New Data Shows Police State Facial Recognition Is WRONG Over 90% Of The Time

 A police department that relies on facial recognition software has  admitted that it has a false positive rate of over 90 percent. What this  means is that nearly every person that is marked as a suspect by this  system is actually an innocent person who will be interrogated by  police, or possibly worse, because they were wrongly identified by this  faulty technology. 

According to a report  from the Guardian, the South Wales Police scanned the crowd of more  than 170,000 people who attended the 2017 Champions League final soccer  match in Cardiff and falsely identified thousands of innocent people.  The cameras identified 2,470 people as criminals but 2,297 of them were  innocent, and only 173 of them were criminals, a 92 percent false positive rate. 

According to a Freedom of Information request  filed by Wired, these are actually typical numbers for the facial  recognition software used by the South Wales Police. Data from the  department showed that there were false positive rates of 87 percent and  90 percent for different events. Further, it is not clear how many of  these suspects were actually nonviolent offenders. The South Wales police have responded to these findings by issuing the following statement: 

“Of course no facial recognition system is 100 percent  accurate under all conditions. Technical issues are normal to all face  recognition systems which means false positives will continue to be a  common problem for the foreseeable future. However since we introduced  the facial recognition technology no individual has been arrested where a  false positive alert has led to an intervention and no members of the  public have complained. In relation to the false positives this is where the system  incorrectly matches a person against a watch list. The operator  considers the initial alert and either disregards it (which happens on  the majority of cases) or dispatches an intervention team as the  operator feels that the match is correct. When the intervention team is  dispatched this involves an officer having an interaction with the  potentially matched individual. Officers can quickly establish if the  person has been correctly or incorrectly matched by traditional policing  methods i.e. normally a dialogue between the officer/s and the  individual. “

The Wales Police don’t see a problem with targeting random people for  search and interrogation, but these findings are raising obvious red  flags for privacy advocates. 

Silkie Carlo, the director of a group called Big Brother Watch, is launching a campaign against facial recognition this month. “These figures show that not only is real-time facial recognition  a threat to civil liberties, it is a dangerously inaccurate policing  tool. South Wales’ statistics show that the tech misidentifies innocent  members of the public at a terrifying rate, whilst there are only a  handful of occasions where it has supported a genuine policing purpose,” Carlo said. 

Similiar numbers  were released by the FBI in 2016, with the agency also admitting that  their facial recognition database consisted of mostly innocent people  since they use drivers license and passport photos for their searches,  in addition to mug shots. In fact, there is a 50/50 chance that your picture is in a facial recognition database. 

Also in 2016, another study found that facial recognition software disproportionately targeted people with dark skin. 

Facial recognition is becoming a part of everyday life whether people  realize it or not, especially in major cities. The rollout of these  systems has been mostly accepted by the general public under the  pretense that they are highly sophisticated tools with a very high rate  of accuracy. But in reality, they seem to just be an expensive and  elaborate excuse to search innocent people.

Police departments across the world are always expanding their facial  recognition databases and putting cameras in every possible place they  can. Just last week, The Free Thought Project reported that police will soon be scanning everything in their path with facial recognition software installed in their body cameras. 

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

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My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion and Manifesto of the Free Humans

I just won a 3-year-long battle with cancer, and will be working to help others through my experience, if you wish to contribute to my medical bills, consider subscribing to my podcast on Patreon.