grep Chelo

I just read this article about a biometrics company laying the groundwork for creating the most secure city in the world, and the Mexican city of León, Guanajuato. The way they’re doing it is by installing retinal scanners in several places around the city. They can use this technology to find known criminals walking around, arrest them if necessary, or flag them so everyone around them knows they’re dangerous. The machines can detect 50 individuals per minute, making it an impressive tool for finding people. Put a bunch of these around the city, and you know where everyone has been throughout the day. This sounds like awesome technology, it could revolutionize crime fighting in a time when drug wars are destroying the country and citizens don’t feel safe when stepping out of their homes. Once that’s all settled, they could be used to target advertising more effectively, and we would be living in a world straight out of The Matrix or Minority Report. This all sounds great, except for one tiny little detail…

IT’S ALL BULLSHIT

I’m not saying the technology is bullshit, it may be as effective as they say (I have no reason to doubt it, but neither to trust it,) however that’s not the problem here. The problem is that this is robbing us all of our privacy, our trust, and most importantly, our freedom.

Before I get into the ethical part of my objection, I want to start with the technical part. Be warned, there will be some (really simple) math involved. A single camera can identify 50 people each minute. That is 3,000 every hour. If we put this camera in a crowded area where it can function at full speed, like a bus station or a mall, we could see 9,000 people putting together the morning and afternoon rush hours. Let’s round it up to 10,000 in a day to make things simpler. The city of León has about 1 million inhabitants, so we could be monitoring about 1% of the population every day. That’s just one camera, if we set up a few more across other important points, we could probably get this number up to 10%. But I’d like to believe that most of the people in the city are good people, so the number of criminals should be nowhere near 10%, but let’s be pessimistic and say that 0.1% of the population is dangerous and the police knows about them and has at least photos of them. So we’re looking at 1,000 people that we could identify.

Now, this machine is not 100% accurate, and additional noise will be inserted into the system by the fact that people will just be walking around, not standing up still in front of a device to have their eyes scanned. I’m a nice guy, so I’ll say that this machine has a 99% accuracy rate (and I’m being generous, I’d be surprised if in real life it can go above 80%.) That means that 1% of the time, it will be wrong. So of the 10,000 people that get scanned in one day, it will give the wrong result with 100 of them. Now, there are two types of mistakes the machine can make:

• False negative: the machine scans a set of eyes, and it’s determined that that person is not in the database. However, that person *is* in the database, but it failed to recognize them.
• False positive: after scanning, the system determines the individual is in the database of criminals and reports it. But in this case, the person was not really in the database, and the system confused them with someone else.

If we say that the failures are about as likely to happen, then we have 50 real criminals who escaped just because of blind luck, and 50 people who will be wrongly detained. And if the police trust this device too much, they won’t hold back on the abuse trying to get a confession out of the suspect. It could also be used against them in a trial as evidence. This are 50 poor suckers a day who will, at the least, spend the worst day of their lives stuck in a police station. If we set up more cameras, the maximum amount of bad guys we can catch is still the same –after all, there were only 1,000 to begin with– but with each new location we monitor, we add 50 more people to the list of wrongfully suspected.

That’s enough numbers for now. Those are all speculation, but notice how, even if I give the machine a pretty good chance of identifying criminals, the end result for the regular, law-abiding people is pretty bad.

Now, borrowing from Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, the importance of a system is not how it works, but how it fails. The criminals who escaped thanks to false negatives didn’t have to do anything, they were just lucky, or the lighting was bad, or they blinked and the camera failed to read them correctly. Now, let’s name a few of the ways a criminal, who knows he’s being watched, can evade being caught by this.

• Wear sunglasses. If the machine can’t see your eyes, it can’t identify you.
• Get fancy and buy some contact lenses that disturb light just enough to make the camera fail. This way they can even avoid looking suspicious for wearing sunglasses.
• Cross the street. If you know where the cameras are, it’s easy to avoid them.

Great, now we have cero criminals to catch, because they’re all doing something to avoid getting caught, but we still have 50 people getting arrested because of false positives! Can everyone see just how wrong this is?

I started this post naming the things we’d be losing if we let this system be implemented. Now I want to expand on that.

• Your privacy: the government knows where you are. The government knows where you’ve been. They know which store you went into. They have pictures of you buying that pair of shoes. They know that you were at the bar and now you’re going into your car. It doesn’t matter if you were drinking or not, they can still harass you because they have “probable cause.” And what happens when all this data gets stolen, or the system gets hacked? On whose hands will your daily routine fall into? What if the criminals know that you always get out of work at 7pm, then pass in front of the mall, and possibly pass that little alley further down the street with the poor lighting and zero security? Will you feel safe then? Your privacy is a part of your security, if the bad guys don’t know your routine, it’s harder for them to rob you or kidnap you. If they can get all this info for 10,000 people a day for a few bucks at Tepito, it will be the best investment of their lives.
• Your trust: You’re walking through the mall, when all of a sudden some policemen come running and grab a guy who was walking a few feet from you. You feel relieved, because you might have been his next victim. Then this happens a few times again, and it even starts to feel normal. Later you hear in the news that of all the people who were arrested, only a few actually got charged with something, the rest went free. You start complaining about corruption in the police, and how we need better cops. Then you hear that a friend of a friend got arrested and was later released, and your friend swears that she’s a good person and that the police really made  mistake. You don’t believe it much, but it sounds plausible. Next, a good friend of yours gets arrested, but he’s not released, and you know there’s no way in hell that he was dealing drugs. Do you trust the system now? Do you trust the police? Do you trust that the people who got released were really innocent?
• Your freedom: What if, instead of being your friend who got arrested and charged, it was you who got to spend some time in jail for having done nothing wrong? This scenario won’t be that common, but it will happen, and no one will hear about it. The media won’t cover it, either from pressures from the government or just because they never heard of your case. You or someone you know is locked up in a cell, their dignity and their freedom stripped away. Are there are many others like that. There are many issues we all disagree on, but we can all agree that denying freedom to someone who deserves it is plain WRONG.

Is this how México celebrates 200 years of independence? By taking all that the fathers and mothers of our country fought and died for and just throwing it away?

This is not just a mexican problem, this is an issue that everyone everywhere needs to pay attention to. Technology is moving at a far faster pace than our laws and our ethics, and we can’t let it trample us. We can’t let fear be the one making choices, in this case, the wrong choices. We can’t allow governments to spend millions upon millions of our money on systems that will only cause fear and mistrust among the general population, while letting all of the sunglasses-wearing robbers, rapists, drug dealers, and murderers cross the street and have a laugh while deciding who their next victim will be.

I seriously hope that my fears are unfounded, and that the article is just a clever joke and I just got mad and worried for something silly. But if that’s not the case, we need to fight for our freedom, because no one else will fight for us.

Let’s celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Mexican Independence by freeing our minds from fear. Let’s take a look at reality, and not get locked in the Jail of Being Watched. Let’s put our hands and money and resources into things that will give us the Freedom to be Happy

Links:

Iris Scanners Create the Most Secure City in the World