Allan Pinkerton had an idea in 1857: Why not use the new technology of photography to create a pictorial file of repeat offenders causing the majority of the crime? That way the police could become familiar with broken noses and twisted smiles, making it easier to round up the usual suspects. The word “database” wouldn’t be coined for another century, but that’s essentially what the Rogues’ Gallery was. The subjects may have been uncooperative at times, but one way or another they were made to pose.

Now we’re all rogues, or at least suspected of such behavior. Here’s the opening two sentences from a recent Ars Technica article by David Kravets:

Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Tuesday. That means there’s about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology says.

While such files can be viewed as an invasion of privacy by police, an invitation for us all to be pre-criminalized, they also pose another problem: As tools improve, these images may be used to steal identities. And it’s not just limited to faces–our voices may also be stolen right out of the air.

From John Markoff at the New York Times:

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The software components necessary to make such masking technology widely accessible are advancing rapidly. Recently, for example, DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary known for a program that has bested some of the top human players in the board game Go, announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.”

The irony, of course, is that this year the computer security industry, with $75 billion in annual revenue, has started to talk about how machine learning and pattern recognition techniques will improve the woeful state of computer security.

But there is a downside.

“The thing people don’t get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially,” said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of Future Crimes.•