Police Across the Nation Will Roll Out Face-Recognizing iPhone Tech This Year
July 17th, 2011Via: Popular Science:
A controversial piece of facial recognition technology … is rolling out in police stations across the country this fall, and naturally not everyone is happy about it. The Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System (MORIS) uses an augmented iPhone to snap pictures of faces, scan fingerprints, and even to image irises, and then combs through police databases looking for matching identities. This, understandably, has privacy and civil liberties advocates crying foul.
The MORIS device attaches to the back of an iPhone, adding roughly 1.75 inches to the thickness of the smartphone. Police officers armed with the tool can take a photo of a person’s face from about five feet away, or scan his or her iris from about six inches, and wirelessly beam that data to law enforcement databases elsewhere to look for a match. It can also perform remote fingerprint matching.
Similar biometric technology has been deployed by the U.S. military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to confirm the identities of civilians entering military safe zones and to search for known insurgents at checkpoints. But rolling it out in the streets of the U.S. has plenty of people concerned with privacy and Constitutional issues.
so long suburbs, hello burbclaves!
i wonder if there are still bureaucratic hurdles to database access the way it was back in the dawn of facial/fingerprint/retina recognition.
some gargoyle/decepticon/t-800 lovechild prolly be hitting the shelves come christmas.
thank all thats good it doesnt work on the droid yet
Ready to move back yet K?
Ready to move back yet K?
haha. I’d have to be ready to visit before I’d be ready to move back.
Yeah, first things first. On the off-hand chance a parent kicks it, I’ll need to have the lenses, latex fingertips and make-up kit together.
Flew back once in late 2008 for a one-off event for a band with which I had some history. I passed the gauntlet unscathed, so I’m apparently not yet considered a risk.
The “legal alien” wife (with long-standing green card in hand) spent an uncomfortable spell in a TSA holding pen though, in the company of a whole bunch of dark-skinned individuals off a Mexicana flight.
All were apparently treated like accused criminals, according to both my wife and the wife of a Mexican executive I spent a few unplanned hours hanging with waiting it out. A fellow musician and Porcupine Tree fan, as it turns out.
They did exactly nothing except hose both of our schedules mercilessly and threaten the two women occasionally when they piped up, a trait common to them both as it turned out… =)
Four hours later the Lady from Mexico City, and she was a lady, exited in a tirade of angry threats about turning her families lawyers loose on the TSA for their troubles.
Mine referred (loudly and clearly) to the guards as “good little Nazis” as she departed, which coming from a German national with a tendency to avoid conflict is pretty strong stuff.
America, love it or leave it, eh…