Face the facts: facial recognition technology's troubled past--and troubling future.

• Author: Kopel, David

WHEN CONSTRUCTION WORKER Rob Milliron sat down to eat his lunch in Tampa's Ybor City entertainment district in July 2001, he didn't expect that it would result in a visit to his workplace by police officers looking to arrest him. His innocent dining inadvertently placed him in a showcase for one of the hottest trends in high-tech surveillance security: facial recognition cameras.

Milliron's face, scanned by the cameras, ended up in a U.S. News & World Report article about the technology. The accompanying headline read: "You can't hide those lying eyes in Tampa." Then a woman in Oklahoma saw the picture, misidentified Milliron as her ex-husband, who was wanted on child neglect charges, and called the police. After convincing police he had never been married, had kids, or even been to Oklahoma, he told the St. Petersburg Times, "They made me feel like a criminal."

Milliron perhaps can take some comfort from the fact that, as the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) for police work spreads, he won't be alone in being falsely suspected. FRT advocates offer Americans a sweet-sounding deal: sell your privacy for security. That's an especially comforting pitch in the wake of 9/11. We've all seen the grainy photos of Mohammed Atta and crew waltzing through airport security. If only those cameras had been linked to the proper criminal databases, say FRT proponents, the attackers never would have made it onto the planes.

But FRT, currently used in at least two U.S. cities and widespread throughout Great Britain, is notoriously unreliable and ineffective. At its best, it brings to our streets the high-tech equivalent of the Department of Transportation's airport security policy: humiliate and search everyone ineffectively.

That's bad enough, but the real problems will occur if FRT ever does start working as promised. It threatens to create a creepy future of ubiquitous spy cameras that will be used by police for purposes far less noble than thwarting terrorists.

FRT works by combining photographic images with computer databases. After an image is captured by a camera, a computer program measures some of the 80 or so nodal points on your face, such as the distance between your eyes, the width of your nose, the depth of your eye sockets, and the length of your jaw line. The technology then turns the nodal measurements into a numerical code called a "faceprint." A properly working face recognition system supposedly can match a person standing in front of a camera with a record from a database including tens of millions of faceprints. Criminals, say proponents, would have nowhere to hide. And law-abiding citizens would have no reason to fear.

Yet for the most part, FRT hasn't worked as intended. The Milliron incident in Tampa was just one of a string of national flops for face scanners, which prior to 9/11 were widely derided even as they were being implemented or considered by several municipalities, including Tampa; Jacksonville, Florida; and Virginia Beach, Virginia. At the time, FRT was being marketed as a tool to catch wanted felons and find runaways and missing persons. Nonetheless, a measure was introduced in the Virginia legislature requiring a judge's approval to use FRT, and in Tampa city council members who had approved its use claimed they had been fooled and didn't know what they had voted for.

Then the terrorists attacked, and everything seemed to change. The Virginia legislature dropped the bill requiring judicial approval. Executives at FRT firms testified before Congress and were called on by intelligence and lawenforcement agencies. Tom Colatosti, CEO of Viisage Technology, told reporters, "If our technology had been deployed, the likelihood is [the terrorists] would have been recognized." Major airports, including Boston's Logan, Dallas-FortWorth International, and Palm Beach International, have installed test versions of FRT. While the stock market was slumping, scanning companies Visionics and Identix saw their share prices shoot up 244 percent and 197 percent, respectively, in the six months following 9/11. (The two companies have since merged and are now known as Identix.)

Yet one stubborn fact remains: FRT doesn't work. In March, Palm Beach International Airport ran a test of Visionics' "Argus" facial recognition system (a version that can be plugged into existing closed circuit TV systems) at its Concourse C security checkpoint. Fifteen airport employees tried to get through the security checkpoint. The security checkers had a database of 250...