If You Thought “Person Of Interest” Was Just A TV Show The FBI Has Other Ideas
Fans of the television series Person of Interest will be quite familiar with the idea of the all seeing and all knowing computer system that uses the ever increasing number of public cameras to be able to identify and track people as they move through the city.
Well if the FBI has anything to say about the matter such a system won’t be something just relegated to a television show but in fact become a reality and they plan on spending over one billion dollars to make it happen. The system is called the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, which is billed as an update to their national fingerprint database, and will allow government agencies to determine a person’s identity through facial recognition and other biometric information.
The program is already operational as a pilot program in select areas, and the FBI says that NGI will be ready for use nationally in 2014. As of now, the system is only able to identify suspects with a criminal history, but other types of government photos (like Drivers’ Licenses) could be added to system by the time it’s fully operational.
via Geekosystem
Needless to say this move has privacy advocates more than a little up in arms but the FBI claims that the program is legal under current guidelines of the U.S. Privacy Act; which means that the program will move ahead pretty well unimpeded.
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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