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By Jon Schuppe
Police say that facial recognition is "essential" and "imperative" – a revolutionary tool that allows them to track down criminals who would otherwise escape justice.
Opponents say the technology is "harmful" and "dangerous" – an omen of repressive government surveillance.
The two sides are engaged in an unprecedented battle on public opinion that will reach a turning point this week, while San Francisco is expected to become the first city in the country to ban the use of facial recognition by the government.
Other cities in the Bay Area, including Oakland and Berkeley, as well as Somerville, Massachusetts, could follow later this year. Massachusetts lawmakers will soon begin debating the issue of a state-wide moratorium on technology. A bill in New York proposes a temporary halt to facial recognition in public schools, which some see as a first step towards a broader ban. Ditto with a California bill to ban the link between facial recognition and cameras of the police corps.
The proposed bans have given new impetus to a campaign led by human rights defenders, defense lawyers and artificial intelligence researchers to expose flaws in facial recognition to lawmakers and the public. Linking the fight with a broader public reaction against the use of private data by the government and high-tech companies, opponents have documented how the algorithms underlying systems are likely to identify people to dark skin Last week, researchers at the Georgetown Law School published reports of police-reported face-to-face violations and the ability of some major city departments to use surveillance camera networks to identify people in public spaces in real time. On Wednesday, Amazon shareholders will consider proposals, pushed by activist investors, to limit the sale by the company of its facial recognition to the government.
However, law enforcement officials and companies developing facial recognition systems claim that miscreants inform the public by pointing out the weaknesses of the technology and neglecting its benefits. They try to thwart the critics by trying to explain why technology can enhance security.
Hundreds of US police departments already have access to facial recognition, many of them using it to identify suspects in routine crimes, ranging from shootings on the fly. But very few of them talk about it openly. This has undoubtedly allowed stories of abuse to dominate the debate.
"This is an area where our traditional secrecy and lack of transparency has probably come back to haunt us," said Jim Burch, president of the National Police Foundation, who helps police adopt new technologies, including facial recognition. .
"The solution," he added, "would be to better inform people and make them understand why this should be done and how to do it in the safest and most intelligent way possible."
This effort is underway, said Benji Hutchinson, vice president of federal operations at NEC Corporation of America, one of the largest providers of facial recognition systems intended for law enforcement. The company has sent representatives to discuss with federal lawmakers to explain the operation of the technology.
"There will be an interesting discussion that we will see unfold over the next six, 12, 18 months as this technology is used in more places across the country," said Hutchinson.
Congress has not yet bills pending to regulate the use of facial recognition by the government.
Opponents of facial recognition believe they have built a model to fight against technology. It builds on a movement that began six years ago in Oakland, California, following the discovery of the city's plan to create a massive surveillance network of video cameras, gun detectors and license plate readers. The plan was abandoned in the midst of a negative public reaction and led to the creation of a privacy commission that supported the passage of a local law requiring the city to submit to the public. public attention any purchase of monitoring equipment. Oakland now has a pending amendment to this law that would ban the city's government from using face recognition.
The American Civil Liberties Union has since launched a campaign to have the versions of the Oakland Transparency Bill passed elsewhere. Eleven local governments, including cities in California, Ohio and Massachusetts, have done so. Many have included the language written by the ACLU in their measurements. More than a dozen other cities plan to do the same, the group said.
The ACLU also drafted a model law for local governments, specifically focused on banning facial recognition.
Matt Cagle, an attorney at the ACLU in Northern California, was one of the leaders of the San Francisco facial recognition ban campaign, which kicked off last fall. Although the city is a hub for the country's technology industry, it also has a long tradition of defending civil liberties. A diverse group of community organizations – representing immigrants, the LGBTQ community, Muslims, Americans of Asian descent, homeless people and defense lawyers – are joined to the 39; effort.
"Communities should be able to decide how governments monitor," said Cagle. "And the public can decide to remove it from the table."
This approach will be used elsewhere.
Lawmakers in Somerville, Massachusetts, have used the ACLU's model legislation to guide the imminent ban on the use of technology by its local government.
"I understand that some may consider this to be an extreme step," said Ben Ewen-Campen, Somerville's city councilor, who sponsored the proposed ban, which could be voted on this summer. "I see this as we finally step in by saying that this technology is evolving at a rate at which the public is not ready, and that it's time to have this conversation with the audience."
Technology companies and some police services say they do not oppose stricter controls on government oversight, including measures that require organizations to publicly explain how they would use the technology they want to buy. Rather than imposing facial recognition bans, it is advisable to adopt guardrails that allow the police to continue to use them while avoiding massive surveillance, they say.
"It's not the first and it will not be the latest technology that's both promising and perilous," Burch said. "But reacting in this way and excluding technology and the potential for good that could result from it is worrying."
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