Chinese man caught by facial recognition at pop concert

[VK3DRB]

This is quite possible. Every entrance in China that requires a ticket has a camera, concert, airport, train station, even some metro stations. And they are at least 720p.
Also, every major traffic light has one camera per lane per side, so there are no traffic cops in China. eCops are everywhere.
Probably the only place that has more camera density than China is Japan, but China is working hard to surpass them on monitoring everything.

It's funny to see this western hypocrisy that NYC has the same surveillance network, and suddenly everyone are bashing China for making a surveillance society, only almost a decade after the NYC one.

The People's Hypocrisy of China means the communist leaders and the rich who are members of the communist party are hypocrites (and counterrevolutionaries). They secretly amass great wealth and special privileges, education and jobs for their own family members and themselves; whist telling the rest of the country to be good comrades and shut up. China is the epitome of inequality. Publish or question the party leaders' family wealth and you not only get a low rating, you disappear. It is onyl a matter of time before the people will revolt against their corrupt leaders. Hence why the surveillance. The west is more honest with their brand of capitalism. But as capitalism has gone unchecked, we also get extreme inequality, With more than half the world's wealth in the hands of eight super-greedy individuals the world is heading into a very dangerous place. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-poorest-50

What the "capitalist pigs" don't understand or care about, is that spreading wealth fairly promotes well being for all. The trickle-down effect is a fantasy to a large extent. For example, assume any man only needs two pairs of new jeans per year. If a tiny percentage of their wealth were shared with 10,000 people to pull them out of poverty, three is a demand for 20,000 pairs of jeans per year, not two. Hence why fairness is good for an economy and the well being of everyone.

[VK3DRB]

I don't care about money that much, as long as I can have a decent life quality. I more care about being able to make things that was not possible before or at least in this country before. That eureka moment is worth everything.

I think the eureka moment is fantastic. Most people would not want a eureka moment if their standard of living was pretty bad. I remember at uni, I was enjoying electronics so much, I didn't care that I was poor. It is different now, although I am happy to accept lower pay than a plumber because I enjoy electronics more than dealing with crap.

Engineers are in two categories: volunteers and conscripts. The former is those who love electronics above money and saving face. The latter is those to do it for face and money above their love of electronics. From my experience the most successful and happiest are those who are "volunteers".

I know two other ex-engineers. One an Indian whose family dictated that he will be an engineer. The other is a pom who did electronics because he enjoyed it. Both left electronics to become professional counsellors or social workers. Guess what? Less pay, but both much happier. The Indian chap was shunned by his family for his change. The English bloke went from $250K per annum (he was a CTO) to about $70K per per annum.

[SL4P]

One method of using this technology, is to put the cameras at ‘choke points’ like turnstiles, escalator/elevator exits etc.

The tech has been coming rapidly for about 15 years, but was previously performed by human eyes watching surveillance cameras at those locations.

Once you have a hit, then narrow down further surveillance in that area until another camera hits.

[all_repair]

Your perspective shall have a quantum change after you get married, and shall have another quantum change after you have a child, and may have another quantum change when your child starts going to school if you also want to provide the best like others.

[Distelzombie]

2017 http://www.eenewseurope.com/news/face-recognition-module-operates-real-time-crowd-video-capture

NEC's NeoFace Accelerator is a PCI Express low profile 68.9x167.65mm board that performs super-fast face authentication based on 4K video acquisition and face matching with an existing photo database.

From that link:

Drawing up to 25W, the board can track multiple persons from a crowd of hundreds of people as they move by in large venues, transit stations or shopping malls.

Intel proudly notes that its technology is what powers the card's face recognition engine. NEC, it says, relies on Intel Arria 10 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) operating on Intel Xeon processor–based servers to increase the performance of its NeoFace facial recognition engine to a level where an individual can be identified smoothly from a high-resolution image with dozens of faces.
“Facial recognition in a moving crowd requires highly advanced techniques when compared to still images because these cameras are affected by many factors: camera location, image quality and lighting, along with the subject’s size, walking speed and face direction,” explains Tadashige Kadoi, general manager of IoT Platform Development Division, NEC Corporation.

“Intel FPGAs and their parallel processing capability help NEC to enable fast and accurate collection and processing of images from even 4K high-resolution remote cameras.”

Last March, NEC NeoFace was ranked No. 1 in almost all tests by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) specifically for face-in-video evaluation. The NIST tests evaluated the accuracy of the technology in two real-life test scenarios including a test for entry-exit management at an airport passenger gate. It determined whether and how well the engine could recognize people as they walked through an area one at a time without stopping or looking at the camera.

NEC's face recognition technology won first place with a matching accuracy of 99.2 percent. The error rate of 0.8 percent was less than one-fourth of the second place error rate, claims Intel.

So it only work with "dozen" of faces. It can't just scan a big crowd, so it would have to be setup at entrance ways etc.
These things aren't magic.
Even one at a time going through a gate under basically ideal circumstances it still missed 0.8% of the time.
I suspect that number would balloon by two orders of magnitude with dozens of people coming through a big concert gate at a time.

This link was provided to prove my point and not to show which hardware was used at that concert. I do not know what they used.
I you want something that works better than NECs solution, look at the imagus.com.au link

[VK3DRB]

China has tried this during Mao's reign, failed.  Egalitarianism, regardless what you've contributed the the society, you get the same reward. People get motivated by political advertisement, but that only lasts for years, not forever. Eventually social productivity succumbs to human laziness. Capitalism (particularly the cruel form) is the only way to excite productivity.

Egalitarianism and equality are two different things. Under equality, all people have the same opportunities in life. Under egalitarianism there is little incentive for people to do well. Worldwide (except for some of the Nordic countries), inequality is growing at an alarming rate including in Australia. The USA and China are both the epitome of inequality.

Incentive should not be engineered in such a way it fosters obscene greed. In Australia, our property market had far too much incentive for investors. It is now a huge bubble, fuelled by greedy politicians, investors and developers. One off-spin is increased inequality.

[VK3DRB]

No face recognition system would detect a real face under a disguise , especially in Asia where wearing surgical masks is popular.

[Mr. Scram]

No face recognition system would detect a real face under a disguise , especially in Asia where wearing surgical masks is popular.

Are you sure? What's still visible may be enough to still get a positive ID. They may also use things like infra-red to reduce the impact of obstructions. Materials opaque to us can be nearly invisible in IR.

[TerraHertz]

Are you sure? What's still visible may be enough to still get a positive ID. They may also use things like infra-red to reduce the impact of obstructions. Materials opaque to us can be nearly invisible in IR.

Never mind IR, I expect the current surveillance cameras of choice are millimeter imaging. These use the band between IR and microwaves. To which everything electrically insulating is transparent, while conductive surfaces (skin, metal) are reflective. So, it's all naked hairless bodies to millimeter imaging. Good luck with that disguise.

Other surveillance-state technologies with too little public awareness:

* Cell phone tracking. The cell system necessarily locates each phone to a particular cell at all times, in order to be able to route calls to that phone. But there is also more precise location available via signal delay triangulation between the nearby cell towers. And then even more precision available if the phone has GPS (most do.) The State has access to all that, any time they want.

* All electronic communication scanned for keywords. It used to be called Echelon, I don't know what the current incarnation is called. But ALL electronic traffic in NATO countries is passed to central locations in each major city, and parsed against a list of keywords and phrases. (Used to be called the 'dictionary') That's assembled from lists provided day to day by the NATO member intelligence services. In each city's surveillance center, there are rooms that are diplomatic enclaves of other NATO governments. Every message flagged with keywords is reviewed by a human analyst - who is technically a foreign agent, so not covered by domestic anti-spying legislation. Every message flagged gets permanently archived, even if it's nothing. If it is of interest, it gets bumped up the analyst tree, and eventually passed to local intelligence or law enforcement as 'assistance from an ally government.'

* All traffic cams (stoplight, speed cams, and Safe-T-cams (speed average checking), and well hidden cameras installed on most police cars, use OCR to log number plates. Of all vehicles, in all cases. This information is gathered to a central database in real time. Giving the State an amazing record of where everyone drove.
This makes the traffic cam system a national security asset.
Ha ha, I know some people who got upset about speeding fines, and were naive/stupid enough to discuss some kind of retribution activity online. (Not me!) They all got visits from federal police, who had printouts of the entire discussion. Because topics related to speedcams are in the Echelon dictionary.

Interestingly, there are apparently countermeasures. Once many years ago, I was stopped behind another car at traffic lights. Happened to be looking right at the car's number plate, when it 'morphed' in about one second to a different number. It looked like a standard number plate, not even like an LCD. I don't know how it worked. Never seen that happen again.
Btw I do not use drugs.

* Passive radar area monitoring, piggybacked on the cell-phone signals. This was first used towards the end of the 2nd Iraq war. Cell towers transmit in short pulses. If you place sensors to capture the precise pulse timings from each tower, a mesh of other passive sensors can sense all microwave-reflective objects to quite high resolution across as much area as you choose to salt with the passive sensors. The resolution is fine enough to see dots for people.
And you _also_ have the fine resolution location of cell phones. So your system can associate cell phone IDs (people's names) with the passive radar person-dots.

Run that system on a city for a few months, and you can build an extremely detailed database of personal associations and movement habits.

That's how the US finally defeated the Iraqi resistance movement. They'd build up such databases, and work out which people were doing resistance-type stuff, and all their associates. Then kill teams would go out at night and murder everyone involved, in their beds at home.

How much do you want to bet, current governments are busily implementing such systems at home?

[Yansi]

Sorry to bother you, I live in a NATO country, but what you write is just bullshit, especially your "keyword scanning".  How do I know? Well, let's say my close relative works in an IT sector, that just happens to do big data networks.

And, btw, good luck scanning your keywords in an encrypted communication.

[Cerebus]

Sorry to bother you, I live in a NATO country, but what you write is just bullshit, especially your "keyword scanning".  How do I know? Well, let's say my close relative works in an IT sector, that just happens to do big data networks.

And, btw, good luck scanning your keywords in an encrypted communication.

Are you really ignorant of the NSA's actions against the Dutch sim manufacturer Gemalto and GCHQ's attack on the Belgian carrier Belgacom and a myriad of other 'revelations'* that came out post Edward Snowden? Both NATO countries, both had critical communications infrastructure attacked by 'allies'. Your 'friend of a friend' style inside information is, in this case, trumped by newspapers and public knowledge. Attacks and mass spying on communications infrastructure isn't kooky conspiracy theory stuff, it's reported fact.

* 'revelations' in quotes because in some quarters this sort of thing was well known about pre-Snowden.

[Mr. Scram]

Are you really ignorant of the NSA's actions against the Dutch sim manufacturer Gemalto and GCHQ's attack on the Belgian carrier Belgacom and a myriad of other 'revelations'* that came out post Edward Snowden? Both NATO countries, both had critical communications infrastructure attacked by 'allies'. Your 'friend of a friend' style inside information is, in this case, trumped by newspapers and public knowledge. Attacks and mass spying on communications infrastructure isn't kooky conspiracy theory stuff, it's reported fact.

* 'revelations' in quotes because in some quarters this sort of thing was well known about pre-Snowden.

Agreed. One of the problems addressing the current state of surveillance is not sounding like an absolute nutcase. If you stick to mainstream reported matters, you still need to dial it back to not sound like you're on something. Things that were considered science fiction nonsense half a decade ago are now commonly accepted fact. I don't think many people thought the information era to be about their personal information and whereabouts.

That being said, there are a few forum members who quite consistently report surveillance and technologies that aren't in line with what remotely reliable sources report. This discussion isn't served by FUD, as it will only cause people to dismiss real issues.

[TerraHertz]

Echelon...

google echelon french parliamentary inquiry
France is a NATO member, therefore participates in Echelon. Back around 1998-2000 The French government wondered how come French companies kept getting their bids on major international projects beaten. They had a parliamentary inquiry, and found that the US was using their control of the Echelon system for commercial spying on their NATO 'partners.'

If you keep looking you will find a lot on Echelon. Though it's all outdated information now.
For eg
   https://cryptome.org/jya/echelon.htm   (1998)
   http://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_AffaireEchelon-EN.pdf
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820352.stm    EU probes Echelon   5 July, 2000


My personal reference points:
* I have some ex-Echelon satellite downlink receivers. 'Rescued' from destruction. Came from SBRS (Shoal Bay Receiving Station) which was an Echelon eavesdropping site. The information on their source was via a friend, a high up tech in the Oz Navy.

* Conversation with a fellow (name withheld) who at the time was the head of the ACC (Australian Crime Commission) Intercepts division Sydney branch. (I can't reveal the nature of that connection. And it might still have been called NCC then.) Discussed Echelon. He found it uncomfortable but acknowledged Echelon exists (as I described what I knew of it.) His estimate of the proportion of all electronic communication that gets filtered through Echelon: 98%  Btw Echelon does not do 'targeted intercepts'. Its designed intent is to scan *everything*.

* Knowing some people who briefly, on a private, password protected web forum, using only their online nics, discussed taking some illegal actions related to traffic cameras. Most were visited soon after by Federal police, who had their real names, addresses, and a full printout of the entire conversation. The police were very nice, just wanted to be assured the conversation had been all in jest. But mainly just letting them know they were watched. (In some other countries those guys would have just vanished.)
Ha ha... I'd made _one_ comment in that severely retarded thread, saying briefly "Are you kidding? You know having spoken of it here, you can't actually do this, right?"
I'd told them before, multiple times, about Echelon. None of them believed me. Severe normalcy bias & failure to research and self-educate. Some of them learned from the experience, others not.

Does anyone in Sydney remember the incident many years ago, where someone with an axe and angle grinder took out all the coms cables in a central node of the Sydney cable tunnels? Knocked out most coms in Sydney for several days.
I'm told that event was Sate-sponsored, perpetrator known, no action taken. Purpose was two-fold.
1. Convince Telstra to lock up all access points to the cable tunnels.
2. Provide an excuse for the downtime required to splice all those cables off to the nearby Echelon monitoring building.
Not many years later there was an identical incident in Hobart. Same reasons.

Re encryption.
All state-approved encryption standards are designed with holes, specifically so the State can read everything that uses those standards. This includes all telcom channel encryption.
Only strong private & public key encryption schemes offer an impediment to State spying. Which is why they are officially depreciated.

For a while, back in the early 1990s, it looked like the Australian government was going to outlaw all strong encryption schemes. I had a friend (died in 1996, mountain climbing in Nepal) who was a high level systems programmer for Telstra. I've stood in his office, reading documents of a Telstra research program in which their network management computers would analyze the nature of content in a channel, working down to identify whether the underlying customer content was encrypted, and if so, in what form. The purpose wasn't just for curiosity.

[Mr. Scram]

This discussion isn't served by FUD, as it will only cause people to dismiss real issues. Strong statements require strong proof.

Besides, according to your own story you just subjected yourself to a show of force from the authorities, just to show they know what you know. You either don't believe your own stories or are taking a huge risk. They can't have you going around and telling people about this!

[KL27x]

What the "capitalist pigs" don't understand or care about, is that spreading wealth fairly promotes well being for all. The trickle-down effect is a fantasy to a large extent. For example, assume any man only needs two pairs of new jeans per year. If a tiny percentage of their wealth were shared with 10,000 people to pull them out of poverty, three is a demand for 20,000 pairs of jeans per year, not two. Hence why fairness is good for an economy and the well being of everyone.

This is a super simplistic view of economics. What happens after you redistribute wealth to those 10,000 people? You think they can consume enough to boost the economy by buying jeans? You believe that handing out wealth creates jobs through trickle up economics?

Do you think the guy that has 50 million dollars is eating up the food that would otherwise feed 10,000 starving people? Does he buy it all and then put it in a landfill?

Wealth is a fiction. Fiat money is a trick. Wealth only exists when it is concentrated. And it makes a heck of a lot of great things possible. Redistributing it is letting the genie out of the bottle. It's entropy. It's wasting something that could have been useful. If everybody has money, no one has anything. Bill Gates can't solve poverty if he had all the money in the world.


Take a population of monkeys, as an example. Let's teach them to exchange tokens for food. This is just step one. This is to teach them to value the tokens. But WE don't have an outside being handing us things in exchange for dollars. So not only do we have to teach these monkeys to spend the tokens, we have to teach them to make food. But instead of eating it, to give it to other monkeys in exchange for their tokens. So now we get this population of monkeys who have this ability to share their excess output with others, and to save for the future. What happens if 1% of the monkeys gains 99% of this wealth? Well, they gain influence. They have a greater chance of survival in times of famine. They might be more attractive to mates. (And they also bear part of the burden of keeping the wheels turning; to keep the rest of the monkeys convinced these tokens are worth something). Is it fair? Is anything fair? OTOH, what happens if you redistribute their wealth to a bunch of the other monkeys?

1% of the population not actively making food is a lot easier to sustain than say 10% of the population. If you redistribute a significant sum of money to those you call in poverty, they don't have to look for a job today. They have enough to eat, today. And that's all they care about. Now, too many people are trying to buy food. But not enough people are making it. Then money loses its value. And people starve. And you either have anarchy, or you have to go to more extreme measure to make this system work. An example of this is maxist communism. In this system 10% of the population is the privileged political class. This is much harder on the rest of the population than 1%. Then this 10% has to take extreme measures to keep the other monkeys in check. And they have to do cruel things just to remind themselves they are worth more than other people. To justify the situation. In capitalism, the 1% don't need to justify shit. They're fortunate. They know it. We know it. And it's fine.

The wealthiest people have power to do things. To affect the world in a positive or negative way. If you think they are doing the wrong things, then that's a problem. If you want to curb individual power and transfer it to some democratic committee, that's a great fiction. And you can easily end up with something much worse than you imagine.