NIST shared dataset of tattoos that’s been used to identify prisoners

guest · Mar 20, 2020

NIST shared dataset of tattoos that’s been used to identify prisoners
March 19, 2020
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/20...attoos-thats-been-used-to-identify-prisoners/

In 2017, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit looking to force the FBI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to cough up info about Tatt-C (also known as the Tattoo Recognition Challenge): a tattoo recognition program that involves creating an “open tattoo database” to use in training software to automatically recognize tattoos.

For years, the EFF has been saying that developing algorithms that the FBI and law enforcement can use to identify similar tattoos from images – similar to how automated facial recognition systems work – raises significant First Amendment questions.

As part of the Tatt-C challenge, participating institutions received a CD-ROM full of images to test the third parties’ tattoo recognition software. That dataset has 15,000 images, and most were collected from prisoners, who have no say in whether their biometrics are collected and who were unaware of what those images would be used for.
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On Tuesday, the EFF presented a scorecard with those institutions’ responses.
The results: nearly all of the entities that responded confirmed that they’d deleted the data. However, 15 institutions didn’t bother to respond, or said “You can count us as a non-response to this inquiry”, to a letter sent by the EFF in January.

It’s not that the FBI and NIST didn’t at least try to strip PII from the images’ metadata. It’s that they failed to identify PII in the images themselves. In one example, by using image data such as the photo-realistic images of inmates’ relatives, their names, dates of birth and death, EFF says it was able to identify the individual within minutes with a Google search.

After the EFF raised concerns about the PII in the images, NIST retroactively stripped images containing PII from its dataset. It was too late to strip the PII from the dataset copies it had distributed to third parties, however.
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The EFF has found a number of cases where the recipients of the dataset have, in fact, identified individuals via their tattoos: [...]

The EFF maintains that tattoos are unique: unlike other biometrics, such as faceprints or fingerprints, they’re an expression of identity.
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EFF: Tattoo Recognition Score Card: How Institutions Handled Unethical Biometric Surveillance Dataset

In response to an EFF campaign started last year, roughly a third of institutions that we believe requested problematic and exploitive data as part of a government automated tattoo recognition challenge deleted the data or reported that they had never received or used it.

The table below details the institutions that NIST identified in government records as having requested the Tatt-C dataset and their responses to EFF’s letter.
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For more information about tattoo recognition technology, check out EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance guide.
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NIST shared dataset of tattoos that’s been used to identify prisoners

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