Ultratech and The Police

[hal]

Hi All,
As I cast my mind about for a new Fantasy Grounds Adventure to be set some 30 years into the future - I'm remembering an old CONTINUUM TV series in which the Police are outfitted with a facial recognition functionality. In European cities with CCTV, and possibly American cities who turn to more CCTV monitoring (including shot recognition sensors to pinpoint locations of gun fire) - the question arises...

If you're a wanted fugitive and you have the police as an enemy, there is a frequency roll that has to be made before the Police are an actual adversary during the adventure.

Speculation: If there are Artificial Intelligences put to work to scan all incoming video real time, and facial recognition is an operational part of law enforcement, what SHOULD the activation number be for the Police as an active ongoing enemy?

My instinct is to set it at a 12 providing that the "fugitive" is taking no care what so ever to avoid the cameras. What what if the fugitive is making an effort? What if the Fugitive stays indoors during the day, and avoids the usual locations that have functional cameras such as surveillance cameras in 7-Eleven style mini-marts? What SKILLS might a fugitive employ as a counter to the activation number so as to lower its value?

I suspect that it is hard for makeup to disguise a face sufficiently well to avoid facial recognition, but I would expect that it would be possible. Perhaps half the margin of success on a disguise roll? Perhaps staying in the lower tech poverty ridden neighborhoods might prove beneficial?

Just curious. Thanks in advance

[khorboth]

It's very easy to justify this in a number of directions. Particularly since we're dealing with hypothetical tech.

The biggest obstacle is that many people look and act similar.

If police are willing to stop innocent people and ask for papers, a 15 is reasonable. But first contact is likely to be less confrontational.

If they are more privacy-oriented, then lower numbers are fine. Just set it to where you want the campaign's tone and backtrack the numbers.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by hal

I suspect that it is hard for makeup to disguise a face sufficiently well to avoid facial recognition, but I would expect that it would be possible. Perhaps half the margin of success on a disguise roll? Perhaps staying in the lower tech poverty ridden neighborhoods might prove beneficial?

In a setting with extremely common facial recognition, use of facial prosthetics should probably be assumed to be the default for Disguise.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by hal

Speculation: If there are Artificial Intelligences put to work to scan all incoming video real time, and facial recognition is an operational part of law enforcement, what SHOULD the activation number be for the Police as an active ongoing enemy?
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Until someone actually has such a set-up working in the Real World the answer is whatever you think you need for your game.

Trying to anticipate realistic tech for this area I have to doubt that it would be radically more effective than putting a fugitive's face on tV or social media.

In particular it relies on cheap and ubiquitous AI. If you have an AI that is at least as good as a human at recognizing faces (a core human function) why do you not have soemthing better for it to do than watch monitors? If AI is so cheap and so common that the answer is "all the more important niches were already being filled" you're going to have an extremely different society.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by hal

Hi All,
As I cast my mind about for a new Fantasy Grounds Adventure to be set some 30 years into the future - I'm remembering an old CONTINUUM TV series in which the Police are outfitted with a facial recognition functionality. In European cities with CCTV, and possibly American cities who turn to more CCTV monitoring (including shot recognition sensors to pinpoint locations of gun fire) - the question arises...

If you're a wanted fugitive and you have the police as an enemy, there is a frequency roll that has to be made before the Police are an actual adversary during the adventure.

Speculation: If there are Artificial Intelligences put to work to scan all incoming video real time, and facial recognition is an operational part of law enforcement, what SHOULD the activation number be for the Police as an active ongoing enemy?

My instinct is to set it at a 12 providing that the "fugitive" is taking no care what so ever to avoid the cameras. What what if the fugitive is making an effort? What if the Fugitive stays indoors during the day, and avoids the usual locations that have functional cameras such as surveillance cameras in 7-Eleven style mini-marts? What SKILLS might a fugitive employ as a counter to the activation number so as to lower its value?

I suspect that it is hard for makeup to disguise a face sufficiently well to avoid facial recognition, but I would expect that it would be possible. Perhaps half the margin of success on a disguise roll? Perhaps staying in the lower tech poverty ridden neighborhoods might prove beneficial?

Just curious. Thanks in advance

It depends on how loosely you're choosing your words.

If you're just a suspect, 12 is probably the highest value that should be used. If the police have a good description and it's not too long between the time of the alleged crime and the suspect being reported, there's a good chance that the A.I. can tag most people resembling the suspect in the general area, correlate the images from various cameras to plot a suspect on the move and one by one the possible suspects will encounter the police and be sorted as "not the suspect" and removed from tracking, or "yeah, that's him", and the search ends. Depending on the severity of the crime, the A.I. may be searching at 9- two weeks later, and at 6- six months later, and forever thereafter (as a low-level cold case check) until the suspect would be deemed to have died of old age, aged to a point where positive identification would be problematic, or the statute of limitations runs out for the crime.

If you're really a fugitive (someone evading custody), 12- would be more suitable for a low-level constant "be on the lookout for...", while 15-, maybe even 16-, during the early hours of evading custody is not unreasonable. Your documentation (record, processing, etc.) is already in the system, and part of that documentation is identification data that sorts you, the fugitive, from those that merely resemble you.

[Pursuivant]

Closest to RAW would be a Quick Contest of the Per score or Observation skill of whatever computer system is monitoring video feeds vs. the suspect's Camouflage, Disguise, or Stealth skills. If the subject doesn't know they're under surveillance make a straight Per or skill roll. It doesn't matter that the observer is a computer and that it's remotely observing the subject.

Assuming a Genius TL9 macroframe computer (Complexity 10), running a Fine-Quality Non-Volitional AI software program (Complexity 10) you'd have a maximum IQ of 18 ((IQ/2)+2 maximum Complexity +2 for Fine Quality). If running Fine-Quality Software with the Observation skill, it would get a +2 bonus, for a maximum of 20.

More typically, it might be a standard TL9 mainframe computer (Complexity 7) running a an average Dedicated AI program ((IQ/2)+1 maximum complexity) which would give a maximum IQ of 12, with no bonus for running ordinary Observation software.

Ultratech pp. 23-26 gives basics for computers and computer programs, but there's not much useful information for evading surveillance software. I'm sure there is better information out there, if only in the GURPS 3E Traveller books and programs for starship computers.

As a guess, a more mature version of current facial recognition software might give a "dumb" computer network an effective Observation skill of 10-12.

Apply bonuses or penalties based on the number and placement of security cameras within the area where the fugitive is operating. Assuming TL9+ pan-tilt-zoom cameras, there's no penalty for sensor quality.

RAW suggests that you can roll vs. Traps/TL at -2 to detect moving cameras, which should give a bonus to rolls to evade them. Possibly give penalties if there are multiple cameras covering an area. I'd allow EO (Surveillance) to substitute for Traps - if you know how to use them, you know how to avoid them.

What surveillance camera systems are currently good at doing is screening by relative height, gait, and sex based on body movements and comparison to known measurements. They're far less reliable at picking out individual faces, however, especially if there's anything obscuring or altering the face, such as glasses, a bandage, or a mask. They're also really bad at recognizing faces of groups of people the system hasn't been trained to recognize, giving a penalty of up to -4, mostly in the form of false positives.

If you want to be semi-realistic, a dedicated AI could give human monitors a +2 or better bonus to skill rolls to detect suspects based on a general description (e.g., "6' tall white male"). If the suspect has obvious traits that make them stand out (e.g., 5' tall, 250 lb. grossly obese white male who walks with a limp in their left leg), then add +1 or +2 per distinctive trait. If they're working from just a facial description then there's no bonus, or even a penalty, unless the face is extremely distinctive.

[Daigoro]

There are number of possible methods for jamming surveillance technology that exploit various weaknesses in the tech, such as wearing clothes printed with random faces or depixelated faces.
Article 1
Article 2

Criminals in a high-surveillance society would use such tech during their crimes, and if there's an anti-authoritarian trend in society in general, using these countermeasures on a daily basis could be quite common and unremarkable. Which of these are effective would depend on how sophisticated you want to posit your AI and the image-capturing hardware to be.

Also, the police facial recognition database might become a regular target for hackers or EMP attacks, so it might not always be available or reliable.

[The Colonel]

Does anyone know what effect these pandemic face coverings have on facial recognition software? I recall them being quite popular in China even before they became compulsory (might be an air-pollution thing as well), but I could well imagine that pandemic respiratory disease of one kind or another will be with us for a while and air pollution ... could go either way.

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Also, the police facial recognition database might become a regular target for hackers or EMP attacks, so it might not always be available or reliable.

Anyone recall that bit in The Expanse where they find that facial recognition database is making matches more or less at random for at least one profile?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Anyone recall that bit in The Expanse where they find that facial recognition database is making matches more or less at random for at least one profile?

I don't remember that, but I was trying to recall which TV show I'd seen them using some of this clothing in, and it just came to me. It was in season 2 of Upload, and they had the main character wear a hood printed with random faces to throw off surveillance drones.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Does anyone know what effect these pandemic face coverings have on facial recognition software?

To my knowledge, they largely make facial recognition software not function; gait recognition or similar is what may be useable as a substitute.

Originally Posted by The Colonel

I recall them being quite popular in China even before they became compulsory (might be an air-pollution thing as well), but I could well imagine that pandemic respiratory disease of one kind or another will be with us for a while and air pollution ... could go either way.

In many Asian countries - Japan is another big one where this is the case - the wearing of protective masks to protect oneself and others from respiratory infection was normalized well before Covid-19 became a thing. Heck, it's not uncommon in anime to have a character wearing one to signify they are sick, have a perpetually-sickly character basically always wear one, or similar. So, a setting where mask-wearing is normalized is entirely realistic, and in such a setting fooling facial recognition software is likely easier than in a setting where only weirdoes (or criminals) wear masks when out and about.

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Anyone recall that bit in The Expanse where they find that facial recognition database is making matches more or less at random for at least one profile?

I don't think that was fooling facial recognition - rather, it was fooling some sort of scanner. It was an implant that sent a false result to said scanner, sending a random ID from someone who resembled the person being scanned. I just assumed all the Belters had implanted RFID's or similar, the scanner simply scanned the data from that, and the illegal implant hijacked the signal to send a random entry from a database. The wiki indicates the "scanner" actually takes an IR scan of the target and apparently identifies them based on the arrangement of blood vessels, and the spoofing implant somehow sends a false result, again pulling from a database.