We See It All: Liberty and Justice in the Age of Perpetual Surveillance by Jon Fasman

Author:Jon Fasman [Fasman, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the most targeted, limited way that police use facial recognition is to generate investigative leads. The sheriff’s department in Washington County, Oregon, was the first law enforcement agency in America to use Rekognition, Amazon’s facial-recognition tool. According to both its website and a presentation by Chris Adzima, a senior information analyst with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, at a police-tech conference in May 2019, they do not use facial recognition to surveil people going about their daily business.

The department wrote a usage policy specifically vowing that their employees would “not employ this technology without a lawful justification that is based upon a criminal nexus,” that it would “not employ this technology to conduct mass surveillance,” and that facial recognition could “not be used to conduct surveillance of persons or groups based solely on their religious, political or other constitutionally protected activities.” The policy also states that “facial recognition search results are potential leads that require follow-up investigation,” and that those results alone do not constitute probable cause.11

If a criminal suspect is caught on camera while engaged in what appears to be criminal activity, an officer, with approval from a commanding officer, compares that image to a database of county mugshot photos dating back to 2001. The picture that starts the investigation might be through any of a variety of means: through surveillance footage, for instance; or because someone took a picture of an assailant with a cellphone camera; or because a suspect consented to have his picture taken by a police officer, or has been arrested and had a mugshot taken, but refuses to provide identification. Only trained officers are allowed to run the searches.

The usage policy contains penalties for violating it—sort of (“discipline as appropriate”). All requests to run searches are subject to audit, and photographs that do not turn up a match are kept for a year and then deleted from the server. As facial-recognition usage policies go, this is about as good as it gets, but it’s really not all that good. The penalties are vague, and however benevolent the aims and limited the uses, the county is still building a database that could be used for broader and less benevolent purposes later on.

At the same conference where I saw Adzima’s presentation, I met Daniel Steeves, the chief information officer for the Ottawa Police Service. He is everything you would expect a senior Canadian police officer to be: mild, bearded, reasonable, and wry. His department piloted a program similar to Washington County’s: twenty-five officers in a robbery investigation unit received training and were then allowed to run images of people captured by surveillance cameras during what appeared to be criminal activity—Steeves mentioned stealing from liquor stores and gas stations—through a mugshot database.

“Without facial recognition,” Steeves explained, “you’d have an officer sending out a broadcast email saying, ‘Does anyone recognize this guy?’ You’d have two thousand people looking at an image that maybe three people should have seen.” He points out the privacy concerns surrounding that common

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