[Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself !]

http://youtu.be/BrtGSEwfIJY

Scan materials or physical objects. Get instant relevant information to your smartphone. Food, medicine, plants, and more.

Out of the box, when you get your SCiO, you’ll be able to analyze food, plants, and medications.

For example, you can:

Get nutritional facts about different kinds of food: salad dressings, sauces, fruits, cheeses, and much more.
See how ripe an Avocado is, through the peel!
Find out the quality of your cooking oil.
Know the well being of your plants.
Analyze soil or hydroponic solutions.
Authenticate medications or supplements.
Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself !

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-sixth-sense-a-pocket-molecular-sensor-fo

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a "driver's license for the internet."

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

The goal is to put to bed once and for all our current ineffective and tedious system of using passwords for online authentication, which itself was a cure for the even more ineffective and tedious process of walking into a brick-and-mortar building and presenting a human being with two forms of paper identification.

The rub is that online identity verification is heaps more convenient for citizens and cost-effective for government agencies, but it's also fraught with insecurities; federal and state governments lose billions of dollars a year to fraud, and that trickles down to taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the technology for more secure next-gen authentication exists, developed by various tech firms in the public sector, but security groups have had a hell of a time implementing any of them on a broad scale. Enter the government, which proposed the national ID strategy to help standardize the process using a plan called the "identity ecosystem."

The vision is to use a system that works similarly to how we conduct the most sensitive forms of online transactions, like applying for a mortgage. It will utilize two-step authentication, say, some combination of an encrypted chip in your phone, a biometric ID, and question about the name of your first cat.

But instead of going through a different combination of steps for each agency website, the same process and ID token would work across all government services: from food stamps and welfare to registering for a fishing license.

The original proposal was quick to point out that this isn't a federally mandated national ID. But if successful, it could pave the way for an interoperable authentication protocol that works for any website, from your Facebook account to your health insurance company.

There's no doubt secure online identification is a problem overdue for a solution, but creating a system that would work like an all-access token for the internet is a scary can of worms to open.   

To start, there's the privacy issue. Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program "radical," "concerning," and pointed out that the plan "makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online."

And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn't be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that's shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.

Post-NSA revelations, we have a good sense for the dystopian Big Brother society the EFF is worried about. As the organization told the Times, at the least "we would need new privacy laws or regulations to prohibit identity verifiers from selling user data or sharing it with law enforcement officials without a warrant."

Then there's the problem of putting all your security eggs in one vulnerable basket. If a hacker gets their hands on your cyber ID, they have the keys to everything.

For now, this is all just speculation. The program is just entering a test phase with select state government agencies only (there are currently plans to expand the trial out to 10 more organizations.)

But it's not far-fetched to think we're moving toward a standardized way to prove our identity in cyberspace the same way we do offline.

The White House argues cutting down on inefficiencies and fraud would bolster the information economy. In an era where we have cars that drive themselves and flying robots delivering beer, you have to wonder how much longer people are going to put up with standing in line at the DMV for four hours to hand a teller (with a taxpayer-paid salary) a copy of your birth certificate and piece of mail to prove you are you.

If an analysis of the pilot programs in Michigan and Pennsylvania find the centralized ID saves time and money and spares us the DMV line, privacy advocates are going to have a hell of a fight ahead of them.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-white-house-wants-to-issue-you-an-online-id

[Gender: Is it a Social Construct or Biological Inevitability?]

http://time.com/84286/you-can-smell-someones-gender-says-science/


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Gender: Is it a Social Construct or Biological Inevitability?

CHULA VISTA, CALIF. — A series of lawsuits filed in recent months in federal courts along the U.S. border with Mexico highlight what advocates say are a growing list of complaints against two U.S. agencies that have expanded rapidly amid the clamor to secure the nation’s borders.

In one lawsuit, centered on events in Chula Vista, Calif., a Border Patrol agent is accused of leaping on the hood of a car driven by a mother of five and shooting her dead. She was unarmed. The agent had been fired from his previous job as a sheriff’s deputy for a variety of misconduct.

In a second case, a Customs officer in Brownsville, Texas, violently pushed a disabled woman to the ground. She had a miscarriage the next day. Border officers also had to call firefighters to remove handcuffs that allegedly had bound her wrists too tightly.

For a third woman, her return to the United States was intrusive and painful. She was pulled from a line at an El Paso, Texas, border crossing, apparently on the suspicion that she was carrying drugs. She was handcuffed. Over the next six hours, agents escorted her to a hospital, where they oversaw the probing of her anus and vagina, forced her to take a laxative and then watched as she moved her bowels. When no drugs were found, they ordered her to submit to an X-ray and a CT scan.

When the ordeal was over, the officers asked her to sign a consent form before they allowed her to return to her home in New Mexico. When she refused, the hospital billed her thousands of dollars for the procedures.

Critics say the lawsuits, all three filed by U.S. citizens, are part of a pattern that’s become endemic to the nation’s efforts to secure its southern border. In addition to complaints that U.S. Border Patrol agents have used deadly force when their lives were not at risk _ agents have killed 21 people since the beginning of 2010, most of them unarmed migrants _ agents from the two federal agencies that monitor the borders stand accused of mistreating American citizens.


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/04/30/226084/as-border-security-expands-complaints.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1

[Brazil's] leftist president, Dilma Rousseff, opened the conference by declaring: "The participation of governments should occur with equality so that no country has more weight than others." The Russian representative objected to "the control of one government," calling for the United Nations to decide "international norms and other standards on Internet governance." Last week Vladimir Putin called the Internet a "CIA project" and said "we must purposefully fight for our interests."
Authoritarian regimes want to control the Internet to preserve their power. "National sovereignty should rule Internet policy and governance," the Chinese representative said. "Each government should build its own infrastructure, undertake its own governance and enforce its own laws." The Saudi Arabian delegate said: "International public policy in regard to the Internet is the right of governments and that public policy should be developed by all governments on an equal footing."
Even nominal supporters of the existing multi-stakeholder model embraced the end of Internet self-governance. The delegate from India declared a greater role for the world's governments "an imperative that can't be ignored." Neelie Kroes of the European Commission said: "The Internet is now a global resource demanding global governance."
Philip Corwin, a U.S. lawyer who represents Internet companies, noted that 27 of the first 30 speakers at NetMundial were from governments or U.N. agencies—at a "meeting supposedly conceived to strengthen the private-sector-led multi-stakeholder, consensus-based policy-making model."

We've heard constant promises that the as-yet nonexistent international body that will take over ICANN will not be dominated by these authoritarian governments, but they certainly seem to think they'll be running the show.  As I've noted since March, many of the ostensibly "private" parties involved in the "multi-stakeholder" model are actually extensions of their all-powerful governments.  And the rest of the world simply does not have the same understanding of free expression that the America of 2014 does... which is saying something, because America 2014 Edition doesn't have the same understanding of free expression that America 1984 Edition did.
The Journal's conclusion is absolutely correct: "President Obama should revoke the plan to abandon the open Internet.  The ugly spectacle of countries jockeying to control the Internet is a timely reminder of why the U.S. should never give them the chance."

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2014/04/29/As-expected-authoritarian-governments-line-up-to-control-the-Internethttp-online-wsj-com-news-articles-SB10001424052702304518704579523342997462478

[James Kottak was convicted of insulting Islam, raising his middle finger, and being under the influence of alcohol while in transit at Dubai airport.]

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Newspapers in the United Arab Emirates are reporting that the American drummer for the rock band Scorpions has been sentenced to one month in jail after being convicted of offensive behavior in Dubai.

The government-backed National newspaper reported Tuesday that James Kottak was convicted of insulting Islam, raising his middle finger, and being under the influence of alcohol while in transit at Dubai airport.

The Gulf News daily says he was arrested April 3 en route from Russia to Bahrain, where the German band was scheduled to perform at a Formula One race. Kottak was a no-show at the April 5 concert.

The newspapers say Kottak admitted to drinking but denied other charges.

The Scorpions' manager did not respond to requests for comment. Kottak's local lawyer couldn't immediately be reached.

http://www.myfoxny.com/story/25378179/reports-scorpions-drummer-jailed-in-dubai



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Strange. And I thought being on drugs, alcohol and raising the middle finger all the time were part of Rock & Roll!!!!!!!!!

That’s the premise of the new book “Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State” by longtime political activist and five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who contends that such a left-right alliance is not just the stuff of imagination but is actually emerging.

“On Capitol Hill, I'm seeing more and more in Congress, left and right,” Nader told “The Fine Print.” “It was a vote in the House over a year ago over the NSA snooping, it almost broke through … so we're beginning to see formulations that once they click together, they're unstoppable.”

Nader was referring to a vote in July 2013 over a measure known as the Amash Amendment that would have curtailed the National Security Agency’s ability to collect bulk phone call data. The measure narrowly failed by 12 votes, in part due to a concerted White House lobbying effort on Capitol Hill.

Nader expects there is going to be a growth of left-right alliances in Congress, pointing to the war on drugs and bank regulatory efforts as areas of possibly confluence. On the war on drugs, Nader said that the United States should entirely decriminalize and move to regulate all drugs in the same way alcohol and tobacco are regulated.

“Tobacco leads to the deaths of over 400,000 Americans, hard drugs lead perhaps to 8,000,” Nader said. “People who are addicted should not be viewed as criminals. They should be a health problem, the way it is in alcoholism and tobacco.”

But Nader qualified that the success of his envisioned left-right alliance is dependent on strong leaders. He said Sen. Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, has the potential to be a leader for the alliance, but added that he thinks the Kentucky Republican has certain shortcomings as a leader.

“He’s a mixed bag, you know, he's evolving. He's broadening his issues that he's talking about and they’re beginning to resonate,” Nader said. “On the other hand … he has problems dealing with people.”

Paul’s “problems” aside, Nader predicted that he will be “the one to beat” in 2016 in a Republican contest that is also likely to also include Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. He also made it clear what he does not want to see in 2016: A Jeb Bush - Hillary Clinton matchup.

“You want a dull campaign? Try Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in 2016,” Nader said. “It'll only be exciting for people who are interested in dynasties and personalities.”

Nader said he never tells anyone not to run for president but that he would oppose a Hillary Clinton presidential bid.

“She's turned into an international militarist,” he said. “She's far more hawkish than Obama.”

Nader suggested that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D – Mass., would be a strong alternative to Clinton, with her understanding of “corporate power,” but said that Warren won’t run because Clinton has “dried up” the prospects for other Democratic contenders to compete.

Nader has his own vision for who he’d like to be president and has even put forward a proposal of 20 billionaires who he encourages to run for president – a list that includes media mogul Oprah Winfrey and environmentalist Tom Steyer.

“That's where we're at now: 20 billionaires with some enlightened background and I said run. Run! Run as an independent,” Nader said. “Just to shake up this two-party tyranny … So maybe one of them will run. We certainly have enough of them, don't we?”

When it comes to the current president, Nader said that Obama has violated the Constitution on several occasions and should be impeached.

"Oh, most definitely," Nader said when asked if Congress should bring forward articles of impeachment against Obama. "The reason why Congress doesn't want to do it is because it's abdicated its own responsibility under the Constitution."

Nader said the president's use of military force in Libya has been his most "egregious violation of the Constitution."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-players-abc-news/ralph-naders-america-impeach-obama-decriminalize-drugs-libertarians-progressives-unite-110418813.html

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I am not a big fan of Nader, but some around here like him so I am sharing.

[The leader of an anti-immigration pressure group has been arrested for quoting Winston Churchill. Paul Weston, chairman of LibertyGB, was taken into custody in Winchester, southern England, after delivering a speech in which he quoted an excerpt from the wartime Prime Minister's book The River War.]

The leader of an anti-immigration pressure group has been arrested for quoting Winston Churchill. Paul Weston, chairman of LibertyGB, was taken into custody in Winchester, southern England, after delivering a speech in which he quoted an excerpt from the wartime Prime Minister's book The River War.

Addressing a gathering of people from the steps of Winchester Guildhall, Weston quoted the passage:

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith."

A woman came of the Guildhall and asked Weston if he had authorisation to make the speech. He replied that he did not, at which point she called him "disgusting" and called the police. At least six police officers arrived, questioned by-standers and arrested Weston and took him away. Britain's ITV News is now reporting the story.

LibertyGB claims that Weston spent several hours at Winchester Police Station, after which the original charge of breaching a Section 27 Dispersal Notice was dropped. Weston was "re-arrested" for a Racially Aggravated Crime, under Section 4 of the Public Order Act, which carries a potential prison sentence of 2 years.

He was fingerprinted and obliged to submit to DNA sampling, following which he was bailed with a return date to Winchester Police on May 24th.

LibertyGB was set up in 2013 by disaffected supporters of the British National Party. It is one of several groups that were founded as the BNP disintegrated, and is standing candidates in forthcoming European Elections.

The River War, written in 1899, recounts Churchill's experiences as a British Army Officer in the Anglo-Sudan War of 1881-1899. Churchill is still regarded in high esteem by most of the British public, with a 2002 BBC poll voting him the greatest Briton of all time.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/28/UK-Cops-Arrest-Man-for-Quoting-Churchill

[...]
Why did everything we need in order to exist come into being? How was all of this possible without some latent outside power to orchestrate the precise dance of elementary particles required for the creation of all the essentials of life? The great British mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated—based on only one of the hundreds of parameters of the physical Universe—that the probability of the emergence of a life-giving cosmos was one divided by 10, raised to the power 10, and again raised to the power of 123. This is a number as close to zero as anyone has ever imagined. (The probability is much, much smaller than that of winning the Mega Millions jackpot for more days than the Universe has been in existence.)

The “Scientific Atheists” have scrambled to explain this troubling mystery by suggesting the existence of a multiverse—an infinite set of universes, each with its own parameters. In some universes, the conditions are wrong for life; however, by the sheer size of this putative multiverse, there must be a universe where everything is right. But if it takes an immense power of nature to create one universe, then how much more powerful would that force have to be in order to create infinitely many universes? So the purely hypothetical multiverse does not solve the problem of God. The incredible fine-tuning of the Universe presents the most powerful argument for the existence of an immanent creative entity we may well call God. Lacking convincing scientific evidence to the contrary, such a power may be necessary to force all the parameters we need for our existence—cosmological, physical, chemical, biological, and cognitive—to be what they are.

http://time.com/77676/why-science-does-not-disprove-god/

https://internetcreditunion.org/

not a new video but:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD6fVNGEnlI

I know they are not into bitcoin directly anymore. I was just looking for a good credit union. Supporting them would be cool. Has anyone around used their services?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/fbi-knew-of-zero-day-attack-on-websites-let-hackers-use-it/

[Or is the filter ahead of us?]

An artist's concept of Kepler-186f, discovered in April 2014.

Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler 186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler 186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the distance from a star in which we might expect liquid water, and perhaps life.

What did not make the news, however, is that this discovery also slightly increases how much credence we give to the possibility of near-term human extinction. This because of a concept known as the Great Filter.

The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighborhood in which life might evolve? As the namesake physicist Enrico Fermi noted, it seems rather extraordinary that not a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has been detected (UFO conspiracy theorists notwithstanding).

This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct. This bottleneck for the emergence of alien civilizations from any one of the many billions of planets is referred to as the Great Filter.

Are we alone?

What exactly is causing this bottleneck has been the subject of debate for more than 50 years. Explanations could include a paucity of Earth-like planets or self-replicating molecules. Other possibilities could be an improbable jump from simple prokaryotic life (cells without specialized parts) to more complex eukaryotic life – after all, this transition took well over a billion years on Earth.

Proponents of this “Rare Earth” hypothesis also argue that the evolution of complex life requires an exceedingly large number of perfect conditions. In addition to Earth being in the habitable zone of the sun, our star must be far enough away from the galactic center to avoid destructive radiation, our gas giants must be massive enough to sweep asteroids from Earth’s trajectory, and our unusually large moon stabilizes the axial tilt that gives us different seasons.

These are just a few prerequisites for complex life. The emergence of symbolic language, tools and intelligence could require other such “perfect conditions” as well.

Or is the filter ahead of us?

http://mashable.com/2014/04/23/habitable-planets-human-extinction/

http://www.soopermexican.com/2012/04/22/the-secret-bloody-history-of-earth-day/

[“For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at home—becoming confrontational,” she asserted.]

In a speech earlier this week, Lisa O. Monaco, President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, insisted that American parents must be vigilant because their “confrontational” children could be on the verge of becoming terrorists.

Monaco began her remarks by eloquently describing the lives tragically lost last year during the Boston Marathon bombings. Interestingly, the Harvard grad failed to mention the religion or the motive of brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Muslim terrorists behind the Boston bombings.

In the very next paragraph, Monaco specifically noted racist and disgustingly anti-Semitic beliefs of Frazier Glenn Miller, the 73-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader accused of gunning down three people at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas last

The White House bureaucrat then settled into the heart of her speech: That Obama “has been laser-focused” on preventing “violent extremism” “by homegrown violent extremists” right here “in the United States.”

The president can’t do it all, though. He needs “local communities” to assist in observing “warning signs a person” is becoming “radicalized to violence.”

This is where the American parents of American children in America’s towns, cities and countryside can provide the greatest assistance, Monaco said.

“For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at home—becoming confrontational,” she asserted.


http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/19/white-house-asks-american-parents-to-monitor-their-children-for-signs-of-terrorism/

[...]
Utility customers who want to install rooftop solar panels or small wind turbines could face extra charges on their bills after legislation passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives on Monday.

Senate Bill 1456 passed 83-5 after no debate in the House. It passed the Senate last month and now heads to Gov. Mary Fallin for her approval.

The bill was supported by the state’s major electric utilities, but drew opposition from solar advocates, environmentalists and others. It sets up a process at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to establish a separate customer class and monthly surcharge for distributed generation such as rooftop solar or small wind turbines.

[...]
While I suppose there might be an argument for allowing utilities to recoup costs that are legitimately incurred from the practice of selling energy back to the grid, the idea of charging people extra for doing something that reduces their dependence on the grid while at the same time increasing the amount of energy available seems rather nonsensical. As the linked article goes on to note, these types of systems benefit energy companies by helping to reduce demand on the grid during peak hours and by increasing the amount of energy available during those periods. Given that, one would think that energy companies would want to encourage this sort of thing rather than backing measures like this which could potentiallly hamper it. It’s hard not to see this as an effort by the utility companies to hamper the competition that solar and wind generated energy provide them and, of course, to make sure that they still manage to make some money out of the deal.


http://newsok.com/oklahoma-house-passes-solar-surcharge-bill/article/3955378

http://youtu.be/l62UTsRQ6qY

http://youtu.be/gvPdgXX27Gw

[refusal to agree to provide samples would be viewed as suspect and could be held for questioning, police said.]

Police have started conducting mass DNA tests of 527 male pupils, teachers and staff at a French high school following the “rape in the dark” of a teenager in the school toilets.

Detectives have asked 475 pupils, 31 teachers and 21 other staff present at a private lycée in La Rochelle, western France, on the day of the sex attack permission to take DNA samples from mouth swabs in an attempt to find the mystery rapist after months of fruitless searches.

The tests began this morning on adults and pupils aged 15 to 18. They were expected to last another two days at Fenelon-Notre Dame lycée, where a 16-year-old was sexually assaulted last September in a rest room.

As the lights were out during the attack, the victim was unable to identify the assailant visually but the genetic profile of a male individual believed to be the rapist was recovered from her clothing.

“This happened during the school day in a confined space,” said Chantal Devaux, the private Roman Catholic school’s director. “The decision to take such a large sample was made because it was the only way to advance the investigation.”

Students received their summonses last week.

Permission to take DNA samples requires the double consent of pupils and their parents, however refusal to agree to provide samples would be viewed as suspect and could be held for questioning, police said.

Most pupils were apparently happy to take part in the exercise but some said they regretted not being informed of the rape until several months after the attack.

Isabelle Pagenelle, the local prosecutor, said: “Forty samples will be taken per hour, under the watch of teachers when it comes to pupils, as photos and identity cards are not always trustworthy for minors.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10764822/Hundreds-of-French-students-and-teachers-DNA-tested-to-find-rapist.html



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Once the rapist is caught, what happen to that database, really?

The Guardian US and the Washington Post are among the winners of a prestigious journalistic Pulitzer award. The newspapers shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Reporting for coverage of NSA surveillance and whistleblower Snowden’s leaks.

[Database will include non-criminal photos as well as mugshots.]

Database will include non-criminal photos as well as mugshots.





New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer.

The EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one-third of the US population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.

What is NGI?

NGI builds on the FBI’s legacy fingerprint database—which already contains well over 100 million individual records—and has been designed to include multiple forms of biometric data, including palm prints and iris scans in addition to fingerprints and face recognition data. NGI combines all these forms of data in each individual’s file, linking them to personal and biographic data like name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, race, etc. This immense database is shared with other federal agencies and with the approximately 18,000 tribal, state, and local law enforcement agencies across the United States.

The records we received show that the face recognition component of NGI may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. By 2012, NGI already contained 13.6 million images representing between 7 and 8 million individuals, and by the middle of 2013, the size of the database increased to 16 million images. The new records reveal that the database will be capable of processing 55,000 direct photo enrollments daily and of conducting tens of thousands of searches every day.

NGI will include non-criminal as well as criminal photos

One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images. We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes.

Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints. This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a “mug shot” photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.

In the past, the FBI has never linked the criminal and non-criminal fingerprint databases. This has meant that any search of the criminal print database (such as to identify a suspect or a latent print at a crime scene) would not touch the non-criminal database. This will also change with NGI. Now, every record—whether criminal or non—will have a “Universal Control Number” (UCN), and every search will be run against all records in the database. This means that even if you have never been arrested for a crime, if your employer requires you to submit a photo as part of your background check, your face image could be searched—and you could be implicated as a criminal suspect—just by virtue of having that image in the non-criminal file.

Many states are already participating in NGI

The records detail the many states and law enforcement agencies the FBI has already been working with to build out its database of images (see map below). By 2012, nearly half of US states had at least expressed an interest in participating in the NGI pilot program, and several of those states had already shared their entire criminal mugshot database with the FBI. The FBI hopes to bring all states online with NGI by this year.

The FBI worked particularly closely with Oregon through a special project called “Face Report Card.” The goal of the project was to determine and provide feedback on the quality of the images that states already have in their databases. Through Face Report Card, examiners reviewed 14,408 of Oregon’s face images and found significant problems with image resolution, lighting, background and interference. Examiners also found that the median resolution of images was “well-below” the recommended resolution of .75 megapixels (in comparison, newer iPhone cameras are capable of 8 megapixel resolution).

FBI disclaims responsibility for accuracy

At such a low resolution, it is hard to imagine that identification will be accurate.1 However, the FBI has disclaimed responsibility for accuracy, stating that “[t]he candidate list is an investigative lead, not an identification.”

Because the system is designed to provide a ranked list of candidates, the FBI states NGI never actually makes a “positive identification,” and “therefore, there is no false positive rate.” In fact, the FBI only ensures that “the candidate will be returned in the top 50 candidates” 85 percent of the time “when the true candidate exists in the gallery.”

It is unclear what happens when the “true candidate” does not exist in the gallery—does NGI still return possible matches? Could those people then be subject to criminal investigation for no other reason than that a computer thought their face was mathematically similar to a suspect’s? This doesn’t seem to matter much to the FBI—the Bureau notes that because “this is an investigative search and caveats will be prevalent on the return detailing that the [non-FBI] agency is responsible for determining the identity of the subject, there should be NO legal issues.”

Nearly 1 million images will come from unexplained sources

One of the most curious things to come out of these records is the fact that NGI may include up to one million face images in two categories that are not explained anywhere in the documents. According to the FBI, by 2015, NGI may include:

46 million criminal images
4.3 million civil images
215,000 images from the Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC)
750,000 images from a "Special Population Cognizant" (SPC) category
215,000 images from "New Repositories"
However, the FBI does not define either the “Special Population Cognizant” database or the "new repositories" category. This is a problem because we do not know what rules govern these categories, where the data comes from, how the images are gathered, who has access to them, and whose privacy is impacted.

A 2007 FBI document available on the Web describes SPC as “a service provided to Other Federal Organizations (OFOs), or other agencies with special needs by agreement with the FBI” and notes that “[t]hese SPC Files can be specific to a particular case or subject set (e.g., gang or terrorist related), or can be generic agency files consisting of employee records.” If these SPC files and the images in the "new repositories" category are assigned a Universal Control Number along with the rest of the NGI records, then these likely non-criminal records would also be subject to invasive criminal searches.

Government contractor responsible for NGI has built some of the largest face recognition databases in the world

The company responsible for building NGI’s facial recognition component—MorphoTrust (formerly L-1 Identity Solutions)—is also the company that has built the face recognition systems used by approximately 35 state DMVs and many commercial businesses.2 MorphoTrust built and maintains the face recognition systems for the Department of State, which has the “largest facial recognition system deployed in the world” with more than 244 million records,3 and for the Department of Defense, which shares its records with the FBI.

The FBI failed to release records discussing whether MorphoTrust uses a standard (likely proprietary) algorithm for its face templates. If it does, it is quite possible that the face templates at each of these disparate agencies could be shared across agencies—raising again the issue that the photograph you thought you were taking just to get a passport or driver’s license is then searched every time the government is investigating a crime. The FBI seems to be leaning in this direction: an FBI employee e-mail notes that the “best requirements for sending an image in the FR system” include “obtain[ing] DMV version of photo whenever possible.”

Why should we care about NGI?

There are several reasons to be concerned about this massive expansion of governmental face recognition data collection. First, as noted above, NGI will allow law enforcement at all levels to search non-criminal and criminal face records at the same time. This means you could become a suspect in a criminal case merely because you applied for a job that required you to submit a photo with your background check.

Second, the FBI and Congress have thus far failed to enact meaningful restrictions on what types of data can be submitted to the system, who can access the data, and how the data can be used. For example, although the FBI has said in these documents that it will not allow non-mugshot photos such as images from social networking sites to be saved to the system, there are no legal or even written FBI policy restrictions in place to prevent this from occurring. As we have stated before, the Privacy Impact Assessment for NGI’s face recognition component hasn’t been updated since 2008, well before the current database was even in development. It cannot therefore address all the privacy issues impacted by NGI.

Finally, even though the FBI claims that its ranked candidate list prevents the problem of false positives (someone being falsely identified), this is not the case. A system that only purports to provide the true candidate in the top 50 candidates 85 percent of the time will return a lot of images of the wrong people. We know from researchers that the risk of false positives increases as the size of the dataset increases—and at 52 million images, the FBI’s face recognition is a very large dataset. This means that many people will be presented as suspects for crimes they didn’t commit. This is not how our system of justice was designed, and it should not be a system that Americans tacitly consent to move toward.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/fbi-to-have-52-million-photos-in-its-ngi-face-recognition-database-by-next-year/