Fortis said:
The problem I have with these photos is that the human face is capable of a wide array of micro-expressions that you would only really catch with a camera. Ever have someone take a photo of you while playing sports or engaged in hard labor? You'd like straight-up demonic.
Seems like physiognomy would require quite a bit "control" photo experiments where they timestamp how long a certain expression was held for and under what context and emotional state.
You piss me off and I'd look possessed or "bad."
Here is the context of the Strzok photo I posted earlier...
People already make these judgments on a second to second basis when meeting new people and in doing so, they are constantly judging the character of the person (Is this person safe, reliable, dangerous, etc etc.) by the facial expressions they receive, usually after conversing or observing the individual. So while an individual photo may seem like a rather marginal indicator of a persons behavior, that singular feature may later on become significant when it comes to facial pattern detection. The body is always speaking and nothing is insignificant. I would even say from my personal experience that women are better at detecting facial and non-verbal expressions since they are generally more neurotic and perceptive to change in the first place. After all, they do care for infants.
There are already heuristic processes that people, like interrogators or detectives, use to extract valuable information by eliciting facial expressions by exposing their subjects to certain stimuli. (usually just questions, but you can get creative here)
That these methods are used and corroborated the world over is at the very least a strong argument for it to be used as a tool to detect shared (cultural) and individual/idiosyncratic facial tendencies that can be used to detect truthfulness, deception, knowing, and ignorance. Furthermore, as cameras and facial detection software advances, this is going to turn into something that a computer is going to be able to detect and analyse extremely well. The human element will eventually be removed as facial detection becomes commonplace and massive databases are built and subjected to analysis by computers, all of which will be accessible and aid local/federal/private law enforcement.
Maybe just repeating myself at this point, but my personal opinion is that this type of information is enlightening yet terrifying. I fully expect state wide endorsement of this to detect threat levels in the future, if it isn't already in place.