Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zacinbusiness 4409 days ago
I'm assuming that I misunderstand the point of this technology, as used by the NSA. It seems that they have pictures of people that they want to arrest. And they have information about those same people, but without pictures. And so they have developed a technology that matches a picture with the name of the person in that picture?

If the NSA wants to have person A detained then wouldn't it be a good idea for them to already know what that person looks like? Am I entirely missing the point?
1 comments
mpyne 4409 days ago
Well somehow I doubt that the NSA has a decent picture on everybody, but for those that they do then yes, it's a way of doing identity matching between pictures of people and data involving those people.

Think doing relational SQL joins based on photos, IMO.

link
zacinbusiness 4409 days ago
So my interface looks something like:

Age: Height: Sex: Eye Color: Skin Color: Build:

and I can fill it in and I will be presented with an image (or images) that matches that query, along with basically all the other information currently collected about that individual?

So, a use case would be...a 6'2'' individual with medium complexion and shinny build with heavy facial hair was caught on a camera doing some potentially illicit activity and the feds can feed that info into the DB and the output is a list of people who match that description, along with all available information such as (I'm guessing here), last known location (most likely according to their last internet login and/or cellphone ping), full transcripts of their emails, chat, voip conversations, etc..?

But how does the system match the photo to the name? [The app 'NSA' would like access to your Facebook Photos. This app will not be able to post on your behalf."]?

link
mpyne 4409 days ago
I have no clue on how it works other than the linked article.

It's not hard to make reasonable guesses based on fundamental systems engineering principles though. E.g. the interface might simply be "Here's a known picture of the guy, find all matches to this picture" and start seeing which connections pop up. Almost like a Facebook Graph Search based on an image identifier instead of a Facebook UID.

link