Privacy Groups Sound the Alarm Over FBI’s Facial-Recognition
Privacy Groups Sound the Alarm Over FBI’s
Facial-Recognition
TechnologyAdvocates are pushing Attorney General Eric
Holder to assess the privacy impact of the FBI's controversial database that is
expected to become fully operational later this year.
By Dustin Volz June 24, 2014
More than 30 privacy and civil-liberties groups are
asking the Justice Department to complete a long-promised audit of the FBI's
facial-recognition database.
The groups argue the database, which the FBI says it uses
to identify targets, could pose privacy risks to every American citizen because
it has not been properly vetted, possesses dubious accuracy benchmarks, and may
sweep up images of ordinary people not suspected of wrongdoing.
In a joint letter sent Tuesday to Attorney General Eric
Holder, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
and others warn that an FBI facial-recognition program "has undergone a
radical transformation" since its last privacy review six years ago. That
lack of recent oversight "raises serious privacy and civil-liberty
concerns," the groups contend.
"The capacity of the FBI to collect and retain
information, even on innocent Americans, has grown exponentially," the
letter reads. "It is essential for the American public to have a complete
picture of all the programs and authorities the FBI uses to track our daily
lives, and an understanding of how those programs affect our civil rights and civil
liberties."
The Next Generation Identification program—a biometric
database that includes iris scans and palm prints along with facial
recognition—is scheduled to become fully operational later this year and has
not undergone a rigorous privacy litmus test—known as a Privacy Impact
Assessment—since 2008, despite pledges from government officials.
"One of the risks here, without assessing the
privacy considerations, is the prospect of mission creep with the use of
biometric identifiers," said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel with
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, another of the letter's signatories.
"it's been almost two years since the FBI said they were going to do an
updated privacy assessment, and nothing has occurred."
The facial-recognition component of the database,
however, is what privacy advocates find most alarming. The FBI projects that by
2015 the facial-recognition database could catalog up to 52 million face
photos. A substantial portion of those—about 4.3 million—are expected to be
gleaned from noncriminal photography, such as employer background checks,
according to privacy groups.
But earlier this month, FBI Director James Comey told
Congress the database would not collect and store photos of average civilians
and is intended to "find bad guys by matching pictures to mugshots."
But privacy hawks remain concerned that images may be shared among the FBI and
other agencies, such as the Defense Department and National Security Agency,
and even state motor-vehicle departments.
Comey, during his testimony, did not completely refute
the suggestion that photos would be shared with states.
"There are some circumstances in which when states
send us records, they'll send us pictures of people who are getting special
driving licenses to transport children or explosive materials or
something," Comey said. "But as I understand it, those are not part
of the searchable Next Generation Identification database."
Currently, no federal laws limit the use of
facial-recognition software, either by the private sector or the government.
A 2010 government report made public last year through a
Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information
Center stated that the agency's facial-recognition technology could fail up to
20 percent of the time. When used against a searchable repository, that failure
rate could be as high as 15 percent.
But even those numbers are misleading, privacy groups
contend, because a search can be considered a success if the correct suspect is
listed within the top 50 candidates. Such an "overwhelming number" of
false matches could lead to "greater racial profiling by law enforcement
by shifting the burden of identification onto certain ethnicities."
Facial-recognition technology has recently endured
heightened scrutiny from the anti-government-surveillance crowd for its
potential as an invasive means of tracking. Last month, documents supplied by
Edward Snowden to The New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency
intercepts "millions of images per day" as part of a program
officials believe could fundamentally revolutionize the way government spies on
intelligence targets across the globe. That daily cache includes about 55,000
"facial-recognition quality images," which the NSA considers possibly
more important to its mission than the surveillance of more traditional
communications.
When asked for comment, the Justice Department would only
say it was reviewing the letter.
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