Police to begin using facial & Iris recogntion Apps. which can also read fingerprints.

American Police Beat:
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, dozens of law-enforcement agencies from Massachusetts to Arizona are preparing to equip their officers with controversial hand-held facial-recognition devices as soon as this month.

The device in question is an iPhone app and associated device made by BI2 Technologies of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

With the device attached to an iPhone, an officer can take a picture of a face from up to five feet away, or scan a person's irises from up to six inches away. Officers can then use that data to do a search to see if there is a match with a database of people suspected of terrorism or to see if they have criminal records.

The new gadget even collects fingerprints.

Like a lot of police gear, the device is a military hand-me-down to domestic law enforcement.

The portable technology has mostly been limited to military uses in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify possible insurgents.

The product rollout has raised concerns among some privacy advocates. They say there are questions to be answered about whether or not using the device in certain ways would constitute a "search" that requires a warrant.

Cops, unlike civilians, are free to record any individual in a public space.

But if a law enforcement officer stops or detains someone, then different standards apply, and officers might be required to get a warrant.

Due to the fact that facial and iris-recognition technology hasn't been put to the test of court challenges, it remains "a gray area of the law," says Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University with an expertise in search-and-seizure law.

BI2 says it has agreements with about 40 agencies to deliver roughly 1,000 of the devices, which cost $3,000 apiece.

Animetrics Inc., a facial-recognition company based in Conway, N.H., that focuses on the law-enforcement and security industries, launched a free app for the iPhone called FaceR Celebrity that allows users to match their face to a star. The application, which has been downloaded about 30,000 times, uses the same facial-recognition technology deployed by local law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, says Animetrics CEO Paul Schuepp.

Indeed, the fast-growing pervasiveness of face-identification technologies
raises privacy concerns. Privacy advocates question what information these
companies collect about people and how it could be used. The new technologies raise fears that face information about people could be used for surveillance, and wonder whether consumers would be able to opt out of the tracking. Just this week, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh unveiled a study that revealed they could identify people in photos about one-third of the time using face-recognition technologies.

The application makers say that they don't collect or store face information
about their users.

Links:
http://apbweb.com/policy-updates-news-menu-25/1995-with-new-gadgets-cops-will-never-forget-a-face.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903885604576488273434534638.html