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Amazon urged immigration and customs officials in June to buy and use its controversial facial recognition technology, according to Amazon Web Services e-mails obtained by a government oversight body.
Documents submitted as part of a Freedom on Information Act request by Project on Government Supervight show that Amazon's technology subsidiary has proposed its real-time video analysis software "Rekognition" for help ICE Homeland Security investigations.
Amazon claims that its website technology is able to provide "real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces and the detection of 100 faces on cumbersome photos."
Amazon Web Services and the Department of Homeland Security officials also met in mid-June at the Redwood, California offices of McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm that previously worked with ICE.
It is unclear exactly how Amazon proposed the implementation of this technology. The e-mail of Amazon Web Services only vaguely refers to "a big problem related to HSI". Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Matthew Bourke, spokesman for ICE, said in an email to the HuffPost agency that the agency had not yet contracted with Amazon for Rekognition, but said that the company had not signed a contract with Amazon for Rekognition. it was "pretty standard" for the agency to evaluate how an emerging technology could help its mission.
Bourke confirmed that ICE had used facial recognition in the past "to help in the course of criminal investigations related to fraudulent activities, identity theft and child exploitation crimes. ".
In May, inspired by a report from the American Civil Liberties Union on technology, a group of concerned Amazon employees sent a public letter to CEO Jeff Bezos asking him to stop providing facial recognition services to police and other government agencies.
"We already know that in the midst of the historic militarization of the police, the renewed targeting of black militants and the growth of a federal deportation force currently engaged in human rights violations, will be another powerful tool for the monitored state, which will ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized, "wrote the employees.
"Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the area of law enforcement, "they added. "We should not be tasked with helping those who watch and oppress marginalized populations."
A follow-up survey conducted by the ACLU in July found that the software posed problems of accuracy, false matches disproportionately identifying people of color as known criminals. To illustrate his point, the ACLU used the software to filter members of Congress on a database of 25,000 mugshots; Representatives of the United States were wrongly identified as criminals, which clearly distorted the results by race.
"Nearly 40% of the fake Reconnaissance answers in our test were people of color," noted the ACLU, "while they only represent 20% of the Congress."
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