Last year the Washington Post reported that the federal government has turned state drivers’ license photos into a giant facial recognition database, putting virtually every driver in America in a perpetual electronic police lineup. In fact, the federal government has been developing a massive biometric database in cooperation with state and local governments for years.
So, which state, local and federal government agencies have access to your face through facial recognition systems?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has set up a tool that can give you a pretty good idea based on the answers to just a few questions.
The answer may shock you.
EFF summarizes the scope of the government’s facial recognition program and the threat to your privacy.
“Photos you provide for identification are often shared, without your consent, with law enforcement, the FBI, ICE, and others. Those agencies use flawed facial recognition technology to compare your face with those in mugshots, social media images, and other photos of people suspected of committing crimes, potentially putting you at risk of being misidentified and invading your privacy.”
I took the test, and as it turns out, my biometric information is available to the FBI FACE Services Unit, CBP, IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and 17 other federal agencies, along with at least 180 of Florida’s 254 police departments. According to EFF, “Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has access to the oldest face recognition program in the country, Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System (FACES), which includes 19 million driver’s license photos (as of 2015) shared with 273 partner agencies (as of 2019).”
This drives home the expansive and invasive nature of the ever-growing facial recognition system facilitated by the federal government.
The FBI rolled out a nationwide facial-recognition program in the fall of 2014, with the goal of building a giant biometric database with pictures provided by the states and corporate friends.
In 2016, the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law released “The Perpetual Lineup,” a massive report on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in the U.S. You can read the complete report at perpetuallineup.org. The organization conducted a year-long investigation and collected more than 15,000 pages of documents through more than 100 public records requests. The report paints a disturbing picture of intense cooperation between the federal government, and state and local law enforcement to develop a massive facial recognition database.
“Face recognition is a powerful technology that requires strict oversight. But those controls, by and large, don’t exist today,” report co-author Clare Garvie said. “With only a few exceptions, there are no laws governing police use of the technology, no standards ensuring its accuracy, and no systems checking for bias. It’s a wild west.”
There are many technical and legal problems with facial recognition, including significant concerns about the accuracy of the technology, particularly when reading the facial features of minority populations. During a test run by the ACLU of Northern California, facial recognition misidentified 26 members of the California legislature as people in a database of arrest photos.
With facial recognition technology, police and other government officials have the capability to track individuals in real-time. These systems allow law enforcement agents to use video cameras and continually scan everybody who walks by. According to the report, several major police departments have expressed an interest in this type of real-time tracking. Documents revealed agencies in at least five major cities, including Los Angeles, either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology with the capability, or expressed written interest in buying it.
In all likelihood, the federal government heavily involves itself in helping state and local agencies obtain this technology. The feds provide grant money to local law enforcement agencies for a vast array of surveillance gear, including ALPRs, stingray devices and drones. The federal government essentially encourages and funds a giant nationwide surveillance net and then taps into the information via fusion centers and the Information Sharing Environment (ISE).
Fusion centers were sold as a tool to combat terrorism, but that is not how they are being used. The ACLU pointed to a bipartisan congressional report to demonstrate the true nature of government fusion centers: “They haven’t contributed anything meaningful to counterterrorism efforts. Instead, they have largely served as police surveillance and information sharing nodes for law enforcement efforts targeting the frequent subjects of police attention: Black and brown people, immigrants, dissidents, and the poor.”
Fusion centers operate within the broader ISE. According to its website, the ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with information needed to enhance national security. These analysts, operators, and investigators…have mission needs to collaborate and share information with each other and with private sector partners and our foreign allies.” In other words, ISE serves as a conduit for the sharing of information gathered without a warrant. Known ISE partners include the Office of Director of National Intelligence which oversees 17 federal agencies and organizations, including the NSA. ISE utilizes these partnerships to collect and share data on the millions of unwitting people they track.
Reports that the Berkeley Police Department in cooperation with a federal fusion center deployed cameras equipped to surveil a “free speech” rally and Antifa counterprotests provided the first solid link between the federal government and local authorities in facial recognition surveillance.
This is precisely why it’s so important for state and local governments to ban or at least limit the use of facial recognition technology. Without state and local cooperation, the feds have a much more difficult time gathering information. Passage of state laws and local ordinances banning and limiting facial recognition eliminates one avenue for gathering facial recognition data. Simply put, data that doesn’t exist cannot be entered into federal databases.
- Thomas Jefferson’s Warnings and Predictions about the Dangers of Money-Printing - April 18, 2024
- Utah’s Step-By-Step Strategy in Support of Sound Money - April 9, 2024
- Utah’s Step-By-Step Strategy Against the Surveillance State - April 1, 2024