They'll be watching you
Thousands of records about U.S. government involvement in the research and development of facial recognition technology—unveiled due to an ACLU lawsuit and first reported on Tuesday by The Washington Post—fueled fresh calls for a federal ban on such tools.
"Americans' ability to navigate our communities without
constant tracking and surveillance is being chipped away at an alarming
pace," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)
told the Post. "We cannot stand by as the tentacles of the
surveillance state dig deeper into our private lives, treating every one of us
like suspects in an unbridled investigation that undermines our rights and
freedom."
While some cities and states have taken
action, there is currently no federal law restricting the use of
facial recognition tools. However, Markey pledged to reintroduce his proposed
ban on government use of the technology—which he
did, alongside Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and other
Democrats, within hours of the reporting.
"The year is 2023, but we are living through 1984. The continued proliferation of surveillance tools like facial recognition technologies in our society is deeply disturbing," declared Markey, reintroducing the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which is backed by various groups including the ACLU.
"Biometric data collection poses serious risks of
privacy invasion and discrimination, and Americans know they should not have to
forgo personal privacy for safety," the senator said. "As we work to
make our country more equitable, we cannot ignore the technologies that stand
in the way of progress and perpetuate injustice."
Despite concerns about accuracy and bias—bolstered by
examples of misidentified Black men being arrested for crimes they did not
commit—the U.S. Defense Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
were more closely involved in work on facial recognition software to identify
people from drone and street camera footage than was previously known,
according to the documents revealed as a result of the ACLU's public records
lawsuit filed in late 2019.
The Post reported that documents including internal emails
and presentations expose how intimately officials at the FBI—which is part of
the Justice Department—and Pentagon "worked with academic researchers to
refine artificial intelligence techniques that could help in the identification
or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent."
Many of the records pertain to the Janus program, which was
funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) and
ultimately folded into a search tool used by multiple federal agencies called
Horus. As the newspaper detailed:
Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the
nation's leading computer vision experts to design and test software that would
quickly and accurately process the "truly unconstrained face imagery"
recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations
and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared
with The Washington Post.
In a 2019 presentation, an IARPA program manager said the goal had been to
"dramatically improve" the power and performance of facial
recognition systems, with "scaling to support millions of subjects"
and the ability to quickly identify faces from partially obstructed angles. One
version of the system was trained for "Face ID... at target
distances" of more than a half-mile.
To refine the system's capabilities, researchers staged a data-gathering test
in 2017, paying dozens of volunteers to simulate real-world scenarios at a
Defense Department training facility made to resemble a hospital, a subway
station, an outdoor marketplace, and a school, the documents show. The test
yielded thousands of surveillance videos and images, some of which were
captured by a drone.
"IARPA said in public
filings that the Janus program had helped advance 'virtually
every aspect of fundamental face recognition research' and led to algorithms
that were 'twice as accurate as the most widely used government-off-the-shelf
systems,'" the Post noted.
\u201cThe FBI + DOD were actively involved in the R&D of
facial recognition software they hoped to use to ID people from street camera +
drone footage. \u201cWe\u2019re essentially beta-testing technology on real
people with real-world consequences.\u201d https://t.co/ed2FaNZPQi via
@drewharwell\u201d
— Rachael Myrow (@Rachael Myrow) 1678210234
Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech,
Privacy, and Technology Project, told the newspaper that the tool's use in U.S.
mass surveillance would be a "nightmare scenario."
"It could give the government the ability to
pervasively track as many people as they want for as long as they want,"
he said. "There's no good outcome for that in a democratic society."