NSA is Collecting Your Images

Millions of faces are being collected directly off the Internet by the NSA through its global surveillance operations so they can use them in sophisticated facial recognition programs. Yep, all those images you've put in emails and on Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and everywhere else about your vacation and that party you went to back in '02 are being put together by new NSA software that revolutionizes the way they find intelligence targets around the world.

It seems the spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years. The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential.” While once focused on written and oral communications, the NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other potential intelligence targets, like you and me.

It is not clear how many people around the world might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the NSA’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Outside experts say the State Department has what could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd. The NSA, though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.” 

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said. And our Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the NSA and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users. The agency intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries.

The NSA can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. In one case, there is documentation of the agency taking vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011, and then matching their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time.

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”