Our biometric future : facial recognition technology and the culture of surveillance /

This work is a fascinating, timely investigation of the cultural practices and institutional priorities surrounding automated face perception technologies. Gates (Univ. of California, San Diego) begins by presenting an image from a surveillance video at the Portland, Maine, airport on the morning of September 11, 2001, apparently showing two of the alleged plane hijackers, and implies that face recognition technology (FRT) could have compared the faces against those of suspected terrorists and alerted airport security. Compared to other biometric technologies, FRT, by basically automating the way humans identify each other, has the advantages of little intrusion and high user acceptance. Gates describes the failed closed-circuit TV experiment in the Ybor City high-crime district of Tampa, Florida, which resulted in public outcry and civil unrest. The author also discusses terrorist identification; social uses of FRT, such as image recognition instead of passwords for computer log-in; and a derivative of FRT, the identification of facial expressions. In the conclusion, Gates goes back to the apparent image of the two 9/11 terrorists mentioned in the introduction, and explains that identification from such low-quality, blurry images would be extremely unlikely, and that she chose this image because it exemplifies the unrealistic hope that society has for FRT. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. C. Tappert Pace University