From Fortune Magazine yesterday:
San Francisco Bans Facial-Recognition Tools for Its Police and Other City Departments
By Kartikay Mehrotra and Bloomberg May 14, 2019
(It all started with automated License-Plate Readers)
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"Concerned that some new surveillance technologies may be too intrusive, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial-recognition tools by its police and other municipal departments.
The Board of Supervisors approved the Stop Secret Surveillance ordinance Tuesday, culminating a re-examination of city policy that began with the false arrest of Denise Green in 2014. Green’s Lexus was misidentified as a stolen vehicle by an automated license-plate reader. She was pulled over by police, forced out of the car, and onto her knees at gunpoint by six officers. The city spent $500,000 to settle lawsuits linked to her detention.
Since then, San Francisco officials determined flaws in the license-plate reader were just part of a wider potential for abuse with Big Brother-type surveillance capabilities. With new technologies increasingly making it possible to identify people, places, and objects, the city decided to impose a higher bar for snooping tools. . .
The U.S. Department of Justice said the technology is not always accurate and that implementation poses significant challenges to civil rights.
“The potential for misuse of face recognition information may expose agencies participating in such systems to civil liability and negative public perceptions,” according to a December 2017 report on face recognition by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. “The lack of rules and protocols also raises concerns that law enforcement agencies will use face recognition systems to systematically, and without human intervention, identify members of the public and monitor individuals’ actions and movements.”
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What is facial recognition?
Facial recognition is a method of using computer programs to identify individuals based on the features of their faces. Facial recognition systems create a unique “face print” (similar to a fingerprint) based on a pre-identified photo (or set of photos) for an individual. These systems can then rapidly scan an image of an unknown face against all the faceprints in their databases, and provide an identification if there is a match. These databases can contain millions of photos and programs can scan through them to identify a match in less than a second.
Facial recognition is also a looming privacy threat. If cameras were placed near sensitive locations such as houses of worship, political rallies, protests, or doctors’ offices, facial recognition could effortlessly catalog the intimate details of individuals’ lives.
Is this something coming in the future, or is it being used now?
. . . law enforcement agencies across the United States are also rapidly adopting facial-recognition surveillance.
Many local and state police forces use facial recognition systems, although details of their use are often shrouded in secrecy. The largest facial recognition surveillance system in the United States is operated by the FBI. The FBI’s Next Generation ID system maintains a facial recognition database with photos of more than 117 million Americans. The FBI conducts on average 4,055 searches per month to identify individuals with its facial recognition systems. Its database is composed primarily of driver’s-license photo databases cities and states provided to the FBI in exchange for use of the Bureau’s facial recognition surveillance system. According to a report by the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, at least one in four of the nation’s thousands of state and local police departments have the ability to run facial recognition searches using the FBI’s or other systems. However, while facial recognition surveillance is being hastily deployed, oversight rules and basic limits on its use are lagging behind.
Many local and state police forces use facial recognition systems, although details of their use are often shrouded in secrecy. The largest facial recognition surveillance system in the United States is operated by the FBI. The FBI’s Next Generation ID system maintains a facial recognition database with photos of more than 117 million Americans. The FBI conducts on average 4,055 searches per month to identify individuals with its facial recognition systems. Its database is composed primarily of driver’s-license photo databases cities and states provided to the FBI in exchange for use of the Bureau’s facial recognition surveillance system. According to a report by the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, at least one in four of the nation’s thousands of state and local police departments have the ability to run facial recognition searches using the FBI’s or other systems. However, while facial recognition surveillance is being hastily deployed, oversight rules and basic limits on its use are lagging behind.
What other issues does facial recognition raise?
In addition to the risk of police misidentifying and acting against innocent people, facial recognition surveillance could allow the government to easily stockpile highly sensitive information about our lives. With an automated system that can identify everyone simply by their face, the government could use facial recognition to effectively end anonymity in our public lives. Facial recognition surveillance could rapidly identify thousands of people at a protest or political rally. It could catalog everyone entering or exiting a house of worship or medical facility. It could track if suspected whistleblowers are entering a media facility or meeting with a journalist. Participation in constitutionally protected activities like these would be chilled as people become fearful of the government’s potential use of facial recognition to target them for investigation, prosecution, or harassment.
