Super Recognizers

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/europe/salisbury-novichok-poisoning.html
Britain is one of the most heavily surveilled nations on earth, with an estimated one surveillance camera per 11 citizens. It has cutting-edge technology for visually identifying criminals, and software so sensitive it can scan an airport for a tattoo or a pinkie ring. And then there is that team of genetically gifted humans known as “super-recognizers.”

Before searching for a needle, investigators said wryly, they first had to build their own haystack.

The investigation drew on some of Scotland Yard’s most storied assets, like its Super-Recognizer Unit. Its officers are selected for their superior ability to remember faces — the opposite of prosopagnosia, also known as “face-blindness.”

“They don’t concentrate on the obvious: the graying hair or the mustache or the glasses,” the unit’s founder, Mick Neville, told Sky News last week. “They look at the eyes, the mouth, the ears — the things that don’t change. They can recognize a face from the tiniest glimpse of part of it.”