After the recent deluge of videos showing police abusing and sometimes
flat-out murdering more-or-less innocent citizens, the willingness of a
growing number of cities to equip officers with video cameras has been hailed
as a victory by civil libertarians.
But what if those cameras also extend the surveillance network
exponentially? In the future, if a policeman is facing you, he might be
filming you. From there, all it will take is real-time facial recognition
technology, and Big Brother will be walking the streets with eyes wide open.
Well, ask and you shall receive:
Real-time
face recognition threatens to turn cops' body cameras into surveillance
machines
(Intercept) - LAST YEAR, A RUSSIAN startup announced that it could scan
the faces of people passing by Moscow's thousands of CCTV cameras and pick
out wanted criminals or missing persons. Unlike much face recognition
technology — which runs stills from videos or photographs after the fact —
NTechLab's FindFace algorithm has achieved a feat that once only seemed
possible in the science fictional universe of "Minority Report": It
can determine not just who someone is, but where they've been, where they're
going, and whether they have an outstanding warrant, immigration detainer, or
unpaid traffic ticket.
For years, the development of real-time face recognition has been hampered
by poor video resolution, the angles of bodies in motion, and limited
computing power. But as systems begin to transcend these technical barriers,
they are also outpacing the development of policies to constrain them. Civil
liberties advocates fear that the rise of real-time face recognition
alongside the growing number of police body cameras creates the conditions
for a perfect storm of mass surveillance.
"The main concern is that we're already pretty far along in terms of
having this real-time technology, and we already have the cameras," said
Jake Laperruque, a fellow at the Constitution Project. "These cameras
are small, hard to notice, and all over the place. That's a pretty lethal combination
for privacy unless we have reasonable rules on how they can be used
together."
This imminent reality has led several civil liberties groups to call on
police departments and legislators to implement clear policies on camera
footage retention, biometrics, and privacy. On Wednesday morning, the House
Oversight Committee held a hearing on law enforcement's use of facial
recognition technology, where advocates emphasized the dangers of allowing
advancements in real-time recognition to broaden surveillance powers. As
Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at
Georgetown Law, told Congress, pairing the technology with body cameras, in
particular, "will redefine the nature of public spaces."
The integration of real-time face recognition with body-worn cameras is
further along than lawmakers and citizens realize. A recent Justice
Department-funded survey conducted by Johns Hopkins University found that at
least nine out of 38 manufacturers of body cameras currently have facial
recognition capacities or have built in an option for such technology to be
used later.
Taser, which leads the market for body cameras, recently acquired two
startups that will allow it to run video analytics on the footage the cameras
collect, and Taser's CEO has repeatedly emphasized the development of
real-time applications, such as scanning videos for faces, objects, and
suspicious activity. A spokesperson for NTechLab, which has pilot projects in
20 countries including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and
Turkey, told The Intercept that its high-performing algorithm is already
compatible with body cameras.
Police see the appeal. The captain of the Las Vegas Police Department told
Bloomberg in July that he envisions his officers someday patrolling the Strip
with "real-time analysis" on their body cameras and an earpiece to
tell them, "‘Hey, that guy you just passed 20 feet ago has an
outstanding warrant.'"
At least five U.S. police departments, including those in Los Angeles and
New York, have already purchased or looked into purchasing real-time face
recognition for their CCTV cameras, according to a study of face recognition
technology published by Bedoya and other researchers at Georgetown. Bedoya
emphasized that it's only a matter of time until the nation's body-worn
cameras will be hooked up to real-time systems. With 6,000 of the country's
18,000 police agencies estimated to be using body cameras, the pairing would
translate into hundreds of thousands of new, mobile surveillance cameras.
"For many of these systems, the inclusion of real-time face
recognition is just a software update away," said Harlan Yu, co-author
of a report on body camera policies for Upturn, a technology think tank.
Civil liberties experts warn that just walking down the street in a major
urban center could turn into an automatic law enforcement interaction. With
the ability to glean information at a distance, officers would not need to
justify a particular interaction or find probable cause for a search, stop,
or frisk. Instead, everybody walking past a given officer on his patrol could
be subject to a "perpetual line-up," as the Georgetown study put
it. In Ferguson, Missouri, where a Justice Department investigation showed
that more than three-quarters of the population had outstanding warrants,
real-time face searches could give police immense power to essentially arrest
individuals at will. And in a city like New York, which has over 100 officers
per square mile and plans to equip each one of them with body cameras by
2019, the privacy implications of turning every beat cop into a surveillance
camera are enormous.
"The inclusion of face recognition really changes the nature and
purpose of body cameras, and it changes what communities expect when they
call for and pay for cameras with taxpayer dollars," Yu said. "I
think there's a real fear in communities of color, where officers are already
concentrated, that these body-worn cameras will become another tool for
surveillance rather than a tool for accountability."
Some thoughts
The above article has some chillingly surreal quotes, including: "real-time
face recognition is just a software update away"; "everybody
walking past a given officer on his patrol could be subject to a perpetual
line-up," and "more than three-quarters of the population
had outstanding warrants." It's hard to overstate just how strange
this emerging world of hyper-surveillance might be.
This genie will never be forced back into the lamp. Camera resolution will
only improve, and face recognition alogrythms will only grow more accurate.
So if it's not the police, it will be the security camera at 7-11 or the
traffic cam at the stoplight on the way home. The resulting tidal wave of
data will be matched by the exponentially rising competence of tomorrow's
artificial intelligences and expanding capacity of data storage centers. Toss
in algorithms that can lip read and our expectation of privacy disappears the
minute we walk out the door.
Asking governments to implement controls on what data is saved and how
it's analyzed is kind of naive, when you think about it. Of course the FBI,
CIA, NSA, and local police agencies will quickly agree to whatever we ask -
and will then do whatever they want in the privacy of their own labs.
Balanced against this emerging police state will be the increasing ease
with which whistleblowers can expose abuses. See In
The Police-State-Versus-Freedom Arms Race, Freedom Seems To Be Winning.
Still, it's hard not to see this latest breakthrough as a win for the bad
guys.
