Title:What is the Color of High-Tech Police Surveillance?

American police departments are purchasing facial recognition systems that can be misused in violation of civil rights and civil liberties, according to the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law Center. When installed at busy intersections and in other public places, these taxpayer-funded surveillance systems often make errors, likely misidentifying a disproportionate number of women, people under the age of 30 and Black people, which can lead to harm, harassment and false arrests.

“This is a transformative technology for police,” says the Privacy Center’s Founding Director Alvaro Bedoya. “It gives them power they’ve never had before, and the way it’s being used in local communities is deeply concerning.”

Facial recognition systems also infringe on people’s constitutional right to privacy. They can be used to track and log people entering places of worship, schools, businesses and community centers without their knowing. Bedoya explains how this covert power poses ethical concerns: A law enforcement agency cannot look across the street and secretly fingerprint everyone standing in a crowd or take a cheek swab of everyone in a community center, but it can photograph every person walking into a mosque without their consent and automatically identify them.

“This is a threat to almost any value we hold dear: the right to be safe, to believe in what you want to believe, to be with whom you want to be with,” says Bedoya. “It lets powerful people secretly track you from afar without your knowledge.”

The Privacy Center—a think tank focused on privacy and surveillance law, policy and affected communities—found a home within Georgetown’s social justice mission. Its members are engaged in ongoing policy conversations with legislators on how to regulate emerging technologies.

Despite voters never having the chance to weigh in on these surveillance powers, the Privacy Center’s research finds that more than half of adults appear in criminal face-recognition databases. Simply having a driver’s license means law enforcement can search for a person’s face in more than 30 states without any oversight. In addition, any system is only as good as the people who enter the data from which the algorithm learns; when biased officers feed data into untested and unregulated AI systems, those systems produce biased outputs.

“It’s the most invasive surveillance technology in the 21st century, and it operates in a legal vacuum,” says Bedoya. “There are no rules.”

These systems have been known to catch criminals under very specific scenarios with high-quality face images, such as comparing a driver’s license to a passport. Successes stem partially from the high volume of data that the systems collect. The Privacy Center does support the use of these systems under court order in public emergencies as a last resort to investigate violent crimes. But police departments that purchased these systems have input sketches, photo-shopped images, even celebrity look-alikes to falsely identify suspects, which Bedoya likens to collecting a partial fingerprint and drawing in the rest.

The Privacy Center is asking for a moratorium on police use of facial recognition until the American people can vote on the technology’s legal applications and government representatives can regulate the systems. As Bedoya puts it, “This Wild West has consequences.”

For more information, visit law.georgetown.edu/privacy-technology-center.