US federal agencies are planning to expand use of facial recognition systems, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) despite continuous backlash over the technology's application for more than a year. The report, published Tuesday, assessed the use of facial recognition systems by federal agencies, and how they plan to expand the use of the technology in the future. Eighteen of the 24 surveyed agencies, including the US Departments of Justice, Defense, Education, Housing and Urban Development, reported using facial recognition technology (FRT) for one or more purposes, the GAO report said. The survey also found that 10 of the agencies plan to broaden their use of the technology by 2023, with two of them investing in its research and development. While most of the facial recognition systems used by the federal agencies are government owned, the report says six such systems come from commercial vendors like Clearview AI, and Acuant FaceID.

The government of Singapore is preparing to transition to a facial recognition program it hopes will eliminate the need for ID cards by 2022. Beginning in June, kiosks fitted with cameras will be installed at a limited number of government agencies, and instead of presenting an ID card citizens will be able to check in for services with just their faces. The facial recognition system is a major expansion of the Smart Nation Initiative, which began in 2014 under Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and through which the state has built up a biometric database on more than four million Singaporeans over the age of 15. The facial recognition kiosks will crosscheck each new scan against this database to verify a person's identity, according to a report in The Strait Times. The kiosks will also work in tandem with SingPass Mobile, an app launched in 2018 that allows people to register their own finger print and face data with the government's biometric database.

Over the last 15 years, the United States military has developed a new addition to its arsenal. The weapon is deployed around the world, largely invisible, and grows more powerful by the day. That weapon is a vast database, packed with millions of images of faces, irises, fingerprints, and DNA data -- a biometric dragnet of anyone who has come in contact with the U.S. military abroad. The 7.4 million identities in the database range from suspected terrorists in active military zones to allied soldiers training with U.S. forces. "Denying our adversaries anonymity allows us to focus our lethality. It's like ripping the camouflage netting off the enemy ammunition dump," wrote Glenn Krizay, director of the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency, in notes obtained by OneZero.

A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers. But critics slam the military's use of facial recognition technology as problematic. A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers.

What if every time you walked down any street in any city, automated cameras - attached to street lights, business facades, mailboxes or homes, or in the form of "body cams" worn by police officers and parking attendants - automatically scanned your face and uploaded a biometric fingerprint to a central server? Or if every time you took a photograph, your smartphone sent a copy to a server for biometric analysis? And what if these servers were monitored by a third-party provider that shared the fingerprints with marketing firms and law enforcement agencies, including border control agencies? The biometric facial recognition technology required to underpin such an undertaking continues to be refined and made available by the likes of Affectiva, Amazon, Google, IBM, Kairos, Microsoft, NEC and OpenCV, among others. Amazon Web Services, for example, in 2016 began to offer biometric capabilities via Amazon Rekognition, and it's ready to highlight positive use cases.