Public Iris Scanning Device In the Works 154
Nonfinity writes "A public iris scanning device has been proposed in a patent application from Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey. The device is able to scan the iris of the eye without the knowledge or consent of the person being scanned. The device uses multiple cameras, captures multiple images, and then selects the best image to process."
Priorities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone else notice the logical disconnect here? (Score:5, Insightful)
It also says "the newly proposed system is that it allows iris scans to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject."
What it does not say is that "the newly proposed system allows good quality scans, with a 'false match' of less than one time per one hundred billion, to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject." I fancy readers are supposed to infer that conclusion, which does not follow from the premises.
I'll bet the system has the usual impressive-sounding "99.9%" accuracy or something in that ballpark... like all those facial-recognition systems. Meaning a false positive rate of one in a thousand. Meaning that if one in a million airport visitors is a known terrorist with an iris scan in the database, then 999 out of every thousand people, yanked out of the concourse by polite but firm security officials, will be Lutheran grandmothers from Davenport, Iowa travelling to visit their children in St. Paul.
And the officials will be unable to give any coherent explanation, since the system is supposed to be surreptitions.
Re:Won't Work (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW the Live Science article suggests that: "Good quality scans result in a "false match" less than one time per one hundred billion". This estimate seems to be off by a factor of between 1 and 10 billion. Check out other articles by the same journalist: "New Study finds Sun only 491 feet from Earth".
Re:Put on... (Score:2, Insightful)
And suddenly (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't see this really working... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, instead of 3 megapixels, think 12. That's still only 40 x 30 pixels. Not enough.
I'll worry when 100 megapixels becomes commonly available. (Yes I know the Navy has a 111 megapixel CCD).
Re:Unlawful Search and Seizure (Score:5, Insightful)
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right. We've got rights to our property, lives and liberty, but not in most cases to our dignity. This is only something that has recently been awknowladged.
The word "dignity" dows not even appear in the US constitution(enacted 1787). US citizens do not have a constitutional right to it. The Irish constitution(enacted 1937) does mention in the preamble that it is being adopted in part "...so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured". But this is only in the preamble.
Interestingly, the constitution of South Africa (enacted 1996), explicitly and unabiguously guarantees a right to dignity in Chapter 2: Section 10: I guess decades of having their dignity denied to them taught South Africans that this right doesn't really go without saying. This is one ammendment I would dearly love to see in my country's constitution. (Actually the SA constitution also guarantees the right to privacy [info.gov.za] and even the right to private communications. It's an extremely progressive document which unfortunately hasn't influenced older constitutions in the way that it should.)
Privacy in public is obviously a fallacy. But we should at least not have to suffer affronts to our dignity by being scanned and checked at every turn, or have our clothing seen through at every security checkpoint. Laws forcing Jews to wear stars or Muslims to wear crescents would probably still be constitutional in a lot of countries. A dignity ammendment would make what we know is wrong explicitly wrong. Humans aren't like animals. We have more needs than simply life, liberty and property. Dignity is one of those other needs.
Re:I can't see this really working... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, we're all safe until someone invents robotically aimed telephoto cameras.
How hard is that?
Re:DAmn hollywood (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just it, a patent is supposed to cover the ideas contained within a design of a working solution. This is why you can't patent things that are illogical [or outside the realm of understood science].
Otherwise, we could just sit down, think of a million devices we can't create yet and shut down the "IP" industry.
Tom
Dignity (Score:3, Insightful)
a) A sign that the constitution will be applied in a very limited fashion, I.e. more as a nice-sounding statement of intent with very limited legal day-to-day application. I suspect this is the case in South Africa.
b) A legal train-wreck waiting to happen. Applying a legal concept of "a right to dignity" in practice makes many other infamous slippery legal issues seem easy by comparison. Expect a constantly changing (according to legal and political fashions) defintion of "dignity". What is certain is only that many new, cool "constitutional" concepts will emerge from the penumbra of dignity.
Why? Simply because there is hardly any consensus whatsoever as to what "dignity" means in many relevant situations - it's fuzzy beyond belief. I recently visited London for a few days, and was no doubt recorded by hundreds of CCTV cameras. Did I consider it a blow to my dignity? Not really. To you on the other hand, CCTV recordings appear to constitute a severe blow to your dignity. Which sort of illustrates my point.
The worse problem (Score:3, Insightful)
E.g., let's say you stick this in an airport, and give it an insane resolution camera. You want to identify suspects quickly in a crowd, right? So if this thing is this good at scanning people without even having them look in a gizmo, better batch scan any iris that has enough pixels on that camera, right?
The problem there is that there'll be maybe a thousand people in any place in the airport at a time, so around 10 of them will be falsely identified. That's just in one scanning everyone in the room.
Now think the hundreds of thousands of people moved by a reasonable airport daily, their families coming with them to the airport, etc. Oooer. Now that's some serious false positives.
Multiply this by a a generous number of cameras scattered all over the place. A 1 false match in 100 scans pretty much means just that: if you take the same person and walk him past 100 cameras, on the average 1 of them will identify him as someone else. Stick enough of these cameras on an airport, and everyone will get at least one false match by just walking from one gate to another, maybe with a detour to the toilet/bar/whatever.
And I don't even want to think of the janitors, security guards, airline personnel, etc. Those are going to get scanned again and again thousands of times a day, producing anywhere between tens and hundreds of false matches each.
Basically: think of the worst "the Pope, Bush and Osama walk onto a plane" joke and a camera somewhere will produce exactly that kind of false match. Daily.
Now for the second problem: picture being placed somewhere at the scene of a crime by such a false match. 99% accuracy sounds just about guaranteed to have been you to the average jurror.