There’s this, too. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but during the OWS protests, there was a particular day when multiple law enforcement personnel were using many different types of cameras, and they were trying to take pictures of every single face at the totally non-violent demonstration. They even made sure to get pics of kids who were there. It alarmed me because I knew that facial recognition software was being used by the govt, and I had a feeling that they were using the OWS protests as an excuse to see how well it worked.
Even under the cruelest of dictators, people were fine as long as they didn’t question authority and did whatever they were told to do. And the old saying that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear can be debunked on so many levels. Very scary that a law enforcement officer is using this as an excuse to violate people’s civil rights (IMO).
On a residential street in San Diego County, Calif., Chula Vista police had just arrested a young woman, still in her pajamas, for possession of narcotics. Before taking her away, Officer Rob Halverson paused in the front yard, held a Samsung Galaxy tablet up to the woman’s face and snapped a photo.
Halverson fiddled with the tablet with his index finger a few times, and – without needing to ask the woman’s name or check her identification – her mug shot from a previous arrest, address, criminal history and other personal information appeared on the screen.
Halverson had run the woman’s photograph through the Tactical Identification System, a new mobile facial recognition technology now in the hands of San Diego-area law enforcement. In an instant, the system matches images taken in the field with databases of about 348,000 San Diego County arrestees. The system itself has nearly 1.4 million booking photos because many people have multiple mug shots on record.
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“If you’re not in a criminal database, you have nothing to hide,” Halverson said.
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Founded in 2007, FaceFirst is a spinoff of military contractor Airborne Technologies and is backed by the $18 billion private equity firm Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. FaceFirst’s main product is facial recognition software that, according to CEO Joe Rosenkrantz, has the capability to “identify everyone in a football stadium in five seconds.”
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Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed alarm at the normalization of military-grade technology in daily police activity. She said she believes the San Diego regional government’s lack of transparency around the facial recognition program is designed to minimize opposition and public debate.
“It becomes accepted and is much harder to push back when an agency has purchased 150 devices and deployed them in the field,” Lynch said.
Biometrics is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, with more than 70 percent of spending by the military, domestic law enforcement and the government, according to the Los Angeles Times. Next year, the FBI will unveil its Next Generation Identification system, a nationwide database of biometric information on criminal suspects and convicts that will replace the bureau’s current national database of fingerprints, corresponding criminal records and notes from past field interviews.
Keenan, the former San Diego ACLU official, pointed to the U.S.’ history of political surveillance after World War II and 9/11 as evidence that the rapid proliferation of biometric technology is part of a tightening net of social control in the United States.
“We were given a false bargain,” Keenan said. “We were told that this kind of control is to prevent another 9/11, and in fact, it’s going to be used to fight the drug war, to pursue other policies where we would not have bargained away our privacy back at that time if we knew that was the tradeoff.”
