An abridged version of this story appeared in 404 Media’s zine. Get a copy here. The same sort of algorithms that use your face to unlock your phone are being used by cops to recognize you in traffic stops and immigration raids.\u00a0 Cops have access to tools that have scraped billions of images from the web, letting them identify essentially anyone by pointing a phone camera at them. Being aware of all the ways your face is being recognized by algorithms and sometimes collected by cameras when you walk outside can start to feel overwhelming at best, and futile to resist at worst.\u00a0But there are ways to disguise yourself from facial recognition systems in your everyday life, and it doesn\u2019t require owning clothes with a special design, or high-tech anti-surveillance gear.\u00a0\u00a0Technologist Adam Harvey\u2019s interest in privacy started right after 9\/11, when caring about what information governments and companies could extract from one\u2019s movements was still fringe. \u201cYou can connect all these dots from 9\/11 and how the surveillance and biometric surveillance industry exploded after that,\u201d Harvey told me in a call. \u201cAnd the projects that I was interested in doing were a response to that.\u201d One of his earliest forays into anti-surveillance design was CV Dazzle, strategically applied facepaint and hair that fooled a specific facial recognition algorithm. But that was in 2010, and face paint is no longer useful for evading those, or any, systems. They mostly just look cool.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI try to point that out in all of my texts, but it’s often not as interesting as painting your face,\u201d Harvey said. \u201cSo people paint their faces and then think that’s the key to making it work, and it’s fun. I don’t want to tell people that they shouldn’t have fun. So, you know, the project has really taken on a life of its own online, and I’ve taken a step back from trying to manage that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the years since the Dazzle project made adversarial design mainstream, there have been lots of projects that attempt to confound, pollute, or elude the cameras that watch us move through the world every day. Harvey\u2019s made several more, including heat obscuring ponchos meant to hide the wearer from drones, Faraday cage pockets for phones, and high-powered LED flash arrays for blinding paparazzi. But much of the wearables in this genre\u2014from high-fashion streetwear shops to cheap listings by dropshippers\u2014rely on 2D printed designs that don\u2019t keep up with how quickly algorithms change and improve. The $600 hoodie with a cool pixel design on it might have worked yesterday, in perfect conditions, but the next time the cameras in the mall update their algorithms or datasets, it doesn\u2019t work anymore.\u00a0To outsmart surveillance systems, it\u2019s helpful to understand them. Facial recognition\u2014which identifies an individual face\u2014works differently from biometric scans that look at a person\u2019s iris or fingerprints, and those systems work differently from automatic license plate readers, which could in theory match an individual\u2019s movements to a car through a database. And consumer-level facial recognition systems, like Pimeyes, operate using different algorithms and databases from the cameras you might encounter when boarding a flight\u2014with the caveat that the differences in these systems and what data they share is more blurred every day.Most facial recognition systems break down the elements of a face into its parts: the shape of your eyes, lips, nose, and even ears, and the distances between each part of your face, combined with skin color and numerous other factors. The system then boils your face down to a numerical value. If that value matches the value of existing images it has in its database closely enough, it may be presented as being you.\u00a0404 Media Is Making a ZineWe are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.404 MediaJason KoeblerThe facial recognition rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than that; there are theories about how individuals\u2019 face, fingerprint, and iris biometric \u201csignatures\u201d are read by these systems. In the Biometric Menagerie theory developed in 2010, researchers grouped people into four categories: \u201cSheep,\u201d or people who are easily recognizable by biometric systems; the more difficult \u201cgoats\u201d which are difficult to recognize; shape-shifting \u201cwolves\u201d that can successfully imitate others, and later, more subsets of these including \u201cworms,\u201d \u201cdoves,\u201d and \u201clambs.\u201d\u00a0All of this sounds complex and sophisticated, but these systems aren\u2019t necessarily hard to fool. It turns out, you probably already own the most effective anti-surveillance fashion: a cloth mask.\u00a0\u201cDespite how anybody may try to discourage you, covering your face with a face mask is still very effective,\u201d technologist and fashion designer Kate Rose told me. In 2019, Rose created Adversarial Fashion, a line of clothing that\u2019s covered in fake license plates, meant to pollute the data collected by automatic license plate readers.\u00a0\u201cBut the question that you had, and everyone has, is, can you beat face recognition? And the answer is yes, and the easiest way is with a Covid mask,\u201d Harvey said. \u201cYou see ICE operatives wearing face coverings and sunglasses. At some point there’s not enough information to do face recognition.\u201d\u00a0Every system is different and every scenario is contextual, but adding a few common items to your kit can reduce the likelihood that enough of your biometrics are obscured to get your biometric matching score down. Big sunglasses, covering your chin and mouth, and wearing a baseball cap or brimmed hat that obscures your features from cameras placed above can all bring that score down. \u201cIt’s kind of almost a linear relationship between how much of your face you hide and your score in that way. It’s quite simple,\u201d Harvey said. But the problem is, you never know what your score is, so you\u2019re going out blindly, not knowing if your Jackie Onassis sunglasses are going to cover enough of your face, or if you have to get an extra long turtleneck or something to wear.\u201d\u00a0If you want to really step up your sunglasses game, you could get a pair of glasses that block infrared wavelengths from cameras, like the ones in newer iPhones that use FaceID. The creator of infrared-blocking glasses line Reflectacles, who asked to go by Skitch, told me he sees the anti-surveillance \u201cfashion\u201d market becoming more mainstream with companies like Zenni selling glasses that block some types of facial recognition joining the trend 10 years after he launched his own IR-blocking specs. \u201cI see the landscape of anti-surveillance wearables becoming popularized and monetized,\u201d Skitch said. \u201cIf people with money find out that an area of business exists without them making money, they will certainly find a way to gather that market, that money.\u201d\u00a0Reflectacles don\u2019t look like normal glasses\u2014they look like something from The Matrix, with a green tint and cyberpunk shapes\u2014but sometimes signaling that you care about privacy to other people is part of the point.\u00a0Rose has been organizing community meetings in her small Pacific Northwest town to talk about the influx of Flock cameras on their streets, and she said she\u2019s found that people across all walks of life and political leanings care deeply about privacy. \u201cIt can feel kind of futile, but I think it’s important to remember that it’s also about art and fashion, right? It\u2019s about helping people with their mental abstraction of how [surveillance] works. And to have a tiny little protest that says, well, you have to store all my garbage, analyze it… People get a chance to talk to each other about what’s important to them, and it actually helps people to understand something that\u2019s often kind of techy and abstract about how a piece of prevalent surveillance tech works.\u201d If a license plate camera database can be foiled by a t-shirt, maybe we should think twice about putting a camera on every corner.\u201cI like the definition of privacy from the Cypherpunk Manifesto: \u2018Privacy is the power to selectively reveal yourself,\u2019\u201d Harvey said, referring to technologist and cryptographer Eric Hughes\u2019 1993 call for encrypted information systems. \u201cBy allowing other people to collect, watch or monitor you… It’s a power dynamic that puts you on the losing end. It’s really about power and individual agency, but there’s also a destructive political and democratic component to allowing these mass surveillance systems to grow even larger.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"