Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 10:52 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition
Technology
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology
By JENNIFER LYNCH
Feb 12 2018
<https://www.eff.org/wp/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition>

Executive Summary

Face recognition is poised to become one of the most pervasive surveillance
technologies, and law enforcement’s use of it is increasing rapidly. Today,
law enforcement officers can use mobile devices to capture face
recognition-ready photographs of people they stop on the street;
surveillance cameras boast real-time face scanning and identification
capabilities; and federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have
access to hundreds of millions of images of faces of law-abiding Americans.
On the horizon, law enforcement would like to use face recognition with
body-worn cameras, to identify people in the dark, to match a person to a
police sketch, or even to construct an image of a person’s face from a
small sample of their DNA.

However, the adoption of face recognition technologies like these is
occurring without meaningful oversight, without proper accuracy testing of
the systems as they are actually used in the field, and without the
enactment of legal protections to prevent internal and external misuse.
This has led to the development of unproven, inaccurate systems that will
impinge on constitutional rights and disproportionately impact people of
color.

Without restrictive limits in place, it could be relatively easy for the
government and private companies to build databases of images of the vast
majority of people living in the United States and use those databases to
identify and track people in real time as they move from place to place
throughout their daily lives. As researchers at Georgetown posited in 2016,
one out of two Americans is already in a face recognition database
accessible to law enforcement.1

This white paper takes a broad look at the problems with law enforcement
use of face recognition technology in the United States. Part 1 provides an
overview of the key issues with face recognition, including accuracy,
security, and impact on privacy and civil rights. Part 2 focuses on FBI’s
face recognition programs, because FBI not only manages the repository for
most of the criminal data used by federal, state, local, and tribal law
enforcement agencies across the United States, but also provides direct
face recognition services to many of these agencies, and its systems
exemplify the wider problems with face recognition. After considering these
current issues, Part 3looks ahead to potential future face recognition
capabilities and concerns. Finally, Part 4 presents recommendations for
policy makers on the limits and checks necessary to ensure that law
enforcement use of face recognition respects civil liberties.

Part 1 provides a brief introduction to how face recognition works before
exploring areas in which face recognition is particularly problematic for
law enforcement use, presenting the following conclusions:

        • When the uncertainty and inaccuracy inherent in face recognition
technology inform law enforcement decisions, it has real-world impact. An
inaccurate system will implicate people for crimes they did not commit. And
it will shift the burden onto defendants to show they are not who the
system says they are.
        • Face recognition uniquely impacts civil liberties. The
accumulation of identifiable photographs threatens important free speech
and freedom of associations rights under the First Amendment, especially
because such data can be captured without individuals’ knowledge.
        • Face recognition disproportionately impacts people of color. Face
recognition misidentifies African Americans and ethnic minorities, young
people, and women at higher rates than whites, older people, and men,
respectively.2 Due to years of well-documented, racially biased police
practices, all criminal databases—including mugshot databases—include a
disproportionate number of African Americans, Latinos, and
immigrants.3These two facts mean people of color will likely shoulder
significantly more of the burden of face recognition systems’ inaccuracies
than whites.
        • The collection and retention of face recognition data poses
special security risks. All collected data is at risk of breach or misuse
by external and internal actors, and there are many examples of misuse of
law enforcement data in other contexts.4 Face recognition poses additional
risks because, unlike a social security number or driver’s license number,
we can’t change our faces. Law enforcement must do more to explain why it
needs to collect so much sensitive biometric and biographic data, why it
needs to maintain it for so long, and how it will safeguard it from
breaches.
Part 2 explores how FBI’s face recognition programs exemplify these and
other problems. FBI has positioned itself to be the central source for face
recognition identification for not only federal but also state and local
law enforcement agencies. FBI collects its own data, maintains data
provided by state and local agencies, and facilitates access to face
recognition data for more than 23,000 law enforcement agencies across the
country and around the world. This makes it particularly important to look
closely at FBI’s system, as its issues are likely present in other law
enforcement systems.

After describing FBI’s internal and external face recognition
programs—including the Next Generation Identification database and
Interstate Photo System—and access to external data, Part 2 highlights
three of FBI’s most urgent failures related to face recognition:

        • FBI has failed to address the problem of face recognition
inaccuracy.The minimal testing and reporting conducted by FBI showed its
own system was incapable of accurate identification at least 15 percent of
the time. However, it refuses to provide necessary information to fully
evaluate the efficacy of its system, and it refuses to update testing using
the current, much larger database.
        • For years, FBI has failed to meet basic transparency requirements
as mandated by federal law about its Next Generation Identification
database and its use of face recognition. The agency took seven years, for
example, to update its Privacy Impact Assessment for its face recognition
database, and failed to release a new one until a year after the system was
fully operational.
        • The scope of FBI’s face recognition programs is still unclear.
The public still does not have as much information as it should about FBI’s
face recognition systems and plans for their future evolution.
Part 3 looks toward face recognition capabilities and concerns on the
horizon, including the use of face recognition with police body-worn
cameras, crowd photos, and social media photos.

Finally, Part 4 provides proposals for change. In particular, it provides a
roadmap to policy makers considering face recognition legislation. It
recommends concrete and specific technical and legal limits to place
meaningful checks on government use of face recognition technology.

People should not be forced to submit to criminal face recognition searches
merely because they want to drive a car. They should not have to worry
their data will be misused by unethical government officials with unchecked
access to face recognition databases. They should not 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. Without
meaningful legal protections, this is where we may be headed.

Want to learn more? For additional information on law enforcement use of
technology, check out EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project. For more on
face recognition and related technologies, visit our issue pages on face
recognition and biometrics.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20180227085003:18BA2FBA-1BC5-11E8-9AC3-97691569A087
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com