Photo credit: CBS News, Lesley Stahl

Editor’s Note:
While Edward Snowden says he leaked NSA surveillance records and the positioning of government officials to run his name through the mud and hunt him down like a mad dog, CBS News ran a story in May that describes even more intrusiveness by companies into individuals’ lives(and of course, governments have this technology, too).

From CBS News 60 Minutes:
“The following is a script from “A Face in the Crowd” which aired on May 19, 2013. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shachar Bar-On, producer.”

“Over the last 10 years, the ability of computers to identify faces has gotten 100 times better, a million times faster, and exponentially cheaper.

Yet facial recognition technology is still a work in progress. While investigators in the Boston marathon bombing had multiple images of both suspects, the technology did not come up with a match. They were not identified by their faces, but by their fingerprints! Authorities won’t say what went wrong. One possibility is that government data banks – through which the photos would’ve been searched – are not big enough.

As we discovered, the FBI is working on expanding its database. Businesses are tapping facial recognition to sell us stuff and computer scientists are upgrading the technology.”
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