Your Face is Not a Barcode

June 29, 2023 5:37 PM

Phil Agre warned us about ubiquitous surveillance--in 2001. “I've been in the military and the police, and if you had seen some of the things that I've seen then you would change your mind. You don't know what I've seen. Besides, everyone knows, having been reminded daily by the news, that evil crimes are committed every day. The real problem with your argument is that, like the argument I just addressed, it could be applied to support giving absolute power to the military and police. But then, by definition, we would no longer be a free society. We need principled arguments about the place of government force in a free society, and my purpose here is to suggest what some of those arguments might be."
posted by mecran01 (21 comments total)

I've flagged this for a moderator to fix the bad HTML ("pre" tags).
posted by intermod at 5:50 PM on June 29, 2023

The "fix" removes the space between the hypothetical answer and Agre's response, making it look like they are the same thing, which is confusing.

The pre-markdown maintained a space between the two, which I probably should have accomplished in some other manner.
posted by mecran01 at 6:27 PM on June 29, 2023

Security can be improved in many ways that have no effect on civil liberties, for example by rationalizing identification systems for airport employees or training flight attendants in martial arts.

This is not a serious piece of writing.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:09 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

Even the phrase "face recognition" does not convey how easily the system can extract facial expressions. It is not just "identity" that can be captured, then, but data that reaches into the person's psyche.

This is indeed not a serious piece of writing.
posted by mmoncur at 7:24 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

If it’s not clear from the post, this is a twenty year old piece of writing from a computer scientist who dropped out of society more than a decade ago (with all the mental health issues that this usually entails). Don’t expect any grappling with where we’ve actually found ourselves in 2023.

Some background (WaPo gift link)
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 7:25 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The article smacks of post-9-11 paranoia about terrorists and includes lots of hand-wavey statistics but, assuming those statistics are within some region of truth, this struck me:
Let us assume, with extreme generosity, that a face recognition system is 99.99 percent accurate ... Then let us say that one airline passenger in ten million has their face in the database. Now, 99.99 percent probably sounds good. It means one failure in 10,000. In scanning ten million passengers, however, one failure in 10,000 means 1000 failures -- and only one correct match of a real terrorist. In other words, 999 matches out of 1000 will be false

With 2.9 million air passengers a day in the US, this would equate to roughly 290 false matches per day (I think - maths is not my strong point). My mind boggles at the work involved in processing and clearing each of those false matches. The sheer number of people moving through airports would mean that a far higher degree of accuracy would be required (and may have been achieved since the article was written) for this to even come close to being a useful tool.
posted by dg at 7:38 PM on June 29, 2023

The article smacks of post-9-11 paranoia

Theorization of the panopticon is rather older than that. Or, if you prefer, the security state did not spring into existence in response to 9-11. It was revived after a very brief interregnum in between the Cold War and the 'GWOT,' to the extent it had ever really declined. (If anything, the problem with that framing is the novelty.)

Here. From 1998 on nettime, by the time the original cryptopunk movement (around PGP and whatnot in the early '90s) was on the wane: Echelon surveillance system is no conspirary theory
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:44 PM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

Interesting. I didn't realise the extent of monitoring by the US so long ago.

The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network (Internet) accessible to US intelligence agencies
Hilarious!
posted by dg at 8:20 PM on June 29, 2023

If face recognition technologies are pioneered in countries where civil liberties are relatively strong, it becomes more likely that they will also be deployed in countries where civil liberties hardly exist. In twenty years, at current rates of progress, it will be feasible for the Chinese government to use face recognition to track the public movements of everyone in the country.

Check.
posted by morspin at 11:26 PM on June 29, 2023

Phil Agre is or was a thinker, or cultural critic, or whatever the hell, who is well worth taking seriously, and I wish to hell I and more of us had twenty-five years ago. Yes, some of what he wrote in 2001 is dumb and 2001.

I hope he's doing okay.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:56 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you go back twenty years from any period, there’s a whole lot of “do not invent the torment nexus”. And yet, somehow, it’s always the torment nexus that gets invented.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:41 AM on June 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

I hope he’s doing okay

Phil Agre is no longer a professor at UCLA
Agre was reported missing on October 16, 2009. He was found on January 16, 2010, but never returned to public life.
posted by Phanx at 12:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

His PhD thesis from 1988 [PDF via MIT] says a lot of stuff I was fumbling around for in the dark when I tried to write about technology, culture and society around 2004ish. (Without much success.) I didn't come across him until later.

It is not just "identity" that can be captured, then, but data that reaches into the person's psyche.

Try imagining it had been translated from the work of a French structuralist or post-structuralist. Are Barthes and Baudrillard "serious" enough? Bourdieu, who appears in his thesis? Latour? Foucault?
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:08 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Argh. Correct PDF link, or the publication page if it won't load.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:16 AM on June 30, 2023

I'll just leave this right here.
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:22 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Many social institutions depend on the difficulty of putting names to faces without human intervention. If people could be identified just from looking in a shop window or eating in a restaurant, it would be a tremendous change in our society's conception of the human person.

Oh, buddy. I’m so sorry you only got to remain in that world for about two years before a bunch of tech bros moved fast to break society’s conception of the human person.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:28 AM on June 30, 2023

He was found on January 16, 2010, but never returned to public life.

the full wiki text concerning his disappearance doesn't paint such a dire picture:

On October 16, 2009, Agre's sister filed a missing persons report for Agre.[6] She indicated that she had not seen him since the spring of 2008 and became concerned when she learned that he had abandoned his apartment and job sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.[6] Agre was found by the LA County Sheriff's Department on January 16, 2010, and was deemed in good health and self-sufficient.[7]

It seems he has managed to more or less achieve invisibility in this now most visible of worlds. Crazy or sane? Feature or bug?
posted by philip-random at 8:58 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Follow the links. From the NPR story:

UPDATE, 1/31, 6:55pm: I received an email from one of the people who has actively been involved in the search for Phil, and she isn't satisfied with the information released by the police. "For several reasons we cannot provide details, but what we can tell you is that the police did talk with Phil for a few minutes," she said. "Police standards for removing a missing persons notice is quite minimal. Those of us guiding the search for Phil have more detailed information about the interaction between the officer and Phil that is not being made public. The information we did receive gave us no evidence that he is actually "safe". Therefore we are continuing to search for him."

Hopefully he really is self-sufficient and off the grid and happy; but there is some cause to be concerned.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:02 AM on June 30, 2023

Fascinating updates here. I followed his Red Rock Eater digest until it fizzled out. A minor aspect was at one point his interest in Japanese pens; IIRC he requested samples from his readers, then acquired so many he asked who wanted some. I sent him a SASE and received back a couple Pilot pens.

I miss his writing but I'm glad his withdrawal seems to be for the most part successful. I admire those who can retreat like that; I'm reminded of My Side of the Mountain or even Huck Finn "lighting out for the territories."
posted by Rash at 9:15 AM on June 30, 2023

It's not that "no one listened" to Phil Agre. He was well known in the 1990s. His newletters The Network Observer and later Red Rock Eater Digest had thousands of subscribers. I recall he was profiled in Time magazine as an influential person on the Internet.

But businesses and governments did not respond to what he wrote, for reasons that Agre understood and explained very well.

I recently ran across some of Agre's writings again after many years and was impressed how pertinent and well-written they are. Here are some samples, with the short ones linked first:

How to help someone use a computer


Rationalizations for bad design, a posting to RISKS digest


Authoritarian Culture, in Notes and Recommendations 8 Nov 1996 (scroll down a page)


Critical Thinking, in Notes and Recommendations 12 July 2000


Archived Notes and Recommendatons from RRE Digest

Layering, from a course on Information Systems and Design

Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI

He wrote a book, here are some extracts and a chapter summary:

Computation and Human Experience

Much more at his old page at UCLA.
posted by JonJacky at 9:57 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

"AI" generator tools like Midjourney can certainly interpret English requests for moods and facial expressions in the way one might expect.

I don't know enough about how those work to guess if going the other direction (recognizing a facial expression well enough to name it) is possible or realistic. It doesn't sound crazy, though.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:17 AM on June 30, 2023