News: More on facial recognition technology

According to a report from USA Today, the FBI has begun trials of facial recognition technology in North Carolina. Reportedly, the trials helped to identify a suspect to a double homicide who had seemingly relocated to North Carolina from California and assumed a false name. FBI officers took a photo from the suspect’s California driver’s license and ran it against the photos contained in North Carolina’s Department of Motor Vehicles database. From “dozens” of potential matches, an FBI investigator zeroed in on one particular individual. That individual has now been placed under arrest. Marc Rotenberg of EPIC, however, questioned how effective the use of such technologies will be in counter-terrorist efforts since good photos of terrorists will rarely be available in DMV databases or elsewhere.