An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, an activist from the German art collective Peng! walked into her local government office in Berlin and applied for a new passport. “I probably have broken the law,” the woman, a chemist living in the Western Saxony region, told Motherboard, “but our lawyers don’t know which one.” The woman applied for a passport using a photo of two separate people. Using specialized software created by Peng!, the collective merged the facial vectors from two different faces from two different images into one. Billie Hoffman (a pseudonym used by everyone in the Peng! Collective when talking to journalists), she told me how easy the whole process was: “Officials didn’t mention fraud at any point.” Hoffman’s passport application was approved, and now she has an official German passport using the digitally altered photo. The photo is half her, half Federica Mogherini, an Italian politician who is the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. “The software calculated an authentic average of the faces and that’s it,” Hoffmann recalls. Hoffman’s passport is part of an artwork called “Mask ID,” a campaign that’s encouraging ordinary citizens to “flood government databases with misinformation” and disrupt mass surveillance programs. Ironically, the project is funded by the Bundeskulturstiftung, the German Federal cultural fund, part one was recently on show in Hamburg accompanied by a photo booth where anyone could upload their image and create their own distorted passport picture in an attempt to confuse government surveillance and circumnavigate facial recognition software. “Passports are tools of oppression” another member of the collective who declined to give me their real name told me.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot