Augusta Chronicle

Face-recognition machines coming to airports

October 25, 2002
By Peter Franceschina/South Florida Sun-Sentinel

In the next few days, Palm Beach International Airport will become the first airport in Florida to deploy a controversial new surveillance technology capable of scanning the faces of passengers to determine whether they are known terrorist suspects.

The search for better safety measures in post-Sept. 11 America has been a boon to the purveyors of some cutting-edge technologies that only a few months ago were barely a blip on people's radar screens.

These new technologies raise troubling questions for some about the future, whether Americans will be willing to surrender what they once cherished as their private lives in the name of national security. What concerns privacy advocates isn't so much the idea of being photographed in an airport but the broad possibilities for misusing the powerful technology.

Police in Tampa already have tried out a system that spies on residents out for dinner and drinks in an entertainment district. There were protests when it went up last summer. But Britain has accepted a proliferation of surveillance cameras in the past few years.

Still to be determined is how effective the face-recognition systems will prove in the real world. Palm Beach County, where many of the Sept. 11 hijacking suspects laid low, is a proving ground.

While the companies tout their systems as the future for detecting evildoers, the technology still has serious flaws, said Samir Nanavati, a partner at New York-based consulting firm International Biometric Group. The hype surrounding facial recognition doesn't live up to its current capabilities, but it can enhance airport security, he said.

"It is a useful component, but it is by no means the magic bullet that is going to solve this problem," he said.

The biometric technologies - which use algorithms to identify individuals through retinal or iris scanning, fingerprints or face recognition - are now front and center in the debate over public safety vs. privacy.

For a three-month test at the airport, the cameras and computers will seek out only airport employees who had their images scanned into the database. The idea is to measure how well the system identifies the employees as they go about amid travelers.

"It will allow us to have an evaluation of the performance of the equipment, of our own employees passing by this camera," said airport spokeswoman Lisa De La Rionda. "What is the future? We will probably be able to better answer that at the end of the 90 days when we have the results."

Visionics, a small company with headquarters in Jersey City, N.J., manufactures a technology called FaceIt, which maps an individual's face using its unique characteristics. Only 14 points of comparison out of 80 are needed to match a photograph encoded in a database.

Face-recognition technology came into the American consciousness after last year's Super Bowl, when it was revealed that Tampa police used the opportunity to search for wanted criminals by scanning the faces of 100,000 fans.

There were 19 matches, but no arrests were made. Tampa police in June installed a FaceIt system in Ybor City to try to match faces of about 30,000 people in their database to people on the sidewalk. The American Civil Liberties Union, which strongly opposes such systems, found that in its limited use, the system didn't identify anyone in the database but did make a number of false matches.

There is no easy answer on the accuracy of face-recognition systems, said Visionics spokeswoman Frances Zelazny. "There are many factors. It is not a simple answer."

One crucial factor is the quality of images in the database and those taken by the cameras, Zelazny said. Someone could thwart the system by making it difficult for the camera to take a picture.

"If you don't have a cooperative subject, it makes finding a face very difficult," said Nanavati, of the International Biometric Group.

A February 2000 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the system is less effective the farther a person is turned away from the camera. Systems failed to detect the same person 43 percent of the time when the images were taken more than a 1 1/2 years apart.

"Time affects how well these systems are going to perform," Nanavati said.

There's another obstacle to the technology. "For one thing, we don't have images of all the terrorists," Nanavati said.

Palm Beach International's system is being put in place this week, said Vincent Vento, CEO of ATC Systems Integrators. He hopes to have it set up for testing late this week. Visionics donated the equipment for the test because the company wanted to try it out at a mid-sized airport.

"This is real world testing in a real world environment," he said.

The ACLU has a number of privacy concerns, said Randall Marshall, legal director for the ACLU of Florida.

"What we are setting up is the ability to track individuals' movements, for whatever reason government wants to do it," he said.

Most people already accept that they are subject to video surveillance at ATMs, convenience stores, banks, gas stations and many other businesses. Visionics spokeswoman Zelazny said the face-recognition technology is no more intrusive and can provide a safety net in airports.

Marshall draws a parallel between face-recognition technology and the inhuman world portrayed in George Orwell's 1984, in which people are controlled by a totalitarian government and its technology.

"What we have here is a rush toward things that may make the public feel good but which in fact may do nothing," he said. "One does not have to be an alarmist to see a government that is tracking law-abiding citizens' movements."

David Callahan, research director for Demos, a New York City research and advocacy group that works on issues involving democracy and economic opportunity, makes a distinction between surveillance in an airport and on a street corner.

"Invasion of privacy you would not tolerate on the street - you would be outraged - you accept when you are getting on an airplane because everybody wants to be safe when they fly," he said.

But he has raised the specter of a future world where more and more private information falls into the hands of corporations, marketers, private detectives and others who have an interest in tracking an individual's life.

"I don't think we have thought it through to start putting these cameras everywhere," he said. "It is the question, 'Where is this going to end up?' If every 7-Eleven in America is linked up to high-speed digital connections, then that is putting unprecedented surveillance technologies in the hands of a large corporation in a way that could start to freak Americans out."