(The Defender) Thousands of records about U.S. government involvement in the research and development of facial recognition technology — unveiled due to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit and first reported on Tuesday by The Washington Post — fueled fresh calls for a federal ban on such tools.
“Americans’ ability to navigate our communities without constant tracking and surveillance is being chipped away at an alarming pace,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told the Post. “We cannot stand by as the tentacles of the surveillance state dig deeper into our private lives, treating every one of us like suspects in an unbridled investigation that undermines our rights and freedom.”
While some cities and states have taken action, there is currently no federal law restricting the use of facial recognition tools. However, Markey pledged to reintroduce his proposed ban on government use of the technology — which he did, alongside Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and other Democrats, within hours of the reporting.
“The year is 2023, but we are living through 1984. The continued proliferation of surveillance tools like facial recognition technologies in our society is deeply disturbing,” declared Markey, reintroducing the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which is backed by various groups including the ACLU.
“Biometric data collection poses serious risks of privacy invasion and discrimination, and Americans know they should not have to forgo personal privacy for safety,” the senator said. “As we work to make our country more equitable, we cannot ignore the technologies that stand in the way of progress and perpetuate injustice.”
Despite concerns about accuracy and bias — bolstered by examples of misidentified Black men being arrested for crimes they did not commit — the U.S. Defense Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were more closely involved in work on facial recognition software to identify people from drone and street camera footage than was previously known, according to the documents revealed as a result of the ACLU’s public records lawsuit filed in late 2019.
BREAKING: We obtained thousands of documents revealing the FBI’s major investment in developing face recognition software that could allow the government to identify and track millions of people at a time.
— ACLU (@ACLU) March 7, 2023
The Post reported that documents including internal emails and presentations expose how intimately officials at the FBI — which is part of the Justice Department — and Pentagon “worked with academic researchers to refine artificial intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent.”
Many of the records pertain to the Janus program, which was funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) and ultimately folded into a search tool used by multiple federal agencies called Horus.
As the newspaper detailed:
