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Nationwide Facial Recognition Ban Proposed By Lawmakers:
Lawmakers have proposed legislation that would indefinitely ban the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement nationwide. The new bill comes after months of public concerns surrounding facial recognition's implications for data privacy, government surveillance and racial bias.
The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act was proposed Thursday by Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). While various cities have banned government use of the technology (with Boston this week becoming the tenth U.S. city to do so), the bill would be the first temporary ban on facial recognition technology ever enacted nationwide.
The newly proposed bill would "prohibit biometric surveillance by the Federal Government without explicit statutory authorization and to withhold certain Federal public safety grants from State and local governments that engage in biometric surveillance."
[...] The ban has no definitive time limit in place, and would continue until Congress passed a law to lift it.
[...] "Facial recognition technology doesn't just pose a grave threat to our privacy, it physically endangers Black Americans and other minority populations in our country," said Senator Markey in a statement. "In this moment, the only responsible thing to do is to prohibit government and law enforcement from using these surveillance mechanisms."
I see nothing blocking companies from using recognition -- facial or otherwise -- and whose data government agencies could request or subpoena.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 29 2020, @06:57PM
That was the prototypical RFID passport argument. Or really any short range RFID including those chips in your credit cards.
You don't need to decode the entire protocol to steal PII and do financial fraud and identity theft... in a war zone where only one side carries RFIDs, all you need is to detect any RFID is nearby, and an IED goes boom. There's a big technological jump from "go boom I detect any RF signal the looks similar to known RFID signals" and "decode and report AES256 encrypted financial data in a RFID credit card"
When I was still in the military they were very enamored of various bar code technologies for inventories for the weapons systems I was working with, because the enemy can't just wave a RFID scanner over buried camp and discover how well we're supplied. Imagine every time a grunt pulls a fresh rifle magazine he has to stop and dig a 6-foot deep hole to hide the RFID ammo tracker chips.
I don't think we're far at all from mass produced drones that buzz around and when they sniff a RFID chip in the area, snap roll around, come back to the GPS coords where it sniffed a RFID, and go "boom".
The real danger isn't even easily noticed and fought threats like RFID triggered IEDs, but intel gathering. Why blow up a patrol one time, when you could semi-passively track every movement of every patrol sent out for the next couple years?
Note that in civie world you don't need facial recognition if you have TPMS (tyre pressure monitor system) scanning and bluetooth scanning and ethernet MAC address scanning and full data access to all social media feeds containing uploaded detailed GPS data.
TPMS is pretty fun to get into monitoring if you do GNURADIO. Then you put up a directional antenna pointing down the road and record the sniffs in a mysql database. Then you run queries and find out that despite departmental policy to the contrary, the local police make exactly two sweeps thru the neighborhood at the same time each day. Allegedly. I'm not sure of the legality of uploading bulk TPMS data. I don't know if the local cops even know each cruiser has 4 (or 5) tracking transmitters.