Interoperable and standardized algorithmic images: The domestic war on drugs and mugshots within facial recognition technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the 1990s, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) leveraged the 1980s’ American War on Drugs to improve and expand facial recognition technology (FRT) infrastructure, including the domestic building of FRTs reliant on mugshots. When examining mugshot databases gathered by the NIST, such as the Multiple Encounters Dataset (MEDS) I and II (2010) and Special Database 18 Mugshot Identification Database (SD-18) (2016), it is clear that the same gendered and racialized dynamics present in policing practices related to the War on Drugs is reflected in the mugshot databases that continue to use for FRT research and evaluation into the contemporary moment. This paper details the SD-18 and MEDS databases, as well as the MORPH database, showcasing how their representational, technical and political protocols operate. The desires for frictionless interoperability built into the images’ technical protocols supersede concerns for eugenic political and representational protocols, resulting in a current moment where the deployment of mugshot datasets cannot be contained to their original intended use with FRTs, but leak into other forms of algorithmic governance as well as into algorithmic image-making and visual culture, including generative artificial intelligence systems such as DALL-E.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".