A friend was telling me an anecdote of how dizygotic (nonidentical) twins of a friend were able to mutually unlock their phones using face recognition. I remembered that actually that's a bug that helped us identify a GRU spy a couple of years ago.
We only had a photograph of him under his fake name. The Russian government had deleted all records of him under his real name once they knew we were onto unit 21955. But they didn't delete his twin sister's passport file. Borderline ethically we used her photo to compare to his.
But totally ethically we never published that photo, not used the finding as basis of our final identification. It was very useful insight though.
What is amazing is that the two faces - of the twin brother and sister - look like they have nothing in common to the naked eye.(I wish I could show you how totally dissimilar they look).
Yet, to AI they appear as nearly the same person.
Just for the experiment: If you happen to have a non-identical twin, do send me photos of you two so I can test what AI thinks of your faces.
To find our how we positively identified thag GRU spy without using his twin sister's photo, read our report here: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
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