Welcome, this is the Device Casting Couch Podcast, please take a seat, and let's begin.
Masks have been part of human existence for millennia. The earliest example is a simple mask over 9000 years old. Every major culture in the world has used masks or some form of face coverings, the ancient Greek and Chinese used them in the arts, African tribes made use of them during ceremonies and rituals, and mascaraed parties were very popular in Victorian Europe.
In the United States, however, for centuries wearing masks in public has been frowned upon, discouraged, or straight up outlawed. Some laws dating as far back as the 1800s make it illegal in some areas to wear masks at all and has become synonymous with illegal activity, widely popularized by gangster and western movies showing outlaws with bandannas obscuring their faces. Even the founding fathers hid their identities and painted their faces when they dumped tea in the Boston harbor. And in most scenarios, if you saw someone with a face-covering you would assume they were up to no good, especially in the western world where even medical masks are not commonplace on the street.
But then COVID-19 struck and the center for disease control pushed for the use face coverings to slow the spread of the illness, as well as thousands of businesses countrywide, now the vast majority of people are wearing masks in public, either by choice or policy.
With the exception a few of course.
In a recent hack known as BlueLeaks, it came to light that the Dept of Homeland Security has a serious problem with the public wearing masks.
For a little history, BlueLeaks refers to 269 gigabytes of internal U.S. law enforcement data obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous and released on June 19, 2020, by the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, which called it the "largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies.”
In the many documents collected, one is a note by Homeland Security intelligence dated May 22 expressing anxiety, as public health wisdom clashes with the mission of local and federal police who increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools. The bulletin, drafted by the DHS Intelligence Enterprise Counter-terrorism Mission Center with the help of a variety of other agencies, states that with the rise of wearing masks in public, it has become increasingly more difficult to recognize individuals by the use of facial recognition software, and has become a huge roadblock to developing it further.
Several security companies have said that they have the ability to recognize people with such software even when they are wearing a mask, some of these claims were made well before the outbreak, however, most of these examples were using a company database, and no evidence has been shown that it works on a national scale with millions of citizens. Furthermore, according to IPVM, an independent group that tracks surveillance technology, tested four facial recognition systems in February 2020 and found that their performance was drastically reduced with masked faces.
To conclude, whether we like it or not, facial recognition is a real and growing part of artificial intelligence, as an example, just look at China’s massive countrywide system that pinpoints millions of its citizens through hundreds of thousands of cameras, but even they been severely hampered by people wearing masks constantly. The US border patrol has been trying to expand their facial recognition software for years, as have airports in an attempt to increase security, and spot those labeled as security risks. Each time they have backed down due to public outcry.
So if you think wearing a mask is encroaching on your freedoms, or taking away your rights as a US citizen, you might want to think again.
- The DCC Podcast
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