jennifer Lynch said in a statement at the time. "Biometrics programs present critical threats to civil liberties and privacy. Face-recognition technology is among the most alarming new developments, because Americans cannot easily take precautions against the covert, remote and mass capture of their images."
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/09/12/2570354/tri-city-hockey-crowds-to-be-taped.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/dhs-to-test-face-scanning-cameras-at-tri-city-hockey-game.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/us/facial-scanning-is-making-gains-in-surveillance.html?_r=0
DHS report suspicious activity behavior :
https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/posters_all.pdf
http://www.nationalterroralert.com/suspicious-activity/
DHS's biometric Biometric Optical Surveillance System or BOSS should concern every American:
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/08/dhs-biometric-crowd-scanning-project.html
The NYPD is spying on citizens at sporting events:
The question now hangs in the air:Were the NYPD youth soccer leagues as well as the teams that compete for the “NYPD Cricket Cup”—yes, there is such a thing—set up explicitly for the purposes of surveillance? Was the trust of hundreds of families who signed up their children for these leagues violated in the name of intelligence gathering? Were these leagues just a way to practice a more effective form of racial and ethnic profiling? Sarsour certainly thinks so. “The NYPD created these spaces,” she said. “When I think about it I get goosebumps. It is so outrageous. What parent would think if you were part of a Little League or Police Athletic League that the police would be tracking your kids on the basis of their ethnicity? When the leagues started we thought they were trying to engage our community through sports. We were wrong.”
These families have the right to know whether the NYPD specifically set up these leagues for the purposes of keeping tabs on a sports-loving community or if it just found a rich opportunity for surveillance once everyone was organized to play. Its community outreach and media divisions have still not returned my requests for comment. If and when they do, we will share their response.
“What we know is that they did set up soccer and cricket leagues from youth to adults,” said Matt Apuzzo, co-author of the new book Enemies Within, “We also know that they encouraged their detectives to join the adult cricket and soccer leagues. I don’t know if we can say they created the leagues for the express purpose of surveillance as opposed to outreach. But we do know from their own documents that they do see these sports leagues as an opportunity to keep tabs on conversations. Either way, we certainly can say that any effort at actual legitimate community outreach can be undermined by the surveillance aspect because it makes people suspicious of motives.”
Whether the leagues themselves were part of a master plan or clumsy happenstance doesn’t really matter, of course, to the communities that feel their trust was betrayed. Rinku Sen, President of the Applied Research Center, described the using of sports leagues to spy on kids as “abusive.” She also made the point to me that the NYPD’s unwelcomed entry into this space exacts a particularly serious price. “Coming out of a regional history fraught with religious and national conflict, sports are one arena in which Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims and others have been able to come together, especially in the diaspora. The NYPD spying brings a layer of suspicion into this world that has otherwise been an important place to build trust and camaraderie.”
This “trust and camaraderie” doesn’t develop, as so many of us know, just from playing sports but also sitting around and watching sports. This space has also, we can say with certainty, been violated by police infiltration and surveillance. Apuzzo’s Enemies Within reveals what the NYPD calls its “Sports Venue Report.” This thirty-eight-page memo, compiled by the NYPD’s “Demographics Unit” lays out the sports playing and viewing locales frequented by “29 ancestries of interest.” It shows that the NYPD has ventured deeply into the community spaces where people of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent gather to hang out and watch a game. As its own report reads, “The Unit has identified the sports of cricket, soccer and billiards as the primary sports within the communities. After the initial research was concluded, members of the unit identified locations were the sports are played locally and locations where fans gather to view the sporting events. The result was that fifty-five (55) locations were identified. Upon the identification of the locations, members of the Demographics Unit conducted field work, in the form of visits, to these locations to ascertain the required information.”
Deepa Kumar, a professor at Rutgers and author of the book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. She said, “When you think you may have agents visiting what you think are safe spaces, people understandably are hesitant to say what they really think, particularly if they are Arab or South Asian. One student told me that she had developed a sleep disorder because of the stress of continuing to stand up and speak out, knowing that what she says is being recorded and could be used against her. Others have told me that they have had to grow up quickly and learn how to spot informants in their groups. This is not what young people should have to worry about.”
It also hurts grassroots activists and resistance movements. Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said to me, “The NYPD’s domestic spying operations illegally collected information about law-abiding Muslim New Yorkers who frequent mosques, or schools or sports bars. But they’re not the only ones impacted: their neighbors, customers, classmates and friends from other communities—such as their drinking buddies, or Occupy Wall Street participants—were also unconstitutionally monitored, even well beyond New York…. The FBI and NYPD have used the Stasi’s tactics to recruit informants across the northeast to entrap, intimidate and sow distrust among innocent Americans from all walks of life.”
http://truth-out.org/news/item/18805-not-a-game-how-the-nypd-uses-sports-for-surveillance
Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/09/12/2570354/tri-city-hockey-crowds-to-be-taped.html#storylink=cpy