Some US Cities Are Moving Into Real-Time Facial Surveillance
SOME
US CITIES ARE MOVING INTO REAL-TIME FACIAL SURVEILLANCE
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By GREGORY BARBER, TOM SIMONITE 05.17.19 07:00 AM
The
report says agencies in Chicago and Detroit have bought real-time facial
recognition systems. Chicago claims it has not used its system; Detroit says it
is not using its system currently. But no federal or state law would prevent
use of the technology.
According to contracts obtained by the Georgetown
researchers, the two cities purchased software from a South Carolina company,
DataWorks Plus, that equips police with the ability to identify faces from
surveillance footage in real time. A description on the company’s website says
the technology, called FaceWatch Plus, “provides continuous screening and
monitoring of live video streams.” DataWorks confirmed the existence of the
systems, but did not elaborate further.
Facial recognition has long been used on static images to
identify arrested suspects and detect driver's license fraud, among other
things. But using the technology with real-time video is less common. It has
become practical only through recent advances in AI and computer vision,
although it remains significantly less accurate than facial recognition under
controlled circumstances.
Privacy advocates say ongoing use of the technology in this
way would redefine the traditional anonymity of public spaces.
“Historically we haven’t had to regulate privacy
in public because it’s been too expensive for any entity to track our
whereabouts,” says Evan Selinger, a professor at the Rochester Institute of
Technology. “This is a game changer.”
According to the report, Detroit first purchased a facial
recognition system capable of real-time analysis in July 2017 as part of a
three-year contract related to an unusual community policing program called
Project Greenlight. To deter late-night crime, gas stations and other
businesses hooked up cameras that fed live surveillance footage to police
department analysts. The program expanded over the years to stream footage to
police from more than 500 locations, including churches and reproductive health
clinics.
Documents unearthed by Georgetown show that real time facial
recognition was supposed to help automate elements of Project Greenlight. In a
letter to the Georgetown researchers provided by the department to WIRED,
police chief James Craig said officers were not using the technology’s
real-time capabilities, limiting the use of facial recognition thus far to
still images of suspects. The department did not say whether it used real-time
facial recognition in the past.
Chicago’s adoption of FaceWatch Plus goes back to at least
2016, the report says. According to a description of the program—found in
DataWorks Plus’ pitch to Detroit—the “project objective” involved tapping into
Chicago’s 20,000 street and transit cameras. Chicago police told the
researchers the system was never turned on. (The department did not respond to
additional questions from WIRED.) Illinois is one of only three states with
biometric-identify laws that require consent from people before companies
collect biometric markers, like fingerprints and face data. But public agencies
are exempted.
Georgetown’s findings
show how the lack of federal rules on
facial recognition may create a patchwork of surveillance regimes inside the
US. San Francisco supervisors voted to ban city use of
facial recognition on Tuesday. In Chicago and Detroit, citizens
in public are watched by cameras that could be connected to software checking
every face passing by. Police in Orlando and New York City are testing similar
technology in pilot projects.
The idea of police scanning faces in real time
may strike some citizens as unusual for the US. But experts tracking the
technology’s spread were not startled by Georgetown’s findings. “I didn’t know
about those police departments, but it’s not surprising to me that it’s
happening here,” says Gretchen Greene, a researcher who studies facial
recognition uses at MIT's Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for
Internet and Society.
Facial recognition has
become more widespread in law enforcement and government in recent years as the
technology has become cheaper and more accurate,
Greene says. Scanning faces in real time requires more sophisticated and
powerful software and hardware, but that capability is now also within easy
reach of many agencies.
Mohammad Tajsar, a staff attorney with ACLU Southern
California, says police departments often adopt new surveillance technologies
without much thought to the broader implications. A panoply of loosely defined
“pilots” and “trials” have helped facial recognition, social media monitoring,
and automatic license plate readers become normalized in departments across the
US. "They're really attracted to shiny new things," Tajsar says.
With few rules in place, how Chicago and Detroit’s facial
recognition technology affects police work—and the safety and rights of
residents—will depend on the procedures the two cities impose on themselves.
A second Georgetown
report published Thursday suggests
New York City police weren’t careful with their facial recognition system.
Documents obtained by the university’s researchers describe NYPD officers
getting creative when the system couldn’t match a suspect’s photo, feeding in
sketches or celebrity photos they judged looked similar to the person of
interest. The report cites a 2014 NIST report that states “sketches mostly
fail.” In one case, actor Woody Harrelson’s visage was used to apprehend a
suspect. While much has been made of the risks of bias and
inaccuracies baked into facial recognition systems, Selinger says the example
shows an overlooked danger: abuse by the people operating them.
Tajsar of the ACLU is skeptical that any internal or
external rules for facial recognition could keep the technology from
endangering civil rights. His organization favors a ban like the one passed in
San Francisco this week. The city may not remain unique. The Massachusetts
state legislature is considering a bill that would impose a moratorium on
government use of facial recognition. The cities of Oakland and Somerville,
near Boston, are considering bans of their own.
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