Agreed.

After the 2011 London riots, the Met gathered two hundred thousand hours of CCTV footage. Computer facial-recognition systems identified one rioter. Gary Collins, the super-recognizer, identified a hundred and ninety.

This is one of the things that bothers me about the mass collection of data by the NSA and GCHQ et. al. There's no way they have the technology yet to effectively scan, process and understand such a huge amount of data despite the rapid advancement of Data Mining and "Big Data" projects.

I remember reading another article about the same squad

Anyone fancy themselves as a super recogniser?

Take a test or two to find out:

1. University of Greenwich

2. Harvard University and Dartmouth College

3. faceblind.org's famous faces test

I got 10/14 on the Greenwich test, but it feels fake because we know to be more aware of things like ear or face shape.

FOr me the problem with the famous faces test was not that I didn't recognise the face, but that I couldn't recall the names of the people.