Another Facial Recognition System Bites The Dust. It's been nearly two years since the September 11th tragedies and the "promise" of facial recognition technology to help prevent events like that from happening again doesn't seem to be coming along so well. A couple weeks ago we wrote about how Tampa was ditching their face recognition technology after it helped them catch exactly zero criminals in over two years. Meanwhile, the big test was supposed to be in airports, and Boston's Logan Airport is now saying that their system is so bad, not only did it not catch any criminals, it didn't even catch many of the "tester" criminals they were using to make sure the system works (story submitted anonymously). To test the system, officials programmed in images of a number of decoys that the technology was supposed to catch. In 249 tries, it let the decoy pass without a problem 96 times. It did catch more than half of the decoys, but still, this is nowhere near what supporters of the technology were promising. To be honest, I'm surprised the technology worked as well as it did. But, if it's that weak, it's not hard to realize that simple disguises are likely to trick it every time. It still seems like the technology is going to be much more useful in matching up someone directly (such as proving you are who you say you are, so you can enter a restricted area) rather than picking a face out of a crowd. [Techdirt]

Do not believe the hype of facial recognition software. It still provides way too few correct positives (We want it to find the bad guys greater than 99% of the time) with a false positive rate that is miniscule. Since the number of innocent people is so much more than the number of terrorists, too many false positives could be deadly. Seatac gets over 25 million passengers a year. If it was 99.9% accurate, it would recognize about 74 people a day as terrorists! And lets say 1 in a million is on the terrorist list. Thus 25 people would pass throught the airport in a year but, if only 50% are found, we get 12 a year or 1 a month. In that month's time, 2220 innocent passengers would have also been detained. So, even if this technology was 99.9% accurate at screening, 2220 people would be examined in a month to find that 1 terrorist. Now, knowing people, how keenly interested do you think the examiners will be if they have to examine 74 people a day every day of a month to find 1 person who is on the list? It is very likely that they will not be observant enough to see the 1 because of the 2220. Like NASA, they will assume that since none of the others were terrorists, that this one person is not one also.

this is one reason why biometrics is such a lousy idea. Add in the inability to work around a disguise and you end up with thousands of people being inconvenienced. The large number of false positives will serve to screen the real positives through tedious drugery. No Thanks.  10:55:04 PM    

The Bat Goes Retro.

Yet another example of the wonderful power of grassroots organizing. This past weekend volunteers from LA for Dean used the get local tools to organize a table at Sunset Junction, LA[base ']s largest street fair. More the 40 volunteers spent their weekend passing out flyers and telling people why they support Howard Dean. When the sun finally set on the fair, 538 people signed up as Dean supporters (see Bat below for a high tech visual description of 538 new supporters).

This is happening everywhere. I left my office on Saturday to check out a street fair in San Jose, and who did I run into? Obviously some of our wonderful volunteers who had also organized a table through the get local tools. (Please tell Kate that there were deep fried Oreo[base ']s in San Jose as well[sigma]this trend is indeed national).

To a lot of people, politics is a distant concept. To a Dean supporter, the political process occurs right outside the front door: at farmer[base ']s markets, Labor Day picnics or street fairs. Let[base ']s redouble our efforts in the coming months, and win this election street fair by street fair and primary by primary.

Aaron Holmes, California State Coordinator

[Blog for America]

Dean is demonstrating just how easy it is for a national campaign to allow individuals at the local level to decide for themselves what to do. The empowerment this new tools provide could have some very long lasting effect, whether Dean makes it or not.  12:35:43 PM    

Incredible Moment -- 100,000 on Meetup.

This is the second day of the September to Remember, and you've already made history.

At 11:35 AM, the 100,000th person joined Dean Meetup. This is truly astounding. I knew it was coming, but I'm still stunned with the power of it.

This is completely unheard of in presidential history, especially this early in a campaign -- one hundred thousand people planning to meet in their own communities and organize locally to take this country back and restore what is best in American Democracy.

Tomorrow, in 728 towns and cities, Americans will be putting aside a few hours -- skipping a movie or skimping on dinner -- to come together in 728 places to work with eachother on building this campaign.

The Governor, who is here in Vermont today preparing for the September 4th debate, said [base "]This is an extraordinary moment.[per thou]

[base "]From the first moment I stepped out the car at the March 5th Meetup in New York City, I knew something incredible was happening in America. On that cold winter day in an out-of-the-way place, more than 600 people had shown up to help the campaign. Since then, all across the country I[base ']ve met people who got involved in politics for the first time through their local Dean Meetups. These are people who have got involved and decided to help take their country back. Every day now, our grassroots community is growing stronger. These 100,000 Americans have reengaged in politics--and they[base ']ll find out that they really can make a difference.[per thou]

Thank you so much and congratulaions. Meetup has been the soul of the campaign, and the powerful creative political energy that has come out of your Meetups has brought this campaign to where it is today.

[Blog for America]

100,000 people all meeting at at the same time to discuss the same politcal agenda. I imagine most other politicians would kill for that many people this early in the game. Should be interesting to see what happens in the rest of September.  12:15:39 PM