From Fingers to Faces: Visual Semiotics and Digital Forensics
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From Fingers to Faces: Visual Semiotics and Digital Forensics Massimo Leone1,2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models (China, Japan, India), adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. Keywords Face · Semiotics · Forensics · Fingerprinting · Artificial intelligence […] But my design, To note the chamber: I will write all down: Such and such pictures; there the window; such The adornment of her bed; the arras; figures, Why, such and such; and the contents o’ the story. Ah, but some natural notes about her body, Above ten thousand meaner moveables Would testify, to enrich mine inventory. (William Shakespeare, 1611 ca. Cymbeline, Act 2, Scene 2, 930–937).
* Massimo Leone [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy and Educational Studies, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
2
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
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1 Facial Impostures On August 3, 2019, convicted drug dealer Clauvino da Silva tried to escape the prison of Rio de Janeiro during a visit of his 19-year old daughter [76]. The Brazilian criminal sought to impersonate her by wearing a silicon mask, a wig, eyeglasses, and the teenager’s attire, swap places, and leave the detention center under false pretenses. Policemen though became suspicious about the ‘teenager’s’ strange behavior and arrested the fugitive, recording on video the moment of his undressing.1 Clauvino da Silva then hanged himself in a confinement jail three days later. His criminal plan would have probably succeeded, had he worn one of the resin masks printed in 3D by Realface,2 the Japanese company created by Osamu Kitagawa [87]. The same kind of mask would have served the purposes also of French-Israeli citizen Gilbert Chikli, nicknamed by French policemen “the king of fraud”, who, in summer 2015, convinced several donors from around the world to transfer to him enormous sums of money; he did so through impersonating, this time through a latex mask, the then French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian, claiming the necessity to finance the French government’s fight against terrorism [31].3 The face is both biologically and culturally a compelli
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