James Delahunty
2 Jun 2014 8:51
According to reports, the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States has grabbed millions of photos from the Internet for use in facial recognition systems.
The report in the New York Times was based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, who is nearing a year in asylum in Russia as he evades U.S. authorities. It claims that the NSA has mined millions of photos from the Internet as part of its facial recognition projects, sourced from social media, e-mail, video chats and even text messages.
Images snapped up from the Internet were then cross-referenced with other databases that included images of airline passengers and even from national identity cards of other countries. The NSA denied that it has access to photos taken for U.S. passports or U.S. driving licenses.
The leaked documents showed that the NSA's facial recognition systems have produced mixed results. Examples were included within that the "Tundra Freeze" (codename) project had turned up several obvious mismatches when trying to identify a young bearded man with dark hair in a photo, and even turned up incorrect results when querying photos of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Some efforts were successful however, including correctly matching a picture of a bald man at a water park to another picture of the same man with hair, and different clothes in a different setting.
Needless to say, the latest revelation will have privacy groups up in arms, but the NSA claims it is only doing its job.
"We would not be doing our job if we didn't seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities - aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies," Vanee Vines, an NSA spokeswoman told the NYT.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images: www.nytimes.com