<nettime> US facial recognition (WRT "Nettime is in bad shape")

[Christopher Leslie <chrisleslienyc@gmail.com>]

Dear Friends, 

A news report from the Washington Post gave me pause today (quotes below). Pundits and scholars are quick to evoke China’s effort to automate surveillance, often mixing science fiction with rumors, as some sort of abyss at the end of a slippery slope we must avoid for the moral benefit of humanity. How many times have you read news reports that surveillance in China is a danger to free people everywhere because once the Chinese perfect it, it will be exported to other countries? Yet, according to the WP, for the past five years, U.S. federal law enforcement has been making hundreds of thousands of requests for photographs and other biometrics from state agencies. 

Nettime has not been immune to this scapegoating. Mentions of surveillance on this list have, for instance, induced readers to share links about China and the so-called social credit system (which seems to be a vague proposal, not an established technology, if you read the stories carefully). Meanwhile, the U.S. has been the home of law enforcement’s use of this kind of technology without any approval from elected officials, even for investigation of petty crimes.

Maybe it was hard for journalists to hear about this use of technology … but why? Maybe they are so distracted by the official story about China as the ideological enemy that they cannot hear the facts being uttered closer to home. It is not as if there is no discussion about this topic in the U.S. For instance, the Yale Privacy Lab, for a few years now, has offered information about surveillance in New Haven (see https://privacylab.yale.edu/surveillance-map.html). 

Is it possible for a critical discussion about media to take place when scholars are obsessed with China as a bugbear? To me, it seems like people who worry about surveillance within the U.S. are labeled as cranks and offered tinfoil hats while people who complain about surveillance in China, even if they don’t really know much about it, are lauded as protecting liberty. 

Chris 

= = = = = =

FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches
By Drew Harwell
July 7 at 3:54 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/07/fbi-ice-find-state-drivers-license-photos-are-gold-mine-facial-recognition-searches/

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure. …

Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool. … 

Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned facial recognition into a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000 facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having returned a “possible match.” … 

The records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local contact, the records show.

“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” said Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.”




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