After the attack of Hamas to the detriment of Israel last year October 7the armed forces ofUnit 8200 – an Israeli military intelligence department – acquired footage from surveillance cameras present in the affected places. The military also recovered from social media the clips shared by Hamas in the days following the attack.
Unit 8200 had a plan: identify attackers using a facial recognition system based on artificial intelligence.
Help for the Israeli armed forces, at that point, arrived from Corsight, a Tel Aviv-based company specializing in facial recognition techniques. On its official website, Corsight claims to use “advanced AI systems” for whom 50% of a face is enough to establish who it belongs to.
But this invasive technology, initially used on the terrorists responsible for the October 7, 2023 attacks, is now used regularly to monitor the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. Without distinction between Hamas militants and civilians. The intelligence “program”, in fact, would concern anyone with links to Hamas.
That’s what the New York Times, who spoke with several members of Israeli intelligence who wish to remain anonymous.
The sources of New York Times they claim that the facial recognition used by Israel sometimes makes errors. Several civilians have been mistakenly associated with Hamas.
Although the president of Corsight, Robert Wattsdeclared that the company’s technology is reliable even in the presence of people being filmed “from extreme angles, from drones and in low light conditions”the soldiers of Unit 8200 who spoke to the New York Times claim that Israeli facial recognition in reality has difficulty with dark or poor quality images.
For example, when Corsight’s technology was used to identify the bodies of Israeli soldiers who died in the attack on October 7, 2023, it did not always give correct results. In that case, the faces of some deceased people had injuries.
Recently facial recognition has been used in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
In the 50 days following the invasion by Putin’s armed forces, the Ukrainian army used facial recognition offered by the American company Clearview 8,600 times to identify the corpses of Russian soldiers or captured soldiers. This data, reported by Washington Postis confirmed – in part – by a video released by IT Armythe army of volunteer hackers created by Mykhailo FedorovMinister for Digital Transition in Ukraine.
AI and war
Ukraine plans to stop war by sending photos of dead soldiers to their mothers in Russia
by Pier Luigi Pisa
Clearview AI, founded by Hoan Ton-That in 2017, it’s like a search engine. But instead of typing a series of words, you upload someone’s photo. At that point the AI examines a database of 30 billion images collected from sites and social networks such as Facebook.
As soon as a perfect match emerges, all available photos of that person appear, with links to the web pages where they were found. And therefore to names – often surnames – and details of the private lives of the people identified.
Interview
Hoan Ton-That, the founder of Clearview AI: “Our glasses will recognize any face”
by Pier Luigi Pisa
In many countries around the world what Clearview AI does is illegal. It is not permitted to collect and store a subject’s biometric data – including facial features – without their consent.
In Europe the use of real-time facial recognition, based on images acquired by video cameras placed in public places for example, was banned by the recent AI Actthe set of rules approved by the EU Parliament concerning the development and use of artificial intelligence systems within the Member States.
Artificial intelligence
The European Parliament approves the AI Act, stop live facial recognition
by Arcangelo Rociola
Nevertheless AI-based facial recognition it is spreading to the rest of the world. Some airports intend to introduce this technology to make checks faster and more efficient. Countries like China and Russia, on the other hand, use technology to keep minorities and dissidents under control.
Clearview AI software, in the USA, according to its founder Ton-That “it has been used a million times by law enforcement”. Especially in the United States.
Kashmir Hilla New York Times journalist expert in facial recognition who recently published a book entitled “Your face belongs to us” (published in Italy by Orville Press), told how Clearview AI has caused in recent years the arrest of six US citizens based on faulty facial recognition. They were all African Americans.
It’s not a coincidence. Facial recognition is 5 to 10 times more wrong when they scan a black person. It can happen if the algorithms were trained on a dataset in which black people are poorly represented, or if the technology used reflects social biases.
Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that There are at least 1 billion smartphones equipped with facial recognition in circulation around the worldi.e. the technology that allows you to protect – and therefore unlock – the phone using the biometric data of its owner.
The market that revolves around facial recognition, on the other hand, is growing rapidly. It went from $3 billion in revenue in 2019 to the $5.7 billion expected to be collected in 2024 (Statista.com data).
#Facial #recognition #hand #Gaza #rest #world
– 2024-03-29 19:47:29
