Since 2006, the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles has used face surveillance technology to try to weed out fraudulent license applicants. From day one, the RMV has allowed law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts and the United States to use its drivers license database and face surveillance tech with no transparency, accountability, or oversight required.
The company that sells this technology to the RMV is called IDEMIA, a French multinational biometrics corporation worth approximately $3 billion. Now, this very same company has released a new video analytics product called Augmented Vision that allows cameras to analyze people and their movements in real-time.
According to IDEMIA, the system includes multiple algorithms with the ability to recognize not only faces but silhouettes, vehicles, number plates, and an unspecified number of objects. All of those capabilities raise serious civil rights concerns, but a particularly pernicious advancement in the technology is its automated “access control system,” which claims to identify a “person of interest,” provide a direct alert, and automatically deny that person access to a space. Presumably, the same technology could be used by governments to track people as they move through public space in real time.
The company doesn’t define “person of interest,” meaning decisions about who is “interesting” to authorities will likely be left to the software user. A system like this could, according to the press release, help police determine who is allowed in a given area, and who may be flagged, stopped, or banned from entering a given area. It is unclear whether the system matches faces in real-time to a database of existing faces, such as from drivers licenses, or whether a user is able to declare a “person of interest” based on characteristics like race, age, and gender. Both of these capabilities allow for the automated tracking and banning of people without their informed consent.
There are currently no statutes in the United States regulating how government agencies can deploy technologies like these, leaving room for abuse, misuse, and discrimination to run rampant.
While the company’s marketing materials make it sound like Augmented Vision is primarily useful for controlling something like employee access to a corporate building, IDEMIA sees no such restriction on the uses of its product. According to the materials, the company envisions its software in cameras in public and private spaces, including airports, stadiums, retail spaces, and commercial buildings. The software does not require specific hardware, and can be integrated into any existing camera infrastructure.
The ability to secretly monitor and ban people from commercial spaces is unnerving, but these technologies pose particularly serious risks in the hands of law enforcement agencies. In the absence of strong privacy rules, there are no requirements that police disclose on what basis they are tracking people, where they are being tracked, what information police are storing about people, or how that information may be used for stops, searches, surveillance, and arrests.
That is one reason why the ACLU of Massachusetts supports legislation calling for a moratorium on Massachusetts government use of at-a-distance biometric surveillance technologies like face recognition until proper regulations are passed to protect civil rights and civil liberties. Biometric surveillance technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, without any legal protections in place to guard our most basic freedoms. It’s time to Press Pause on face surveillance now, before it’s too late.
Take action.
This blog post was written by ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty intern Sarah Powazek.
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Monday, June 24, 2019 - 2:45pm
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Blog written by Somil Trivedi, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project
& Nusrat Choudhury, Deputy Director, ACLU Racial Justice Program
Ava Duvernay’s new miniseries, When They See Us, retells the harrowing story of the five Black and Latinx boys wrongfully imprisoned for the rape and near murder of a young woman in New York’s Central Park in 1989. In this telling, she tackles racist practices that echo to the past, but are very much present in the current era of mass incarceration.
The story is as complex as it is damning. Duvernay chronicles how police, prosecutors, judges, jailers, and the media worked in concert to destroy these innocent children and their families. Dehumanized by the press, the boys were convicted after the NYPD and Manhattan DA brutally extracted false confessions from them. But the press merely augmented the voice of the systems of oppression at work. Yes, the law eventually, after many failures, afforded them some semblance of justice, including through a 2002 exoneration based in part on DNA evidence. But this only forces us to ruefully scrutinize how this miscarriage of justice it began and proceeded, and to consider the roots of structural oppression and institutional racism that drove the injustice in the first place.
Indeed, the series tells a story that is so powerful and so painful, there is a risk that some will see it as an aberration, something outside the norm of our criminal legal system. But viewers must recognize and grapple with the fact that the shocking details of this prosecution – the beatings, coerced confessions, and prosecutorial misconduct that led to the imprisonment Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise – are simply manifestations of legal infrastructure that has long brutally harmed people of color throughout our country and across generations.
It would be irresponsible to divorce the experiences of the men exonerated for the Central Park assault from deep-seated and prevalent racial biases that dehumanize Black and brown people, as well as our country’s sordid history of wielding the criminal legal system to enforce those stereotypes. Throughout our history, Black people in particular have been equated with apes and animals, with the predictable result of promoting state violence against them. In 1980s New York alone, Willie Turks was beaten to death by white racists, and Bernard Goetz shot four Black teenagers on the subway with impunity. So it’s no surprise that, in 1989, prosecutors and the media labeled these boys—none over the age of 16—as part of a roving “wolf pack,” a racially-charged term commonly used at that time in New York City to describe groups of young Black and brown men. Amplifying these stereotypes, none other than Donald Trump took out full-page ads in major newspapers calling for the boys’ execution.
Thirty years later, communities across the nation continue to endure a near constant barrage of police killings of unarmed Black people, including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, and so many more. The nearly ubiquitous lack of accountability for their killings sends the message that these people are in fact not people at all, and therefore their lives ought not matter.
Our challenge, then, is to upend these biases and combat this history by seeing all people of color and all criminal defendants with the same humanity that Ava Duvernay applied to her five subjects.
Second, the miscarriages of justice in the Central Park assault case were not and are not abnormal. It is true that the misconduct of lead prosecutor Linda Fairstein was uniquely appalling in many ways, and she somehow maintains to this day that she got it basically right—despite the men’s eventual exoneration and New York City’s decision to settle their civil rights lawsuit for $41 million.
The real story here is not about individual prosecutors or police, many of whom would rightly denounce the approaches on display in the series. As DuVernay herself explained, “It’s not all about [Fairstein]. She is part of the system that’s not broken, it was built to be this way. It was built to oppress, it was built to control.”
Indeed, the true power of When They See Us is how it blows the lid off a system of criminal laws and norms anchored by near-unreviewable law enforcement discretion to target and pressure vulnerable people into abandoning their rights and submitting to state punishment. In the miniseries, that pressure took the form of violent, illegal interrogations of children of color. However, we must speak the truth that every day in America, law enforcement officers exert similar pressure on marginalized people—disproportionately people of color—through racial profiling and the over-policing of communities of color, family separation, mandatory minimum sentences, crushing fines and fees, and coercive plea bargaining tactics, to name a few. These tactics push Black and brown people to jail and prison in droves, despite mounting evidence that incarceration destroys communities and costs far too much. Indeed, there are data-driven reasons to believe incarceration actually creates more crime.
In other words, the story of When They See Us actually gets told every day in America, thousands of times over. But the systems that make those stories possible are being fought.
Across the country, the Black Lives Matter movement is mobilizing for liberation from state-inflicted violence against Black people, including by taking on prosecutors. And though the U.S. is still mired in a mass incarceration crisis, there is a growing, bipartisan coalition working to eliminate it. A small but significant cohort of law enforcement leaders, including elected prosecutors in places like Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, and Boston, is deploying their discretion to review illegal convictions rather than coerce them, and reduce racial disparities rather than exploit them. States are responding to increasing public support for law enforcement transparency and accountability, and humane alternatives to coercive policing, prosecution, and sentencing.
Things are changing, slowly but surely, in response most of all to community pressure. We must remain vigilant in our hope, and resolute in our efforts. Because we are not there yet. “Reformers” backslide; “reforms” underwhelm. The same man who once called for the execution of five innocent boys of color now encourages police brutality as President of the United States. We are not as far from 1989 as we might think. When They See Us is a powerful reminder of that fact, and of the imperative to keep fighting and lifting up the voices of those who are most seriously impacted.
Date
Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - 1:00pm
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By Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel
We already know that the FBI has a massive facial recognition apparatus. We know the agency has slowly been working towards getting access to photos of almost every American to run through this system. We also know it is building this mass surveillance infrastructure without clear authorization from Congress, safeguards, or public input.
The fact that face recognition technology, which can be readily abused, has been deployed by federal agencies largely in secret should give us all pause. The technology gives government agencies the unprecedented power to track who we are, where we go, and who we know. Companies marketing this technology to the government boast that it can be used to track people in real-time, reconstruct past movements from video footage, or identify a hundred individuals from a single photo. This threatens to create a world where people are watched and identified as they attend a protest, congregate outside a place of worship, visit a medical provider, or simply go about their daily lives.
At a House Oversight Committee hearing this week with an FBI witness, we learned new details that further confirm our fears that the FBI’s face recognition apparatus continues to balloon, threatening our fundamental liberties. The details also underscore the urgent need for Congress to put the brakes on law enforcement use of this powerful technology.
Here are some of the most concerning details we learned from the hearing:
1. The FBI’s massive facial recognition apparatus continues to expand and can now match against over 640 million photos.
The FBI now has the ability to match against or request matches against over 640 million photos — a number that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted is larger than the total population in the US. This includes driver’s license photos from 21 states, including states that do not have laws explicitly allowing their driver’s license repositories to be used in this way. These numbers show that the FBI is moving closer to having the capability to run face recognition searches against photos of virtually every American.
The FBI is also running large numbers of face recognition searches. According to the FBI, from October 2017 to April 2019, the FBI ran over 152,000 searches of its face recognition system that matches against mugshots. That number does not even include searches on external databases, like passport photos. It is also unusually high when compared to the fact that there were only 10,232 criminal convictions stemming from FBI-led investigations in fiscal year 2017.
2. The FBI claims it can use face recognition on individuals without a warrant or probable cause.
The FBI says that it only performs face recognition as part of authorized investigations or open assessments. But that doesn’t make it any better. Under FBI guidelines, agents can open an assessment without any fact-based suspicion whatsoever. Even preliminary investigations may be opened only in cases where there is mere “information or allegation” of wrongdoing, which the FBI interprets to cover mere speculation that a crime may be committed in the future. Thus, even if the FBI strictly adhered to its internal policies, they would still have broad discretion to use face recognition without a warrant or probable cause, making the technology even more susceptible to widespread use and abuse.
3. The FBI doesn’t even track basic statistics to measure the technology's efficacy.
The FBI claims that face recognition can help to “protect public safety.” But, as their testimony before Congress this week revealed, the FBI doesn’t have the data to back up this claim. During questioning, the FBI confirmed that it does not track how many times face recognition has led to a conviction. Additionally, the agency does not track how many times the use of face recognition leads to arrests, including arrests of individuals ultimately acquitted.
There is good reason to question the FBI’s efficacy claims. A report on the use of face recognition in the UK found that the technology led to false matches over 90 percent of the time. The fact that the FBI doesn’t even track basic data about efficacy calls into question how they can conclude it has positive law enforcement value.
4. The FBI cannot even confirm that it complies with its constitutional obligations.
The government is required to provide notice to criminal defendants when they are identified by face recognition or where match information may be considered exculpatory. Evidence has suggested the FBI is not complying with this obligation — and this hearing provides more cause for alarm. Twice during the hearing, the FBI was specifically asked whether they notified criminal defendants when other individuals also returned as a face recognition match, which could support defendants’ claims that they are innocent. The FBI witness said she should not confirm that this information was always provided. The FBI also failed to clearly respond to questions regarding whether they even notified defendants in cases where face recognition contributed to their arrest or prosecution.
5. The FBI won’t reveal information about the companies it has communicated with about face recognition products.
The FBI was asked to name “the companies who lobby or communicate” with the FBI about its face recognition products. The FBI witness evaded this question, and that is troubling. We have already seen examples of companies selling and marketing irresponsible uses of face recognition to law enforcement. For example, Amazon has pushed the use of face recognition in body cameras, which are intended to be tools of accountability, not surveillance. Given this, additional oversight of private companies who sell and market this technology is critical. Congress should press the FBI to provide information on the companies it has communicated with about face recognition, and the information these companies have provided to government decision makers on the efficacy, bias, and potential uses of their face recognition products.
The ACLU has long sounded the alarm over the FBI’s use of face recognition and, along with over 60 other groups, has called for Congress to halt federal law enforcement use of this technology until Congress debates what, if any, uses should be allowed. The hearing this week provides further evidence that such a moratorium is needed to prevent harm and safeguard our rights.
Date
Monday, June 10, 2019 - 4:30pm
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