At a recent happy hour, a friend-of-a-friend who is into all government conspiracy theories (including thinking Covid is a hoax) was there. It got kind of heated, and one question I asked him was "If the government is so hellbent on instituting surveillance technology everywhere, why would they also advocate for you to wear a mask, which hinders current face recognition capabilities?" Unsurprisingly, he didn't have an answer.
>...why would they also advocate for you to wear a mask, which hinders current face recognition capabilities?
Not a very good conspiracy theorist!
Obviously 'person' recognition tools, facial recognition included, are good enough that models work without facial data, hindering America's enemies but giving America the upper hand. This uses the assumption that miltech is anywhere from 10-100 years ahead of bleeding edge/experimental public/research tech.
The dumb counterfactual assumption but "logical" reason is they already have a working facial recognition profile of everyone without a mask but they need more masked training data to work around it and can't simply digitally add a mask to their old training set.
Contradicted by what we know about current facial recognition technology but in a "make sure that the bullets are sterile, we don't want any wounded prisoners to die of an infection before we get any intelligence" sort of way.
