Category: Ethics

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

There are two things about biometrics that make it an endlessly evolving discipline: our signatures of humanity and our ability to track them. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre defines biometrics as “the automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioural characteristics.” The reach of that automation is expanding rapidly as technology reveals new indicators of personhood and unlocks our capacity to detect them reliably and remotely.

In the latest feat of biometric virtuosity to make the headlines, US forces deployed what some sources called “never-before-used technology” to locate and rescue a downed airman from an Iranian mountain region. The ‘Ghost Murmur’ tool was described by several news outlets as futuristic but – a bit like the plots in dystopian fiction – the actuality is already here.

Biometric technology is unlocking so many modalities (things that we can measure like fingerprints, faces and DNA) that, as I have suggested elsewhere, we are entering the field of zoemetrics where every manifestation of life can be weighed and weighted. While we can attach transmitters to inanimate objects like golf balls and surfboards (although, astonishingly, not yet vehicles), the wonder of zoemetrics is that we are all emitting natural signals all the time, many of them unique to us – and their traceability is blooming with our ingenuity. AI-enabled technology is giving us ever more imaginative ways of calibrating human life and zeroing in on features of individual biological uniqueness that can distinguish us from everyone else. As modalities like voice and pulse recognition have shown, once you can isolate and reliably compare a set of variables for congruence with a pre-determined pattern, you get confirmation of identity which is the grand prize for security, forensics and criminal investigation.

Given the saturation of technology in our ‘expository society’, it’s not surprising when people are found by advanced surveillance capability even in remote settings, but locating a lone human soul so quickly in a vast and unpeopled landscape is still a remarkable feat.

In a dynamic military context, the delay from flash to bang can be short but in law enforcement the latency is different; the policing environment presents a different type of battlefield. Introducing groundbreaking technology can be frustrating and the path from innovation to implementation is often labyrinthine and laborious. A decade after its initial adoption, UK policing is still anguishing over facial recognition technology, with front-line teams perplexed at why their organisations haven’t introduced technology that their teenage offspring are already bored with. While retail businesses are pioneering the sustainable benefits of live facial recognition (LFR) for preventing crime, the police still give advance notice of the few sites where it will be in use so that individuals can ‘opt out’ of being found by it.

By contrast, the take up speed for crime-enabling technology is almost instant and the life cycle from breakthrough-to-bin is as long or as short as opportunity dictates. With the only entry requirement being technical possibility and few, if any, barriers to adoption, the return on investment for the criminal use of biometric technology is a steal. AI-powered technologies are expanding the reach of individual and organised criminals and some of the biggest risks to our communities won’t be prevented by posting a constable at the gates. The availability of Deepfakes-as-a-service is an example of where the impact of AI-enabled technology on the criminal justice system has yet to be understood while the use of drones, molka surveillance, doxxing and swatting is growing.

With so many political pronouncements appearing in all caps braggadocio, genuine claims for innovation can struggle to make themselves heard, but the police talk about ‘game changing’ biometrics without hyperbole and I agree with them. Some AI-enabled solutions offer them never-before capabilities for preventing harm and investigating crime, capabilities that can be deployed affordably, quickly and at scale. If crime can be characterised as a ‘game’, technology is changing its rules for all sides. The potency of ‘now possible’ technology runs both ways and its availability is reshaping the very nature of risk from which the state is tasked with protecting us.

The trade secrets of the tools used to locate and recover the airman are preserved for now, but the silken drape has been pulled back and the concept exposed. Once revealed, new biometric applications usually trigger another race – work to echo ghost murmur will have started even before the AI scriptwriters set about creating the movie of the same name, with equally energetic efforts being made to detect, disrupt and defeat this latest tool.

Controlling how all this shrink world technology – from allometry to zymmetry – is deployed is a continuing challenge for governments and its effective regulation is the 64PB question that seems to be defeating the brightest policy minds. In liberal democracies, technological possibility (what can be done) must be balanced with legal permissibility (what must/must not be done) and societal acceptability (what people support being done) but, as all sectors know, the political hurdles can often be higher than the technical ones.

Meanwhile, a continuing challenge is the speed at which cutting edge technology leaps from pre-alpha stage to public release. As I have reported to the UK parliament, tech consumerism means capabilities that were once the preserve of state intelligence agencies have become available to all of us – what the state has today, we’ll be shopping for tomorrow. When will we be able to buy ghost murmurs on Amazon or Alibaba? We will have to wait and see, but the first optical sports watch is already ticking.

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.