[privacy] Driver's License Emerges as Crime-Fighting Tool, but Privacy Advocates Worry

["'Richard M. Smith'" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/us/17face.html?ei=5065
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/us/17face.html?ei=5065&en=36580b4653017e9
c&ex=1172293200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print>
&en=36580b4653017e9c&ex=1172293200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
 
February 17, 2007

Driver's License Emerges as Crime-Fighting Tool, but Privacy Advocates Worry


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/adam_liptak/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> ADAM LIPTAK

BOSTON, Feb. 12 - On the second floor of a state office building here,
upstairs from a food court, three facial-recognition specialists are
revolutionizing American law enforcement. They work for the Massachusetts
motor vehicles department.

Last year they tried an experiment, for sport. Using computerized biometric
technology, they ran a mug shot from the Web site of "America's Most
Wanted," the Fox Network television show, against the state's database of
nine million digital driver's license photographs. 

The computer found a match. A man who looked very much like Robert Howell,
the fugitive in the mug shot, had a Massachusetts driver's license under
another name. Mr. Howell was wanted in Massachusetts on rape charges.

The analysts passed that tip along to the police, who tracked him down to
New York City, where he was receiving welfare benefits under the alias on
the driver's license. Mr. Howell was arrested in October.

At least six other states have or are working on similar enormous databases
of driver's license photographs. Coupled with increasingly accurate
facial-recognition technology, the databases may become a radical innovation
in law enforcement. 

Other biometric databases are more useful for now. But DNA and fingerprint
information, for instance, are not routinely collected from the general
public. Most adults, on the other hand, have a driver's license with a
picture on it, meaning that the relevant databases for facial-recognition
analysis already exist. And while the current technology requires
good-quality photographs, the day may not be far off when images from
ordinary surveillance cameras will routinely help solve crimes. 

Critics say the databases may therefore also represent a profound threat to
privacy.

"What is the D.M.V.?" asked Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and a privacy advocate. "Does it license motor vehicles and
drivers? Or is it really an identification arm of law enforcement?"

Anne L. Collins, the Massachusetts registrar of motor vehicles, said that
people seeking a driver's license at least implicitly consent to allowing
their images to be used for other purposes.

"One of the things a driver's license has become," Ms. Collins said, "is
evidence that you are who you say you are."

The databases are primarily intended to prevent people from obtaining
multiple licenses under different names. That can help prevent identity
theft and stop people who try to get a second license after their first has
been suspended.

"The states are finding hundreds of cases of fraud each year in each state,"
said J. Scott Carr, executive vice president of the Digimarc Corporation,
which says it has sold biometric technology to motor vehicle departments in
seven states and has a role in the production of more than two-thirds of all
driver's licenses in the United States.

But the databases can also be used for law enforcement purposes beyond
detecting fraud. 

A page concerning Mr. Howell, printed out from the "America's Most Wanted"
Web site, is taped to the wall of the investigators' office here. It is a
kind of trophy.

"It's always exciting when you get a hit and you're getting someone really
bad off the streets," said Maria Conlon, a facial-recognition specialist at
the Registry of Motor Vehicles. "That's when everyone's morale goes up."

Most of the work is less glamorous. The analysts' main job is to check
roughly 5,000 new driver's license photographs every day against the
database. A computer algorithm that takes into account about 8,000 facial
data points does a rough cut, and analysts examine potential matches,
rejecting the vast majority.

That computers alone cannot do the job does not surprise Richard M. Smith,
an expert in digital security. "It's probably one of the more inaccurate
biometrics," Mr. Smith said, referring to facial-recognition technologies.

After computers narrow the field of potential matches, Ms. Conlon and her
colleagues get to work. 

"We don't look at hair," Ms. Conlon said. "We do look at lips, noses, ears."


Scars and tattoos can be useful, but what seem to be birthmarks are often
passing blemishes. Some people make it easy by wearing the same clothes,
though they are seeking licenses under different names. They have, Ms.
Conlon said, "a registry outfit."

The program, in place since April, has yielded more than 1,000 apparent
fraud cases referred to the state police. Other potential matches identified
by the computers and confirmed by analysts have turned out to be clerical
errors where, for instance, the wrong information was attached to a person's
photograph. In the six months ending in January, analysts found 157 twins
among the images flagged as potential matches.

The database's second function, as a resource for law enforcement agencies,
is growing in popularity. Police chiefs from around the state e-mail digital
photographs for comparison with the database, sometimes several times a day.

And other uses are not hard to imagine. Coroners have on three occasions
sent over photographs of dead people they could not identify. The analysts
struck out, perhaps because of the quality of the images.

"To make it work at all," Mr. Smith said, "you have to have good control of
camera angle and lighting." Passport and driver's license photographs, along
with mug shots, are ideal. 

Other sorts of images are not useful - yet. "A video surveillance camera is
probably not going to give it to you," Mr. Smith said.

In time, though, the combination of facial recognition and other information
- from financial records, mobile phones, automobile positioning devices and
other sources - may do away with the ability to move anonymously through the
world, Mr. Tien, the privacy advocate, said.

"The real question with biometrics," he said, "is that they are part of a
cluster of technologies that will allow for location tracking in both public
and private places."

The case against Mr. Howell fizzled last week. He had been charged with
invading a home at gunpoint in Dorchester in August 2002 and holding three
people captive for hours, repeatedly raping one of them. He fled after being
released on bail, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the district attorney's
office, leading to his inclusion on the television show's most-wanted list.

But after Mr. Howell was caught through his license photo, the prosecutors
re-examined their case. In the intervening years, the victims disappeared,
and prosecutors think they may have left the country. Without their
testimony, prosecutors concluded, there was no way to take the case to
trial. Prosecutors formally abandoned the case on Friday, and they let Mr.
Howell go.

"He is in the wind right now," Mr. Wark said.

 

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