The biggest international topic today is privacy. All of us know that data can be collected but so can personal photographs. The article below explains some of this process.
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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web
Images
By JAMES RISEN
and LAURA POITRAS MAY 31, 2014 NY Times
The National
Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from
communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations
for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret
documents.
The spy
agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over
the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the
flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences
and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe
that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds
intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s
ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have
not previously been disclosed.
The agency
intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial
recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,”
according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward
J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A.
now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as
important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other
intelligence targets, the documents show.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, left, who
tried to bomb an airplane, and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb
in Times Square. The attempts prompted more image gathering. Credit Reuters;
U.S. Marshals Service, via Associated Press
“It’s not just
the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach
that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular
activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can
help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.
One N.S.A.
PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of
an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in
different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These
include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly
list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist
ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence
agencies.
It is not clear
how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been
caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s
surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the
N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people
overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and
satellite transmissions.
Because the
agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be
required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its
surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on
their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border
communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to
someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.
Civil-liberties
advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving
technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial
recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on
facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still
technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the
databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”
State and local
law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial
imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The
F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification” project
to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery
and other biometric data.
The State
Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial
imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of
photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the
Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments
around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.
The N.S.A.,
though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private
communications.
“We would not
be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision
of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid
foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm
the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.
She added that
the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s
licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the
agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa
applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial
imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other
than communications intercepts.
“The government
and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face
recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert
on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San
Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition
databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people
under challenging conditions.”
Ms. Lynch said
a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional
protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added
that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a
legal vacuum.
Laura Donohue,
the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law
School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.
Congress has
largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express
protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of
Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying
possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.
Facial
recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching
low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or
angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.
Dalila B.
Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of
Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different
angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition
algorithms in the software.”
That can lead
to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra
Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to
identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The
document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were
obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.
Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial
recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the
search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight
resemblances to Bin Laden.
But the
technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a
bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with
another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is
at a different location.
It is not clear
how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery
through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving
Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot
Act, according to Ms. Vines.
The N.S.A. has
accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama
administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended
attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the
so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian,
tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on
Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a
Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.
The agency’s
use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously
reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British
counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted
webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.
The N.S.A.
achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images
collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database
code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list
database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to
cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the
agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence” analysts who
work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to
develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.
The agency has
developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a
wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain
facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from
national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents
show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such
databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The documents
suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its
phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing
so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the
N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.
In addition,
the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program
called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range
of countries.
One of the
N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called
Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and
displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house
programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial
recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by
Google, the documents show.
The N.S.A. can
now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs
taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be
vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in
2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock
taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant
training facility in Pakistan.
A version of
this article appears in print on June 1, 2014, on page A1 of the New York
edition with the headline: N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images.
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