“Chechen militant bombers were wearing a police uniform in Moscow subway blasts”

The Russian Ministry for Internal Affairs has been receiving reports about persons pretending to be INTERPOL officers using fake ID. Some of the places this has been going on are border towns in Murmansk Oblast.

The Russian National Central Bureau for INTERPOL by the Ministry for Internal Affairs has received reports from different parts of the country about certain persons appearing as Interpol officers, a press release from the ministry reads. The impostors use identification documents and badges with INTERPOL’s symbol.

In Murmansk Oblast, these false INTERPOL officers have been operating in towns on the borders with Norway and Finland, the press release reads. Here they have been showing their IDs to local officials and regular citizens. The IDs looked like official INTERPOL IDs, in blue morocco cover with a metal badge shaped as the INTERPOL emblem. The “officers” have used the fake IDs to get personal benefits or get away after having done minor offences like breaking traffic regulations.

Similar reports have come from Moscow, Krasnodar, Tyumen and Astrakhan. The National Central Bureau for INTERPOL has also received information about similar incidents in Russia’s neighboring countries.

Fearing that the number of such incidents could be on the rise, the National Central Bureau for INTERPOL informs that their officers do not use any special identification documents other than the standard police badge that all Russian police officers have.

BarentsObserver has earlier reported that police authorities on both sides of the Norwegian-Russian border are interested in a joint plan on cross-border crime prevention and crime investigation. A cooperation agreement on the issue is signed before summer, Chief of police in Eastern Finnmark police district Håkon Skulstad said.

Cross-border traffic across the Norwegian-Russian border could pick pace if a planned cooperation zone between the two country’s border areas is implemented. The cooperation zone would include facilitated cross-border travel conditions for the people living in the zone.

By ANGELA CHARLTON
Associated Press Writer – Charlotte Observer

DAVOS, Switzerland The biggest travel threat facing the world now is passport fraud, according to the chief of Interpol – the millions of stolen documents that could be used by terrorists or criminals to travel worldwide.

Airport body scanners, embraced by many in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing, are a misguided solution to travel threats, Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday night.

“The greatest threat in the world is that last year there were 500 million, half a billion, international air arrivals worldwide where travel documents were not compared against Interpol databases,” he said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, where 2,500 business and political leaders are gathered in this Alpine resort.

“Right now in our database we have over 11 million stolen or lost passports,” he said. “These passports are being used, fraudulently altered and are being given to terrorists, war criminals, drug traffickers, human traffickers.”

The solution, he said, is better intelligence, and better intelligence sharing, among countries.

“You don’t know the motivation behind the person carrying the passport,” he said. If you’re a terrorist, he said, “Are you going to carry explosives that are going to be detected? No.”

Many U.S. airports use the body-scanning machines and airports in other countries are adopting them after Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear Dec. 25 on the Detroit-bound flight.

But Noble questioned “the amount of money and resources that go into these (body-scanning) machines.”

He cited a case two weeks ago in a Caribbean country where five people were arrested carrying European passports, but were caught after they were found to be carrying stolen passports – one stolen back in 2001. The five had “definite links to crime, organized crime, human trafficking but no definite links to terrorism,” he said, though he wouldn’t name the country.

He said U.S. authorities are recognizing the threat of passport fraud – in 2006, U.S. authorities scanned the Interpol database about 2,000 times, while last year they did so 78 million times. They came up with 4,000 people traveling on stolen or lost passports.

Intelligence experts have cast doubt on the usefulness of the so-called no-fly lists of suspects shared among airports worldwide, saying that criminals can change their names or make simple name spelling changes that render them untrackable.

“(The lists) are useful but I don’t believe they are the be-all and end-all,” Noble said, adding he was concerned about governments’ efforts to expand them.

Noble, who has expanded Interpol’s efforts to fight terrorism, cybercrime, corruption and maritime piracy in his nearly 10 years at the helm of international police agency Interpol, also had words of warning for people hoping to donate money to Haiti after its devastating earthquake.

“Be very careful,” he said, citing several cases of fraudsters preying on donors and stealing their money via fake charity Web sites.

“Whenever there’s a tragedy it seems to bring out the best in people and unfortunately the worst,” he said. He said several U.S. sites have been taken down since the earthquake after they were found to represent no known charity.

Interpol has a team helping identify victims in Haiti, a daunting task with an estimated 200,000 dead. Another daunting task will be rebuilding Haiti’s law enforcement.

Policing in Haiti “was a challenge before this happened,” he said.

Letter

Executive Committee Home

United Kingdom is Leading Pack in Face Recognition; Is U.S. Next?

By ASHLEY PHILLIPS – ABC NEWS

A 17-year-old walks into a liquor store, carries a 12-pack of beer up to the counter and hands the clerk a flawless fake ID. Unbeknown to him, the clerk need not even glance at the ID before turning him down. His face gave him away. A facial recognition system placed behind the store counter analyzes the teen’s 17-year-old features and informs the clerk of his illegal age. It’s just one of a litany of uses for the fast-evolving surveillance technology, a field that has security experts salivating and privacy advocates bracing for a battle.

(Getty / ABC News)

Computers that can pick out fugitives in a crowd, video cameras that scold people for littering, eyes in the sky that detect crimes as they’re being committed. While these scenarios may sound straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” they are becoming reality and could be headed for your corner store sooner than you think.

Although still being researched across the globe, facial recognition technology has already taking hold, particularly in Great Britain.

Last week, Budgens, a U.K. grocery story chain, announced that it would use facial recognition technology to prevent its clerks from selling alcohol and cigarettes to underage customers. The photos of customers who were refused previously will be stored in a database, and then if the offenders come in to buy similar products again, the clerk will be alerted.

Similarly, the British government plans to roll out a facial recognition pilot program in London airports this summer. People who hold biometric U.K. and EU passports can pass through unmanned gates. At the gate, their faces will be scanned to match them to their passport records.

Though the technology has been around for years and the British are embracing it and moving forward, technology experts say facial recognition — and the cameras needed to support it — wouldn’t fly with privacy-obsessed Americans, at least not yet.

“[Facial recognition] really has picked up steam in the last 10 years,” said Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, who teaches electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “The principle has been around for 25 years, but it started getting put into commercial systems five to 10 years ago.”

Bhagavatula describes the technology simply.

“Let’s say a digital camera is taking a picture of someone’s face. So now it gets represented in computers as a bunch of numbers,” he said. “Humans have no problem [saying] that’s someone I know. The computer has to look at those numbers and say, ‘Are these the same set of numbers corresponding to a person I took a photo of a year ago?’”

It’s a complex process, and it is not flawless. For computers, those numbers representing human features can change based on the person’s expression, lighting and overall quality of the image, according to Bhagavatula.

To combat this, researchers are constantly looking for new algorithms to analyze facial features. Currently, many researchers are looking at features that don’t change, such as the distance between the eyes, the angle made by the tip of the nose or the length of an eyebrow, he said.

“Many methods try to capture these kinds of things that are unique to people’s faces,” he said. “You hope that these numbers stay the same when a person smiles or frowns.”

The U.S. Privacy Police

The kind of monitoring that would enable facial recognition to work well has not caught on in the United States, at least not yet, according to Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley.

“The English have always had a slightly different attitude toward privacy,” Saffo said. “They’ve never had a strong a privacy culture as America has had. The English do not have a constitution. Their protections are in common law. It is easier for the government to overstep notions of privacy than it would be here, because you have people invoking the Bill of Rights.”

But Saffo believes that given the right crisis, the United States would eventually accept the technology.

“Do not underestimate the psychic shock of the London subway bombings,” he said. “We bleat and cry about privacy, but we happily surrender our privacy for the cheapest of coin.”

So far, most legislative pushes for video monitoring by city governments have been thwarted.

This week in Washington, D.C., a bill pushed by the city’s mayor calling for nearly $1 million in funding for citywide public cameras was voted down by the city council.

“People sometimes talk about video surveillance systems as moving forward inexorably in the United States, but we’ve seen quite a few successful protests,” said Mark Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I think there are a lot of questions that need to be asked about video surveillance. The most obvious one is: what is the purpose?”

“[Britains] have embraced a really extraordinary amount of monitoring by the government that I don’t think the U.S. would accept,” he said.

Yeah, but Does It Work?

Some critics also take issue with the accuracy (or lack thereof) of facial recognition technology.

In perfect conditions, facial recognition can be fairly effective, according to experts, but in less than perfect conditions it can be wildly inaccurate. For example, it is difficult for a computer to identify a person who is walking on a city street or in an airport where his face might be blurred, obscured or shadowed.

“We have gotten a long way from where we were 10 years ago,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Bhagavatula. “But good algorithms have an 80 percent accept rate. It’s pretty good, but not perfect.”

Rob Jenkins, a psychology professor at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, may have found at least one way around the technology’s inaccuracies. Jenkins and his colleague Mike Burton published a study in the journal Science in January that outlined a method to get 100 percent accuracy from computers by using what the researchers called an “averaged” face image, made up of 20 photos.

“The great thing about this averaging process is it just washes out all these differences of single photographs. The lighting and the pose all kind of becomes neutralized,” Jenkins told ABCNEWS.com in January. “And what you’re just left with is the core of the face. The aspects of the image are consistent from one photo to the next.”

Since that study, police, governments and companies have shown interest in his research, Jenkins said. And although he is interested more in how the mind recognizes faces than how the technology is used, as a citizen, he finds the ubiquity of CCTV troubling.

“New technologies that are being unveiled as being the solution to problems — often they’re just a better key to locking and unlocking something, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t think about what’s behind the door,” he said. “Because if you put all this trust in a new technology, … you can find yourself in quite a hairy situation.”

Jenkins points out that sometimes even humans can’t recognize familiar faces.

“The human brain is the most sophisticated computer we know of,” he said. “Engineers are setting themselves [up] with a very difficult problem by demanding accurate performance. Even humans can’t do this reliably and should give us pause. … Is the goal a realistic goal? Are we ever going to build a machine that can do that? And maybe we will, but I think it’s a question that’s worth asking.”

By Michael Fitzpatrick – BBC Increasingly facial recognition is picking out people in a crowd

A surveillance state, with cameras on every street is commonplace but now Big Business is also turning to Big Brother.

Face recognition, behavior analyzing surveillance cameras, biometric profiling and the monitoring and storing of our shopping patterns has made snooping into our habits, movements and private lives ever easier.

Dismayed at its shrinking power to market to us via traditional media or even the internet, the private sector is now proposing to reach potential customers in ways that critics say should have us all concerned.

“There is an enormous pent-up demand for personalized location advertising, whether it is on your cellophane or PDA, on your radio in your car, or on the billboards you walk by on the streets and inside stores,” says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT.

“This is yet another technological intrusion into privacy. And like all such intrusions, it will be taken as far as the owner of that intrusion finds it profitable.”

Emotional reactions

New surveillance technology could even evaporate the advertiser’s favorite grouse that “half of advertising is wasted, but we don’t know which half”.

Advertisers are turning to “intelligent” digital billboards that use cameras to watch you watching the ads.

In Germany, developers have placed video cameras into street advertisements attempting to discern people’s emotional reactions to the ads, according to the Washington-based privacy advocate outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

It warns that this type of surveillance encroaches on civil liberties. Such face, voice and behavior technology could be a means of tracking individuals on a mass level across their entire lives, it says.

Pushed by the demands of advertisers and security-minded governments, these technologies are becoming so increasingly smart and intrusive that they now resemble something out of science fiction, it warns.

Science fact

Some of the technology available now seems to have overtaken fiction.

When an interactive ad shouts out to Tom Cruise’s character in the 2002 film Minority Report: “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness!” It identified him as he walked through a mall by scanning the unique pattern of his iris.

This is now pretty standard. Face recognition technology is proving to be a handier, more sophisticated tool to pick us out on the street, a crowded room or at passport control.

Such systems are able to automatically detect and identify human faces using recognition algorithms.

The first step for a facial recognition system is to recognize a human face and extract it from the rest of the scene. Next, the system measures the distance between the features — a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery.

Matches can then be found in databases in under a second, although 100% accuracy is not yet guaranteed.

Currently the private sector is finding such systems useful for what it calls “targeted marketing,” or “dynamic advertising.”

Japan’s NEC, for instance, is sells face-recognition technology to allow advertisers to tailor what ad is showing on a digitized screen depending on the viewer’s sex and age.

Tracking systems, such as these, can determine the viewer’s gender 85-90% of the time, approximate age and ethnicity, and change the ads accordingly.

NEC denies the system raises privacy concerns as it does not store any images, only the analyzed results (age and sex) based on those images.

But as Schneier points out systems like these are likely liable to “function creep” where a technology is brought in for one purpose, to profile your sex while viewing an ad for example, and then begins to push the boundaries.

“Once the cameras are installed and operational, once they’re networked to central computers, then it’s a simple matter of upgrading the software,” he says.

“And if they can do more — if they can provide more “value” to the advertisers — then of course they will. To think otherwise is simply naive.”

And when advertisers start to follow us, our privacy, our right to be left alone will be severely compromised, he thinks.

More control

Democratic governments, charged with protecting us from such violations, are beginning to wake up to these practices.

EU commissioner Viviane Reding wants to see tighter controls

The US is about to propose a bill to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them. While the EU promises to rigorously police what it claims are already stringent controls on our personal data.

“Europeans must have the right to control how their personal information is used,” Viviane Reding, the EU’s commissioner for information society and media told BBC news. “We cannot give up this basic principle, and have all our exchanges monitored, surveyed and stored, in exchange for a promise of ‘more relevant’ advertising.”

Despite such assurances, given the pervasiveness of such technologies firstly on the internet and now spreading to the physical world, what we do about them in the next few years will be crucial. It might control our privacy for generations to come say human rights advocates.

“Companies are increasingly impatient to get to us and once these practices are commonplace it will hard to reverse them,” says Marc Rotenberg director of EPIC. “Particularly as, ironically, we lose privacy these companies are gaining secrecy.”

It would seem sensible to debate now how far business and the state should be allowed to tag us while we still have a privacy to protect.

Posted by Irene – Loss of Privacy

October  1, 2009

An expansion is currently underway that will develop the FBI’s current fingerprint collection database into a new biometrics system that includes DNA, facial recognition, palm prints and voice scans.

The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today.

The FBI’s current IAFIS database remains a workhorse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark

The next-generation FBI database system is under design by Lockheed Martin, with MorphoTrak and others, and is expected to include DNA, iris scans, advanced 3-D facial imaging and voice scans among its multi-modal biometrics. Lower turnaround times for delivering information over wide-area networks are planned. The goal is to drop from a roughly two-hour response time for IAFIS urgent requests to less than 10 minutes.

The FBI is already moving into new areas, including setting up a palm-print repository and searchable databases for scars, marks and tattoos that it will be collecting.

The FBI, under the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, is now allowed to collect reference-sample DNA material for biometrics analysis purposes at the time of booking, Grever said. “DNA has become a powerful and timely tool,” said Grever, adding there are no “privacy or civil liberties issues beyond those associated with fingerprints.”

Given that DNA can be fabricated, how accurate is this new biometric database going to be?  Given that they’re tracking everything else about you, it won’t be long before whatever makes you “you” is in a database somewhere.

Multi-modal biometrics targeted for new system

By Ellen Messmer Framingham – Computerworld | Thursday, 24 September, 2009

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is expanding beyond its traditional fingerprint-focused collection practices to develop a newbiometrics system that will include DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans, blended to create what’s known as “multi-modal biometrics”.
“The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative,” said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI’s science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa.

The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that’s expected to be in prototype early next year. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more.

Grever said that fingerprints and DNA appear to be the most mature and searchable biometrics possibilities, but the FBI is working to include iris-scan records among newer biometrics technologies to identify criminals and terrorists. The plan is to share this data with authorised US and international investigative partners, as the agency does today.

The FBI’s current IAFIS database remains a workhouse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark.

The next-generation FBI database system is under design by MorphoTrak and is expected to include DNA, iris scans, advanced 3-D facial imaging and voice scans among its multi-modal biometrics. Lower turnaround times for delivering information over wide-area networks are planned. The goal is to drop from a roughly two-hour response time for IAFIS urgent requests to less than 10 minutes.

But FBI officials acknowledged there’s still a lot of research and development that needs to be done to reach its NGI goals. One goal is to develop a rapid DNA analysis method that would provide DNA analysis in less than an hour, as opposed to several hours or even days. The FBI is cosponsoring research with the Department of Defense, which has a similar goal.

Kevin Reid, section chief for the biometrics service section at the FBI, said the FBI also wants to establish a service-oriented architecture for NGI, but it’s not clear when this would be in place to provide services related to biometrics information-sharing.

The FBI is already moving into new areas, including setting up apalm-print repository and searchable databases for scars, marks and tattoos that it will be collecting.

The FBI, under the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, is now allowed to collect reference-sample DNA material for biometrics analysis purposes at the time of booking, Grever said. “DNA has become a powerful and timely tool,” said Grever, adding there are no “privacy or civil liberties issues beyond those associated with fingerprints.”

Published: 6:44PM Monday September 21, 2009
Source: ONE News

New technology designed to prevent identity fraud is sparking “big brother”-like concerns.
Legislation being debated in parliament will allow Immigration New Zealand to use biometric checking to stop those who are not who they claim they are from crossing borders illegally.
But there are fears these new powers will be extended to other arms of the state.

ONE NewsAn example of biometric testing

The shape of your face, the width of your nose, iris patterns, fingerprints, the way you walk, even the way you type are unique characteristics.
It is information governments around the world are keen to collect, says Michael Bott from the Council for Civil Liberties.
“The more information the state has about you, the more they can track your movements and control you. Knowledge is power,” he says.
From the end of 2009, New Zealanders and Australians with electronic passports will have the option of using SmartGate to get through customs quickly. Your image is checked against the biometric identity data chip in your e-passport.
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“This technology will actually pinpoint multiple points on cheekbones, nose and eye and if the distance is fractionally out it will go ‘this is not the person’,” says Customs Minister Maurice Williamson.
Under new immigration legislation making its way through parliament on Tuesday, anyone arriving in New Zealand will be required to provide biometric data.
Immigration New Zealand says biometrics could have prevented a man allegedly linked to the September 11 attackers from crossing the border. He spent four months in New Zealand before being deported.
“We, along with every other country, have been the victim of identity fraud and identity crime,” says Immigration Identity Programme Manager Aaron Baker .
ONE News has been told New Zealand has joined Canada, Britain, Australia and the United States to work more closely on managing entry visas.
Three of those countries have agreed to share biometric information. New Zealand has not yet, but is likely to do so.
Privacy concerns
A report obtained by ONE News has highlighted some of the potential threats to privacy if biometric information is shared too widely.
The new legislation allows immigration to share data with other departments if a migrant or visitor applies for a taxpayer funded service like hospital treatment.
Privacy Commissioner Marie Schroff would like to see more details around how there will be protections around that information.
There are also concerns a law that allows one government agency to collect biometric data will allow others to follow.
Overseas, the technology is already used to check the identities of drivers, prison visitors and welfare beneficiaries.
Biometric technology is becoming more sophisticated. However, there are genuine fears that the rights of citizens to privacy will be left behind as technology advances.