FC: Patrick Gunkel on automated face recognition as police monomania

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Patrick is an interesting fellow. You can see some of his work at 
http://ideonomy.mit.edu/. As for automated face recognition, this is the 
most important privacy issue confronting us today (yes, more so than what 
happens when you give your email address to flooze.com and it goes 
bankrupt, sigh). --Declan]

*******

Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 09:36:48 -0400
From: Patrick Gunkel <pgunkel () cape com>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
CC: "politech () politechbot com" <politech () politechbot com>
Subject: ADVANCED POLICE FACE RECOGNITION SYSTEMS


2001 July 5.

               • ADVANCED POLICE FACE RECOGNITION SYSTEMS

     No matter how hard or even disturbing it may be for us to do so, it
is important for all of us to try to visualize in advance — from a
broad, imaginative, and philosophical perspective — what such Pandoran
technology and socio-political innovations as this may be and mean, so
that we can keep them from happening in an insidious way, through
inattention or naiveté, for simple reasons of efficiency or in response
to the narrow interests of certain parties, or because of the pernicious
fallacy that everything that becomes practical should also be welcomed
by society.
     After rotating all aspects of this issue in my mind, in a neutral,
fair, and technically knowledgable way, my own thoughtful conclusion is
that the employment of facial recognition technology in our society in
the future for most, though not all, police purposes, would be imprudent
and should be opposed, simply owing to the extreme risk-to-benefits
ratio associated with it, the myriad dangers it would pose for the
country over the long term, and the grave injury it would do to basic
American ideals, and to a subtle but crucial form of privacy.

     It is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, that once this
sort of technology is implemented it will be used in ever widening ways
until the limits of its applicability have been reached.
     The second thing to be kept in mind is the reality that the forms
of technology that can and will be created in the future for
identification, surveillance, and control of populations will be
fantastically diverse and sophisticated.
     The third thing to keep in mind, or to ponder now, is that the
variety of ways in which such technology can be abused, and will be
abused if the opportunities are not denied to governments and other
organizations, later or preferably now by preclusion, are also
extraordinarily diverse, and that it is the SUM of these, and their
consequences for the proper relation of the State to the Citizens who
are its sole reason for existing, that is the one thing that must be
considered in advance, because it is the greater danger or the real
threat to human freedom and our way of life.

     In effect, you and I hold the future in trust.  It is in our power
to protect it or to give it away through a lack of imagination, care,
and responsibility.

               — Patrick Gunkel, a neuroscientist at MIT

                    _______________________

                                 • POLICE MONOMANIA

     To place this issue in perspective, the face recognition technology
for use by police for general identification and surveillance of
citizens that is under discussion was created in England.  I was
watching a newsstory about it a few days ago on the BBC.
     What astonished me, as an MIT neuroscientist with a particular
interest in visual pattern recognition, was the supposed capacity of
this system in the English case.  It was said to be able to recognize 50
MILLION FACES PER SECOND.  What immediately flashed through my mind was
that this is roughly the total population of England.
     What is therefore ultimately implicit in this heinous technology is
the ability of a government to monitor the identity and whereabouts of
EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN OF A COUNTRY FROM SECOND TO SECOND.  It is said
that in London, where of course a constant threat from the Irish
Republican Army exists, there are already of the order of 500 video
cameras for the identification of people per square kilometer (an
interesting figure to scale-up for the total area of the vast metropolis
of Greater London).
     But what one sees here, in a far more general way, is the danger to
all of us from what now is a common disease, notably in government and
public policy.  I am referring to MONOMANIA, in the sense of the
forgetful and destructive obsession of some institution, social group,
or individual with a single concern to the exclusion of all others and
typically with a blind disregard for the harm that can easily result
from such pathological single-mindedness, a condition in which it may
seem that all the universe is reducible to one narrow matter, and that
the lives of all of us depend upon it.
     I suggest that such political and social monomania, with its
egregious philosophical imbalances, is the real Devil that all of us
need to be wary of, and constantly on the watch for and determinedly
opposed to, if we are to keep this world sensible and sane.

                       — Patrick Gunkel




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