The FBI has found a man suspected of child sex abuse who has been on the run for 14 years, with the help of facial recognition technology.
The suspect, 48-year-old Neil Stammer of New Mexico, was arrested in 1999 on multiple charges, which included child sex abuse and kidnapping, but he did not show up for bail, according to The Guardian.
The case was passed to the FBI after New Mexico issued an arrest warrant for Stammer in 2000, filing a federal fugitive charge.
FBI Special Agent Russ Wilson was assigned to be a fugitive coordinator in New Mexico earlier this year. Prior to his assignment, the feds decided to shelve the Stammer case after spending years trying to find him, CNET reported.
"In addition to the current fugitives, I had a stack of old cases," Wilson said, "and Stammer's stood out."
At the time Wilson reissued Stammer's "Wanted" poster, the Diplomatic Security Service, which is responsible for finding fake U.S. passports, started testing facial recognition technology designed to identify bogus passports. Wilson then tracked down Stammer after a Diplomatic Security Service agent ran the software on Stammer's poster and found a match for someone named Kevin Hodges in Nepal.
Stammer was found in Nepal hiding under the alias of Kevin Hodges as an English teacher, CNET reported.
"He was very comfortable in Nepal," Wilson said. "My impression was that he never thought he would be discovered."
Stammer's case is one of the few where success was due to the use of facial recognition software, The Guardian reported. Despite the capabilities of the technology, it has been receiving opposition from those concerned about privacy, such as U.S. senator Al Franken, who wrote in a letter that the software is designed to operate at a distance so the person being identified doesn't know about it.
"Individuals cannot reasonably prevent themselves from being identified by cameras that could be anywhere- on a lamp post, attached to an unmanned aerial vehicle or, now, integrated into the eyewear of a stranger," Franken said.
The software issue was raised in April when privacy advocates expressed concerns over a facial-recognition database that the FBI is building. The database has the ability to hold 52 million images by next year, CNET reported.
A report from July 2011 states that, in addition to the FBI, close to 40 law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. are trying to use facial recognition software as a tool for identifying individuals.
