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.
Related Stories
AWS Facial Recognition Platform Misidentified Over 100 Politicians As Criminals:
Comparitech's Paul Bischoff found that Amazon's facial recognition platform misidentified an alarming number of people, and was racially biased.
Facial recognition technology is still misidentifying people at an alarming rate – even as it's being used by police departments to make arrests. In fact, Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy expert with Comparitech, found that Amazon's face recognition platform incorrectly misidentified more than 100 photos of US and UK lawmakers as criminals.
Rekognition, Amazon's cloud-based facial recognition platform that was first launched in 2016, has been sold and used by a number of United States government agencies, including ICE and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities. In comparing photos of a total of 1,959 US and UK lawmakers to subjects in an arrest database, Bischoff found that Rekognition misidentified at average of 32 members of Congress. That's four more than a similar experiment conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – two years ago. Bischoff also found that the platform was racially biased, misidentifying non-white people at a higher rate than white people.
These findings have disturbing real-life implications. Last week, the ACLU shed light on Detroit citizen Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested after a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security footage of a shoplifter.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @11:32AM (2 children)
It's a minority party bill in an election year. They can pass whatever they want you to believe they stand for in the House with no danger at all that it'll actually become law.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @06:46PM (1 child)
yeah, and nobody cared until they can use it to pander to "minorities".
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @08:54PM
Well I did but nobody up in DC gives a fuck what I care about except the guys with the watch lists.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday June 29 2020, @12:01PM
As noted, by Upstart, I guess if this even becomes a thing then you'll have private security company do it instead and then law enforcement will just buy or subscribe to their service for facial recognition. There are a lot of multi-national security corporations that do everything from guarding to monitoring such as G4S and Securitas (they already own part of what was Diebold and they own Pinkerton).
(Score: 2, Disagree) by SomeGuy on Monday June 29 2020, @12:21PM (18 children)
The genie is out of the bottle. Facial recognition already exists and is already being used. Soon even your box of Frosted Flakes will recognize your face.
The best we can really hope for, and should demand, is complete transparency in how and when facial recognition or similar technologies are used.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 29 2020, @12:38PM (8 children)
Whoaa! Better avoid Frosted Flakes, then.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday June 29 2020, @12:55PM (7 children)
Good luck with that. The entire point is you won't be able to avoid facial recognition. You will have your face scanned dozens of times just to buy food.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @12:58PM (6 children)
Not when we're all wearing plague masks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday June 29 2020, @01:16PM (5 children)
Facial recognition is no match for face masks, but things are changing fast [venturebeat.com]
Even mask-wearers can be ID'd, China facial recognition firm says [reuters.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday June 29 2020, @03:25PM (4 children)
They can say whatever they want, just paint some eyes on it [pinimg.com]. Even better, make the mask reflective, the CV will have troubles of recognizing where my face ends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 29 2020, @04:10PM (3 children)
That will just flag you for intense scrutiny since almost nobody will do that.
Also, gait recognition [apnews.com] and other tools will get you.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 29 2020, @04:21PM
Barring Richelieu, that will be extremely inefficient for them, they'll spend heaps searching for me and trying to prove I did something wrong. Wearing makeup or embellished Covid mask is not illegal.
At first. But since the advantages are obvious...
Gait recognition is weak - just put a small pebble in one of your shoes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @08:59PM (1 child)
My car needs painting so lately I've been going over possible paint schemes. I had to throw out a General Lee possibility because the 01 would land between the doors and that would annoy me. So I thought camouflage. Then I thought, "When is my car ever going to be hiding in a forest? What it needs is urban camouflage. What would be the best urban camouflage?" My brain kicked back the answer "License plates over the whole bloody thing." It also pointed out that I'd be the most stopped by cops human being on the planet if I did that though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @04:26AM
You could do like those people who sticker bomb their car until it's all unintelligible black and white lines. If you use the same color as the license plates and make the patterns just close enough to be confused for strings of numbers by whatever machine learning algorithm they use, that might work.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @01:01PM (7 children)
Bloody stupid assertion. You could make the same argument about dumping toxic waste in rivers. Just because something is being done does not mean it can not be legally curtailed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday June 29 2020, @01:37PM (4 children)
Please do try to curtail it, but there are so many other tracking technologies already in places where they really should not be, it seems like ubiquitous facial recognition is inevitable.
Dumping toxic waste kills people. People won't complain about facial recognition when they are presented with "Put your face up to this camera and get a coupon for 10% off!".
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by c0lo on Monday June 29 2020, @02:22PM (3 children)
Bloody wear a COVID mask, you know it's effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @02:30PM (1 child)
But my freedoms!
And Hillary's emails!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 29 2020, @06:06PM
I think you mean: But my rats!
Ickspecially my 2nd amendment rats.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @09:00PM
Not even if it's like a horse's feed bag but full of M&Ms.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @05:00PM (1 child)
the libertarian is sooooo close to getting it
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @09:01PM
I get way more than you think. Where my lines are drawn is just vastly less on the side of authoritarian insanity than yours.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 29 2020, @05:59PM
Not if you eat it first. Quickly.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @04:30PM
Masks on people good. Make it simple to pillage, plunder, conquer, & destroy.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 29 2020, @06:04PM (1 child)
The life of a spook will become more difficult.
A location where a spook might visit, a foreign embassy, or meeting place with Bad Guystm, might have facial recognition.
Now those bad people might detect the spook person, maybe years later, using facial recognition, as they go about other spook jobs, or even in their "real life" if they are allowed to have one.
Similarly, police officers who are under some covers, might be recorded by facial recognition, only later to be discovered to be a police officer.
Or imagine that Bad Guys can secretly plant a camera and telescope to recognize and record faces of people who go into, say, police departments, court houses, military bases, etc. Then the Bad Guys might have a chants of being immediately informed if they are meeting with an under cover officer, or spy.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.