The head of our department was rightfully sceptical as well.

Here's how they did it: they had a few decent cameras zoomed and focused so that their fields of view formed a skewed line crossing the path the subjects walked.

You only need a 300x150 image of the whole eye to perform decent iris recognition, so an eye covering 10% of a given camera's field of view was usually large enough.

But that was in 2012 - I imagine they've made some improvements.

I still think we can only survive as societies with truly radical openness - stick up all the cameras younwant, but it is legally obliged to publish everything you are monitoring - everyone gets to see what everyone else sees.

i honestly don't see any alternatives, despite the enormous implications

An idea publicized and championed by David Brin in 1996 (!)

http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

An idea dissected in detail since even the 1950s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days#Simila...

The GPL of camera footage?

"Publish the terabytes of footage you're recording, and market it so we know where to find it, or... or... we'll do something!"

Publish it or you will be liable under the law for upto 4% of your global corporate turnover. For each camera.

Seems to be working so far as a threat.

Look this is a new world, just as the one where "sending children to work down mines and in factories is bad" or "dumping pollutants in rivers is bad". The laws took time to exist and time to get teeth and time to get enforced - but they feel natural now.

Just wait

With good optics and fast tracking, I don't see why not. Even if your video is lower-resolution, you could use a video feed for movement tracking to direct a high-res still camera with decent optics and have a high-resolution capture of the face and eyes, maybe enough to distinguish iris details. 6 metres doesn't look hard for my off-the-shelf optical-zoom camera.

If you are rich and can afford custom optics and a large-ish array of sensors (think of Kepler's camera back, more rectangular and much smaller), you could capture different sensors independently to get different sections of a larger panorama separately, identify which ones hold high-enough res irises and pipe them through your recognition plumbing. Knowing all irises are within a certain range of heights make the problem a lot simpler WRT positioning the camera, the optics and the sensor array.

So wearing shades indoors will be illegal. It makes me wonder about contact lenses with an iris pattern printed on them? Maybe the system will flag if a persons eyes never dialate at all?

My thesis was exactly about this. We even had a lab course in which we used paper printouts of irises with holes poked in the center(so that light reflections on the cornea were captured) - that's how easy fooling those systems used to be.

The iris is constantly slightly changing its size, so with such contact lenses you can expect to be suspect no 1.

Disposable/mass-produced colored contacts tend to slide around a bit due to poor fit, so going just by apparent pupil size wouldn't work

So millions of people would be suspect no. 1. Seems like good odds to me.

"such" contact lenses. Specialized. Nobody's wearing these today.

Nobody's wearing colored contacts? That's really interesting.

Nobody's wearing contacts with irises printed on them.

Colored contacts don't fool it.

Going through the Hong Kong airport several years ago, security guards made people take off hats and sunglasses.