To learn how police use facial recognition, we must ask the right questions
If you simply ask your local police department if it uses facial recognition technology, you may or may not get a complete answer. But if you make that inquiry in the appropriate legal language and pinpoint the phrasing of your query, you just might improve your odds of discovering the details of their facial recognition tactics.
A project launched in November by two transparent-government groups, Open the Government and MuckRock, aims to help by sharing lessons learned from using state public-records laws to quiz law-enforcement agencies about their use of this technology.
Even as facial recognition systems have begun expanding to airports, the automated systems used to match images of faces to records of identities have drawn extensive criticism for their potential invasion of privacy and possible bias, especially with nonwhite populations.
Specifically, a 13-page document provides a concise explanation of how the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and comparable state laws work; a checklist for drafting, submitting, and following up on a FOIA request; and sample text to use in that request. Making these queries and following up on them—”FOIA-ing” for short—can be a prolonged and frustrating process even for experts.
In a talk in December at the annual surveillance conference in Washington presented by the Cato Institute—a libertarian think tank—Open the Government policy analyst Freddy Martinez shared some early findings from the first 100 public-records requests sent by that group and MuckRock.
In an email sent to me on December 30, Martinez said that “most/all” of the public-records filings recorded in this effort have come from either Open the Government or MuckRock. He added that he hasn’t seen other signs of attention to training and the potential for bias among police departments.
Asked for an example of a particularly responsive government, Martinez pointed to the Bay Area.
“San Francisco did a fairly lengthy release to us for all of their collection of biometrics,” he said. The San Francisco Police Department turned over 18 documents, most relating to the department’s use of fingerprints collected from arrest suspects.
But San Francisco is one of a handful of cities—others are Oakland and Berkeley across the bay, plus Somerville, Massachusetts—that have already banned police use of facial recognition systems. That’s not where the problem, to the extent that it exists, is going to be found. But even after such efforts as a map of government facial recognition applications released this summer by the activist group Fight for the Future, we’re still in the early stages of figuring out where to look.
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