At least some law enforcement officers are apparently exploring the tactic, which legal experts warn may be illegal in the United States.
The use of face recognition technology by law enforcement during investigations has grown in recent years, due in part to a thriving surveillance business built on an ever-expanding smorgasbord of publicly available biometric data. The legal constraints on where and how such technology may be utilized, on the other hand, are ambiguous and continuously expanding. Now, it appears that at least some law enforcement officers are toying with the concept of employing face recognition during otherwise innocuous traffic stops, a possible broadening of the technology's use that has legal and privacy experts concerned.
That possibility, as originally reported by Insider's Caroline Haskins earlier this month, was presented during a 2021 edition of the Street Cop Training podcast, a program designed for police personnel eager to acquire new investigation tactics. Dennis Benigno, the show's presenter, sets a situation to his guest, Nick Jerman, in the episode.
"What if you're pulled over for a traffic violation and we think someone in the car is wanted?" Benigno inquired. "How would you go about researching someone who you suspect is trying to conceal their fear and identity?"
Jerman responded, "there are a couple paid programs you can use, [presumably referring to Clearview AI and apps like it] where you can take their [the driver's] picture and it will put it [the photo] in," after spending the rest of the episode describing ways to use publicly available social media tools to identify potential targets during a police investigation.
In other words, if a police officer is unsure about the identification of a driver or potentially even a passenger, they can instantly take a snapshot of their face and input it into a facial recognition database to get further information.
Though mentioned in passing, Jerman's predicament might reflect a significant shift in the ease and regularity with which police employ facial recognition, a technique that many privacy activists worry lacks adequate accuracy, particularly when identifying persons of color.
The condition may also be illegal under US law.
Nate Wessler, Deputy Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, spoke to Gizmodo about a growing patchwork of towns and states throughout the US that have approved local legislation prohibiting public face recognition use. Many of those examples, from San Francisco to Portland, would undoubtedly break local laws if the technology was used in such a blatant, fire-from-the-hip manner. According to Wessler, traffic stop facial recognition might possibly contravene rules in areas such as Maine, where law enforcement is only authorized to employ face recognition for major offences and with a warrant.
In a broader sense, Wessler stated that, while mistake rates in technology are improving, they are still too high for any match to serve as probable cause to arrest someone.
"These are probabilistic algorithms that make their best prediction depending on the quality of the uploaded photo, what's in the database, and how the algorithm was trained," Wessler explained. It should be emphasized that Gizmodo has yet to independently corroborate any instances of this tactic being employed by law enforcement in any known arrests.
Images taken by police at traffic stops, which are likely to have been captured in haste using a smartphone under suboptimal settings, are also unlikely to match the same levels of accuracy shown in more recent, high-profile face recognition experiments. "So, if police pull someone over and use face recognition technology, and it spits out a purported match to someone who they think has an outstanding warrant, and then they arrest that person on the spot just based on that face recognition result, that would not be probable cause to arrest," Wessler added.
In that case, Wessler advised officers that deploying face recognition during a traffic check may expose them to a Fourth Amendment false arrest action. Nonetheless, Wessler stated that owing to the newness of the technology, case law involving law enforcement use of facial recognition is extremely limited.
Greg Nojeim, Senior Counsel and Co-Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, told Insider that he believed Jerman's recommendation to use facial recognition at a traffic stop would cross the line into illegality if the police did not have "reasonable suspicion" that the targeted individual had committed a crime. Reasonable suspicion, on the other hand, is a famously ambiguous phrase with a broad range of interpretations.
According to the New York Police Department, matched photographs from a face recognition search aren't enough to support an arrest on their own, but should instead serve as a "lead" for additional investigation.
According to the NYPD, "the detective assigned to the investigation must show, with additional supporting evidence, that the suspect indicated by the photo match is the culprit in the alleged crime." In some circumstances, though, incorrect face recognition matches have apparently resulted in erroneous arrests. In one of the most notorious examples, a 43-year-old father named Robert Williams was detained for 18 hours without explanation after Detroit police arrested him based on a flawed facial recognition match.
If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of a police officer shoving a smartphone camera in your face, there are a few things you may do. According to Wessler, drivers in that scenario have the right to notify an officer orally that they do not consent to having their biometrics (in this example, their facial scan) captured. That may not mean much to an officer right now, but Wessler believes it will help people who are fighting for their rights in the future. People also have the legal right to videotape a police officer with their own phone, which may stop officers from scanning your face in some situations.
All of this is to say that, if recent cultural touchstones are any indication, even the most regular traffic stops in the United States have the ability to quickly escalate from mundane to possibly fatal in mere seconds. With that in mind, Wessler advises people to make their own decisions about what behaviors or reactions feel safe at the moment.
On a more practical level, Wessler believes it is unclear what genuine policing advantage law enforcement wants to gain by utilizing face recognition during a traffic stop. In such case, police already have the ability to request a driver's license, which they may then check against their own databases. In other words, the privacy cost isn't worth it.
"This seems superfluous," Wessler said, "because it places this extraordinarily powerful and uncontrolled surveillance weapon in the hands of beat officers to employ with no supervision, standards, predicate degree of suspicion, or confirmatory processes." And that's a surefire prescription for tragedy."
#NYPD #LawEnforcement #FacialRecognition #USLaw
SOURCE: gizmodo
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