Facial Recognition Tech Could Ensnare Millions Of Innocent Americans For Crimes They Didn’t Commit
Facial Recognition Tech Could
Ensnare Millions Of Innocent Americans For Crimes They Didn’t Commit
It’s
often the case that new technologies arrive on the scene faster than our
society and its legal code can keep up. Sometimes this can be a good thing. For
instance, 3D printing allows people to print out unregulated gun parts, thus
allowing gun owners to circumvent the onerous laws of our government, which has
struggled to come up with new laws to restrict the technology.
When technology advances at a
breakneck pace however, it can also be quite dangerous for our liberties. This is especially true
in regards to privacy. If a new technology makes it easy for the government to
track us, you can bet that the government is going to take its sweet time
updating the legal code in a way that will protect us from surveillance.
That certainly seems to
be the case with facial recognition software. During a recent Congressional
Oversight Committee hearing, members of both political
parties sounded the alarm on the FBI’s use of the technology, and read the written testimony of
Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Jennifer Lynch:
Lynch
detailed the stunning scope of the FBI’s photo collection. In addition to collecting
criminal and civil mug shots, the agency currently has “memorandums of
understanding” with 16 states that mean every driver’s license photo from those
states is accessible to the agency—without the drivers’ consent. The FBI also
has access to photos from the U.S. State Department’s passport and visa
records.
Lynch argued that “Americans should not be forced to submit to
criminal face recognition searches merely because they want to drive a car.
They shouldn’t have to worry their data will be misused by unethical government
officials with unchecked access to face recognition databases. And they
shouldn’t have to fear that their every move will be tracked if face
recognition is linked to the networks of surveillance cameras that blanket many
cities.”
“But without meaningful
legal protections, this is where we may be headed,” Lynch stated. “Without laws in place, it
could be relatively easy for the government and private companies to amass
databases of images of all Americans and use those databases to identify and
track people in real time as they move from place to place throughout their
daily lives.”
All
told, law enforcement agencies around the country have access to 400 million
photos in facial recognition databases, which are connected to roughly 50% of
American adults. Most of these people have never committed a crime, and
obviously haven’t given any consent to this.
At
first glance it may sound harmless to be in one of these databases. Movies and
TV shows make it sound like this technology can help law enforcement swiftly
and precisely nab suspects. So what do you have to fear if you haven’t
committed a crime? It turns out that in real life, facial recognition is far from perfect.
Internal FBI documents
obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy
Information Center indicate
that the FBI’s own database, called the Next
Generation Identification Interstate Photo System, or NGI-IPS, had an
acceptable margin of error of 20 percent — that is, a 1-in-5 chance of
“recognizing” the wrong person.
And research published in
the October 2015 issue of the scientific journal PLOS ONE by researchers at the
universities of Sydney and New South Wales in Australia found that the humans who interpret such
data build in an extra
error margin approaching 30 percent.
If we ever allow our
government to roll out facial recognition cameras on a wider scale, lots of
innocent people are going to be hurt. Whether by mistake or by malice, it will
become shockingly easy for law enforcement to identify ordinary people as
criminals. The surveillance control grid will not only be inescapable, it will
be unwieldy and rife with abuse.
It’s often said that you should
never trade freedom for safety. In this case, we wouldn’t
receive any kind of safety.
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