FBI, ICE use driver license photos without owners’ knowledge or consent
FBI, ICE use driver license photos without owners’
knowledge or consent
By Drew Harwell Washington Post, July 7, 2019, 7:53 p.m.
WASHINGTON — Agents with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state
driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning
through hundreds of millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or
consent, newly released documents show.
Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal
documents, and e-mails over the past five years, obtained through
public-records requests by Georgetown University researchers and provided to
The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state
Department of Motor Vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented
surveillance infrastructure.
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA, and
other ‘‘biometric data’’ taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records
contain the photos of the majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have
never been charged with a crime.
Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized
the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and
Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive,
and error-prone surveillance tool.
‘‘Law enforcement’s access of state databases,’’
particularly DMV databases, is ‘‘often done in the shadows with no consent,’’
House Committee on Oversight and Reform chairman Elijah Cummings, Democrat of
Maryland, said in a statement.
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Oversight
Committee’s ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing
into the technology last month at the use of driver’s license photos in federal
facial-recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or
individual license holders.
‘‘They’ve just given access to that to the FBI,’’ he
said. ‘‘No individual signed off on that when they renewed their driver’s
license, got their driver’s licenses. They didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh,
it’s OK to turn my information, my photo, over to the FBI.’ No elected officials
voted for that to happen.’’
Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned
facial recognition into a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has
logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local
databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office
said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged
daily working relationships with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents
logged more than 1,000 facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the
records show. Names and other details are hidden, though dozens of searches are
marked as having returned a ‘‘possible match.’’
San Francisco and Somerville have banned their police and
public agencies from using facial-recognition software, citing concerns about
governmental overreach and a breach of public trust, and the subject is being
hotly debated in Washington. On Wednesday, officials with the Transportation
Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service
are expected to testify at a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland
Security about their agencies’ use of the technology.
The records show that the technology already is tightly
woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use
of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including
cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with
nothing more formal than an e-mail from a federal agent to a local contact, the
records show.
‘‘It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later
system,’’ said Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project
on Government Oversight. ‘‘People think this is something coming way off in the
future, but these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently
today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go
through state DMVs.’’
The records also underscore the conflicts between the
laws of some states and the federal push to find and deport undocumented
immigrants. Utah, Vermont, and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to
obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving
privilege cards, and ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those
DMV databases.
More than a dozen states, including New York, as well as
the District of Columbia, allow undocumented immigrants to drive legally with
full licenses or driving privilege cards, as long as they submit proof of
in-state residency and pass the relevant state’s driving-proficiency tests.
Lawmakers in Florida, Texas, and other states have
introduced bills this year that would extend driving privileges to undocumented
immigrants. Some of those states already allow the FBI to scan driver’s license
photos, while others, such as Florida, Massachusetts, and New York, are
negotiating with the FBI over access, the GAO said.
‘‘The state has told [undocumented immigrants], has
encouraged them, to submit that information. To me, it’s an insane breach of
trust to then turn around and allow ICE access to that,’’ said Clare Garvie, a
senior associate with the Georgetown law school’s Center on Privacy and
Technology. Garvie led the research.
An ICE spokesman declined to answer questions about how
the agency uses facial-recognition searches, saying its ‘‘investigative
techniques are generally considered law-enforcement sensitive.’’
Asked to comment, the FBI cited congressional testimony
last month of Deputy Assistant Director Kimberly Del Greco, who said facial-recognition
technology was critical ‘‘to preserve our nation’s freedoms, ensure our
liberties are protected, and preserve our security.’’ The agency has said in
the past that while facial-recognition searches can provide helpful leads,
agents are expected to verify the findings and secure definitive proof before
pursuing arrests or criminal charges.
Twenty-one states, including Texas and Pennsylvania, plus
the District of Columbia, allow federal agencies such as the FBI to scan
driver’s license photos, GAO records show. The agreements stipulate some rules
for the searches, including that each must be relevant to a criminal
investigation.
The FBI’s facial-recognition search has access to local,
state, and federal databases containing more than 641 million face photos, a
GAO director said last month. But the agency provides little information about
when the searches are used, who is targeted, and how often searches return
false matches.
The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding
the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches,
according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under
conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only
a few possible matches.
Civil rights advocates have said the inaccuracies of
facial recognition pose a heightened danger of misidentification and false
arrests. The software’s precision is highly dependent on a number of factors,
including the lighting of a subject’s face and the quality of the image, and
research has shown that the technology performs less accurately on people with
darker skin.
‘‘The public doesn’t have a way of controlling what
information the government has on them,’’ said Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior
organizer for the advocacy group Mijente who was particularly concerned about
how ICE and other agencies could use the scans to track down immigrants. ‘‘And
now there’s this rapidly advancing technology, with very few guidelines and
protections for people, putting all of this information at their fingertips in
a very scary way.’’
Comments
Post a Comment