Abstract
Stop that face!
Video cameras and face-recognition technology were used during the January 2001 Super Bowl (now known as the “Snooper Bowl”) to search the crowd for known criminals and/or terrorists. But no miscreants were fingered and no evildoers taken into custody. On the other hand, when they learned somewhat later that the technology had been used, irate citizens, concerned about privacy rights, complained loudly.
Local law enforcement officials, however, believed the time was ripe. Since 1997 the National Institutes of Justice had supported research into face-recognition software to the tune of $8 million, and several systems were said to be ready for public trial. One package in particular, the “FaceIt” system produced by Vision-ics, Inc., seemed mature. Visionics software converts a photo or a video image to a mathematical equation based on an analysis of 80 facial points between the nose, cheekbones, and eyes. The equation is then saved as a “faceprint.” Using the Visionics system, a surveillance camera can scan a face in a crowd and within a minute or less compare it to thousands of faceprints found in a police database.
Visionics President Joseph Atick said his technology had already been proven in Britain. Atick claims that after it was adopted in 1998 for use on the streets in a dangerous area of Newham (a London borough), crime dropped more than 40 percent in the first year. (Of course, it's not clear whether crime dropped because cameras were visible or because criminals thought their faces could be computer ID'ed.)
In any case, the police in Tampa were not dissuaded by the ruckus surrounding the use of face-recognition technology at the Super Bowl. In midsummer they installed 36 surveillance cameras in Tampa's entertainment district, known as Ybor City, and settled back to wait for the faces they scanned on the streets to match up with faceprints in a database of 30,000 wanted felons and missing children.
A sign in Tampa's Ybor City district tells passersby that they are being monitored
Local citizens, the American Civil Liberties Union, and members of Congress (including Texas Republican Dick Armey) called for shutting the cameras down, but project director Bill Todd, a Tampa detective, insisted that what some residents were calling a “virtual lineup” was not only constitutional, it was efficient. “This is no different than a police officer standing on a street corner with a handful of wanted pictures, except that it's more accurate and stops trouble faster,” he told U.S. News & World Report (August 6).
As part of its publicity campaign, the police handed out a sample picture taken from one of the surveillance cameras. The picture ran in the June 30 St. Petersburg Times and was reprinted in U.S. News, along with the story quoted above.
Many visitors to Ybor City expressed their displeasure with the surveillance system by wearing Groucho glasses or making rude gestures in the direction of the cameras. Civil liberties specialists complained vociferously.
Given the hostile atmosphere surrounding their new crime-busting technology, Tampa police must have been overjoyed when the individual in their sample picture was identified almost immediately by a woman in Oklahoma who insisted the photo was that of a wanted man–namely, her deadbeat ex-husband.
Three Tampa police officers tracked down the man in the photo, Rob Milliron, at the construction site where he worked–pulling him aside to question him about the charges against him in Oklahoma for felony child neglect.
But the unlucky Milliron had not been identified by the exacting science of face-recognition software, only by a woman whose memory was apparently somewhat careless when it came to ex-husbands. As it turned out, Milliron was innocent–he had never been to Oklahoma, never married, and had no children.
Milliron was upset by his interrogation in front of a gawking crowd, and even more annoyed when he later discovered that the headline below his photo in the magazine had read, “You Can't Hide Those Lying Eyes in Tampa.” “It made me out to be a criminal,” he said (St. Petersburg Times, August 8).
Face-recognition technology got even more attention when it was demonstrated by British comedian John Cleese on a BBC television special, “The Human Face,” which was shown on The Learning Channel on August 27. Cleese, wearing a series of disguises, including one particularly ladylike get-up, was immediately identified by the surveillance system. But his last disguise, which included a hat pulled low over his forehead and a large pair of dark glasses, foiled the system.
In real life, however, Ybor City's searching cameras had yet to uncover a wanted baddie. In fact, none of the face-recognition software seemed to be pulling in the bad guys. According to Wired News (August 15), the “Missing Child Locator Agent,” a web crawler, had yet to make a match. Another technology, the “Identiface,” which is intended to be used by cops to “identify suspects during mobile stakeouts,” had so far made only one match its promoters described as successful. That match was of a photo of a dead man, matched to his driver's license photo. (His license photo was ranked only fourth, though, in a series of possible matches.)
You'd be toast
As part of its effort to highlight the danger of keeping nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, on September 6 the Back from the Brink campaign delivered a toaster like this one (the missiles pop up) to every member of Congress. The action was also in support of the MX Missile Stand-Down Act, legislation introduced by two congressional Democrats, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Ellen Tauscher of California. The campaign's motto: “In the time it takes to make toast, we could all be toast.”
The possibility that a database of driver's license pictures might be used to match faces in a crowd raises even more concerns about privacy. One city council member in Jacksonville, Florida, suggested that her community should outlaw the technologya before it was misused. And the possibility of widespread abuse became apparent with the suggestion that databases might be sold or shared with third parties. According to police in Tampa, it is their practice to discard information on faces in the crowd that don't match anyone in their database. But there's no requirement that scans from the public streets be discarded, or that driver's license photos not be scanned.
Visionics's Atick knew that something had to be done to turn what appeared to be a negative tide against the company's face-recognition technology. In a pre-emptive strike on August 8–at about the same time it was revealed that Vision-ics was selling the technology to that bastion of civil and privacy rights, China–Atick called on Congress to pass legislation to regulate its use. And according to Julia Scheeres's September 5 report for Wired News, the “biometrics” industry, of which faceprinting is only a part, is now trying to find a few heart-warming “Good News Biometric Stories” to counteract opposition.
Best Buddies
In July, Public Citizen asked the Energy Department a simple question: Why had the department hired Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform a supposedly independent environmental analysis of the effects of recycling radioactive scrap? After all, the company was a subcontractor in a controversial scrap recycling program at Oak Ridge and stood to gain if it declared recycling to be environmentally safe; it could scarcely be considered unbiased (Nancy Zuckerbrod, Associated Press, July 26).
As Michigan Democratic Cong. John Dingell put it in a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, the department had hired the company to study something the company “has been promoting for almost two decades.” The contract was canceled on July 25.
The same Associated Press story reported that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had hired SAIC to write rules dealing with radioactive scrap, but dropped the company last year when the same conflict of interest was pointed out.
Don't make this mistake
After Canadian Peter Dant died in June at the age of 90, it was revealed that his will was rife with errors. It seems that Dant, who was “deeply disappointed with the decline in written and spoken English,” had decided to make the correction of his will a contest. An expensive piece of jewelry would be the prize for the lucky winner who could correct 12 errors found in each of 12 excerpts to be published in Canada's National Post over a 12-day period (Chemical & Engineering News, July 16).
Admiring as we are of Mr. Dant's ingenuity, we'd rather you just remembered the Bulletin in your will.
Energy took a different tone a few days later, however, when it was pointed out that Winston & Strawn, a law firm Energy hired as a member of the team of contractors characterizing the suitability of Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste disposal site, was simultaneously working for the nuclear industry, by lobbying Congress in support of pro-Yucca Mountain legislation (Matthew Wald, New York Times, July 28).
Energy Department spokeswoman Jill Schroeder insisted that “we have not found a conflict of interest.”
On the other hand, the law firm's Energy bosses surely knew that someone found their relationship a little too cozy: When Winston & Strawn was hired in 1992, it worked on preparing a license application for TRW, the main contractor at Yucca Mountain. Energy then hired the firm to review the same application before submitting it to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A rival law firm's case, complaining that the government was paying Winston & Strawn to review its own work, has been pending in Federal District Court.
There's something in the air …
The Pentagon is looking into a new kind of weapon, and it's going to be a real stinker. “Malodorant grenades”–otherwise known as stink bombs–may be the future of riot control. A super stinker could be used to get people out of an area and keep them out, or as a tagging device.
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Matthew McLaughlin said that malodorants would be desirable as a “less-than-lethal” alternative to firing lead bullets at people in “less-than-war” scenarios. “The idea is to give the on-scene commander options,” said McLaughlin, adding that malodorants could eventually have both military and civilian uses.
Outside the Pentagon, there are some who turn their noses up at the idea of stink bombs. The Sunshine Project, an international weapons watchdog group, warns that using malodorants “could promote [the] use of chemical weapons in conflict and destabilize controls on both chemical and biological weapons.”
But one thing about stench warfare is certain: The perfect stink has to exploit the psychological connection between fear and odors, tricking people into smelling danger. The stench needs to be so overpowering, so olfactorily offensive, and so universally repugnant that anyone who sniffs it immediately turns tail and runs. That's the smell that scientists at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia are trying to find, and researcher Pam Dalton thinks they've got a good candidate in a fragrance called “U.S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor,” a scent created to test the mettle of cleaning products. “It's very pungent,” Dalton told New Scientist (July 7). “More precisely, it smells like shit, but much, much stronger.”
“If anything transcends culture it should be something like this,” she said about the harmless but extremely foul eau du toilette, which made volunteer sniffers curse and scream within seconds of catching a whiff.
With the idea still on the drawing board, there are other considerations–namely, the delivery system. An effective stink bomb needs to be more than just super-smelly, it also has to linger. Without staying power, even a sophisticated stink bomb could be defeated by something as simple as holding your breath. One also assumes that anosmics, those who can't smell, would be impervious to a stink bomb–and one wonders whether a head cold wouldn't be an advantage to those who can.
In Brief
Sticky fingers, sweaty palms
There's a tiresome old saying: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Well, apparently when the only tool you have is a giant synchrotron, everything looks as if it should be analyzed in one. Thus a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been conducting analyses of the “sweat profile” of fingerprints. The reason? Team leader Dale Perry says that if each individual's sweat has a unique chemical profile, and if the technique can be perfected, sweat analysis could nail criminals by identifying fingerprints that are too blurry to be read. On the other hand, Stephen Homeyer of the FBI's Forensic Science Research Unit says, “I don't know of any forensics lab that has a synchrotron in the backyard” (New Scientist, September 8).
Ach du lieber …
For two years, reports Agence France Presse (August 22), people living in some 300 homes in southwest Germany–“from Lake Constance to Heidelberg”–have been plagued by a mysterious nocturnal buzzing noise. They say the buzzing causes a “racing pulse and fatigue along with a sense of excitation and uncontrollable muscle quivering.” Some add that their beds feel as if they are electrically charged. Authorities in Baden-Württemberg recently hired physicist Henriche Menges to investigate the cause of the phenomenon. But no need, says one German website, www.raum und-zeit.de–the source is a U.S. military project, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or “HAARP,” based in Alaska. The United States describes HAARP as a tool for investigating the ionosphere directly above it; the German website says it is a giant energy accelerator whose electromagnetic waves can be used as a superweapon to “make a nation dance on one leg,” or drive an entire city insane.
Mine's bigger than yours
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled its new computer–the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative White, or “ASCI White”–in mid-August, calling it the world's most powerful supercomputer. Gen. John Gordon, the head of the Energy Department's new, quasi-independent nuclear security agency, described the computer as the “key to the country's mission of maintaining the [nuclear] stockpile” (Las Vegas Sun, August 15). The machine, which was delivered in 28 tractor-trailers by the IBM Corporation, can perform 12.3 trillion calculations a second. But this behemoth will not hold the title of “most powerful” for very long. Next year the National Science Foundation expects to unveil its “Teragrid” computer, which will perform 13.6 trillion operations a second. But neither machine is good enough for the weapons establishment, which insists it “needs” a computer 10 times more powerful by 2004.
Oops
“All those [involved] feel bad about the mistake,” said George Jackson, a Fluor Hanford vice president in charge of disposing of certain radioactive wastes at the Hanford, Washington, weapons facility, explaining that an “honest mistake” led Fluor to bury transuranic wastes earmarked for deep disposal in New Mexico in Hanford's central landfill instead. For two years, Fluor used two portable radiation detectors which were erroneously calibrated. The detectors were recalibrated every time they were moved, as many as 10 times a year. But each time they were recalibrated against the initial, incorrect readings (Tri-City Herald, July 25).
Duck and cover
Last month we learned that Americans have warned Canadians that a successful U.S. national missile defense might cause enemy missile debris to rain down on their territory. We also learned that if the “test site” the administration is eager to build at Fort Greely, Alaska, were actually used, missile launches would cause debris to fall on populated areas of that state. This month we learn–courtesy of MIT scientist Ted Postol–that a boost-phase interceptor might produce more than just debris if it destroyed only the booster rocket. In the case of a “rogue” launch from the Middle East, an actual warhead could land on the heads of U.S. friends and allies in Europe (New Scientist, August 29).
There you go again
In a July 24 appearance on ABC's Nightline, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz responded to Ted Koppel's questions about whether missile defenses would work by giving an example: “The Navy Theater Wide System,” he said, “is something that works.” But, asks an August 17 update from the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center, “What Navy Theater Wide System could he possibly be talking about? The navy system hasn't even attempted an intercept test, and won't until this fall. The missile needed to intercept an ICBM hasn't been built yet, and when and if it eventually is, it may not fit in the launch cells of the Aegis ships.” Or, the update continues, could Wolfowitz have been talking about a boost-phase system? As the navy's Capt. Leonard Capello said, “We don't even have a viewgraph for that one yet. That's basically just a concept…. That would require a separate new missile that, until a week ago, I never heard of.”
Still on the shelf: Last year, while visiting the hospital at Lambaréné, Gabon, founded by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer, a friend of the Bulletin took this photo in his office, which has been left untouched since his death in 1965
The ultimate symbol of victory
The plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Reservation in Washington State, and the name of nearby Richland High School's sports team, the “Bombers,” reflects the town's long association with Hanford. The team's logo is a mushroom cloud with the initial “R” in the middle.
This summer, when several alumni banded together to give the school a statue recognizing the Bombers–a 10-foot-tall bombshell painted in the school's colors of green and gold–emotions ran high. And when the donors installed the giant mock bomb in a school foyer on July 1 without bothering to get the Richland School Board's permission, the board was torn about how to respond. But there was no ignoring the giant replica. As board member Phyllis Strickler pointed out, “It's kind of an in-your-face thing” (Tri-City Herald, August 15).
Another of the Richland Bombers' logos
When the school superintendent ordered the bombshell removed several weeks later (it took a “bomb removal squad” using acetylene torches to bring it down), chief donor and long-time school supporter Roy Ballard was angry: “This is politically correct garbage,” he said. “This country is to the point where everything you do has to be O.K. with everyone else” (The Columbian, July 20).
The school superintendent explained that the removal would stand, pending a vote at the next school board meeting on whether to accept the gift.
With the ultimate fate of the bombshell in its hands, the board held a public meeting on the night of August 14. A contentious and strongly pro-bomb replica crowd of 100-plus filled the hall.
Audience members who testified at the meeting supported the mock bomb, 19-1. One described it as “the ultimate symbol of victory”; another complained that it was outsiders who were against its display: “Year to year we get newcomers in this community, and right away they want to change things…. A lot of guys got cancer out here making the bomb.” A recent graduate said that the donors “may have done the wrong thing without putting in the paperwork, but that can be fixed. Personally, I like the cloud and the bomb.”
When it came time for the members of the board to vote, the shouts and jeers of the crowd made it difficult for board members to be heard as they explained the reasons for their individual votes. Ultimately, though, the board voted 3-2 to reject the bomb display.
The response was boos and catcalls, with one audience member loudly promising: “You guys won't get voted in any longer.”
Coming Soon
We're grateful
The Bulletin, published by the not-for-profit Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, thanks the following foundations for their generous financial support in 2001:
The Ford Foundation
Freedom Forum
Gladys Louise Jones Trust
Leighty Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The John Merck Fund
National Philanthropic Trust
The New-Land Foundation
Ploughshares Fund
Pritzker Foundation
Prospect Hill Foundation
Samuel Rubin Foundation
Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust
W. Alton Jones Foundation