WASHINGTON, DC — Facial recognition technology (FRT) allows investigators to quickly scan billions of photos and videos to identify potential suspects and victims.
Now, a new watchdog report sheds more light on how often federal law enforcement agencies use the tool and the training their officers receive.
Federal agents used FRT to identify suspects connected to criminal activity during the 2020 nationwide protests, and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to identify suspects inside the Capitol. FRT was used to identify.
Seven federal law enforcement agencies use FRT, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). This includes U.S. Customs and Border Protection, FBI, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Homeland Security Investigations, and U.S. Marshals Service.
All seven participants started using the technology before the training took place, according to the survey results.
Gretta Goodwin, director of GAO's Justice and Law Enforcement Affairs team, said, “We found that by the time officials at these agencies received any training, about 60,000 searches had been conducted.'' ” he said. “That's worrying.”
“It's absolutely infuriating that federal agencies are playing with fire here, in so many situations and without policy or training,” said Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. he said.
Civil rights groups like the ACLU have warned that facial recognition technology could violate the rights of the public and lead to the arrest and prosecution of innocent people.
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Research shows that mistakes are most commonly made when trying to identify women and people of color.
“Even in the best of circumstances, wrong results can occur,” Wessler says. “This technology poses particular problems when used in the real world with low-quality input images, such as from surveillance cameras.”
Civil liberties advocates say the protests can have a chilling effect on people seeking to exercise their First Amendment rights.
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“We had no idea that just by showing up to a protest, police could automatically record our presence based on our faces,” Wessler said.
According to the report, several of the seven government agencies currently have training policies in place that include explaining how FRT impacts civil liberties, but they are not yet fully developed. It is said that it has not been implemented.
“If we continue to use these technologies, we need to put policies in place to help law enforcement officers determine and guide how they are used,” Goodwin said.
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