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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
Politech facecam archive: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=facecam --- Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 16:52:21 -0500 To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> From: Barry Steinhardt <BSteinhardt@aclu.org> Subject: Drawing A Blank -- ACLU Report on the Failure of Face Recognition in Tampa Declan, The use of the biometric facial recognition technology, along with video surveillance on the streets of Tampa, Florida is an overhyped failure that has been seemingly abandoned by police officials, according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union. System logs obtained by the ACLU through Florida's open-records law show that the system never identified even a single individual contained in the department's database of photographs. And in response to the ACLU's queries about the small number of system logs, the department has acknowledged that the software -- originally deployed last June, 2001 -- has not been actively used since August. The report entitled "Drawing a Blank : The Failure of Face Recognition in Tampa", can be found at http://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy/drawing_blank.pdf. Our announcement can be found at http://www.aclu.org/news/2001/n010302a.html. Barry Steinhardt ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------