Nowhere To Hide As Minority Report-Style Facial Recognition Technology Spreads Across America
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
September 17th, 2014
What is our society going to look like when our faces are being tracked literally everywhere that we go? As part of the FBI’s new Next Generation Identification System, a facial recognition database known as the Interstate Photo System will have collected 52 million of our faces by the end of 2015. But that is only a small part of the story. According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has been using advanced facial recognition technology for years. In addition, as you will see below, advertising companies are starting to use Minority Report-style face scanners in their billboards and many large corporations see facial recognition technology as a tool that they can use to serve their customers better. Someday soon it may become virtually impossible to go out in public in a major U.S. city without having your face recorded. Is that the kind of society that we want?
To the FBI, this technology does not represent an invasion of privacy. Rather, they are very proud of the fact that they are not going to be so dependent on fingerprinting any longer. The FBI has been developing the Next Generation Identification System for years, and this month it was announced that it is finally fully operational…
The federal government’s Next Generation Identification System — a biometric database that relies largely on facial-recognition technology — is now fully operational, the FBI announced Monday.
“This effort is a significant step forward for the criminal justice community in utilizing biometrics as an investigative enabler,” the FBI said in a statement.
The latest advance in the technology gives users the ability to receive “ongoing status notifications” about individuals’ criminal histories, the FBI said. That means if, for instance, a teacher commits an offense, law enforcement can be immediately informed — and then pass that information on to administrators.
It’s to monitor criminal histories of those “in positions of trust,” the FBI said.
As part of this new system, every American will eventually be assigned a “Universal Control Number”.
Does that sound creepy to you?
The Rest…HERE
