Facial recognition

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday at PPP headquarters at Freedom House, party General Secretary, Bharrat Jagdeo made the most unequivocal statement thus far about the government’s intended use of facial recognition technology.

Clearly speaking in his capacity as Vice President, Mr Jagdeo said that the government is working on a biometric project that will allow the authorities to use facial recognition software to track people with criminal records and pinpoint their exact location at any given time.

As such, he said the new Brickdam Police Station which is being built will assist in bolstering the country’s security plan.

Mr Jagdeo added that the government has a “master plan” to improve security in the country and to do that there must be better-trained police officers “which we are working on separately but we also need a whole range of facilities and technology and upgrade of the environment.”

In defending the government’s decision to build a 12-storey Brickdam Police Station, Mr Jagdeo said, “You need that building which would be a central police station that can do a large number of things, not just policing.”

He said that the station will be the “nerve centre” for crime fighting across the country.

He added, “In a modern environment, we have to support, the technology will support it, it has to be bolstered by good quality forensic labs, we are already putting in security cameras with facial recognition software, we are working on a biometric project that would allow us to know everywhere, every person in Guyana, every criminal in Guyana who has a record we can pinpoint where they are at any moment in time, through facial recognition software we’d be able to track every person who comes into our country, who overstays their visa or anything else, all of that being worked in at different (points).”

Mr Jagdeo continued, “So it is not just a building we are putting up there, it is a plan we are rolling out so that has to be done as well as upgrading all our police stations across the country as well as better equipping them and ensuring that we use technology for better security in our country, it’s part of a security plan.”

On November 12, 2021 President Ali had also said that government will be investing in intelligence gathering by the law enforcement officials.

“...Nationally we are going to have a Safe Country programme. We are going to have the entire country connected on the CCTV cameras so that all of the country will be [under] the

watch by the relevant authorities so that we can be proactive in crime fighting,” Mr Ali said during an address to the nation.

While facial recognition technology is increasingly being used for security purposes, particularly in tightly controlled societies, its application is rife with concerns about the attenuation of civil liberties, the invasion of privacy and the propensity for widespread abuse and misuse of the technology.

What was outlined by Mr Jagdeo was so sweeping as to immediately raise concerns about a surveillance society. Were it to be integrated with the controversially signed US$34 million contract with German-headquartered company, Veridos, for the production and rollout of an electronic citizenship card, then the government would become the veritable ‘Big Brother’.

Such a system under the control of this government should and will evoke concerns about the invasion of privacy, misuse of information and the security of databases.

In July of 2019, the APNU+AFC government, unveiled the Huawei-built Safe City Command Centre for the CCTV Surveillance system and real time facial recognition and facial tracking are among its features. The system receives feeds from 102 Intelligent Video Surveillance sites, each consisting of three to four cameras.

In the more than four years that this system has been in operation, citizens of this country have no consolidated information on the effectiveness of these cameras, who is monitoring the feeds on a daily basis, the safeguards in place to prevent the use of images for political and corrupt purposes, the quality of the protection of the system from hackers and cybercrime, what is being done with images that could aid in crime or traffic investigations and whether there have been successful prosecutions as a result of the use of the images.

As much as this network must operate in relative secrecy, there must be oversight of its work - ideally by a parliamentary-convened body. Who has ministerial responsibility for these cameras and who has this person reported to over the last three and a half years? That aside, there are the widespread international concerns about the use of Huawei equipment and whether the host country is able to have full control over the surveillance systems.

Given Mr Jagdeo’s intervention on this matter, before there are further advances on surveillance, there must be a bill presented to Parliament setting out exactly what is envisaged along with the attendant governance safeguards. This should enable a full debate in Parliament after which, if necessary, the bill can be consigned to a select committee.

On January 5th this year, the UK Telegraph reported that British police have been secretly conducting hundreds of facial recognition searches using the UK’s database of 46 million British passport holders.

Chris Philp, the policing minister, had raised the prospect last year of officers accessing the database of passport holders so they could use facial recognition to identify suspects in all burglaries, thefts and shoplifting.

An investigation by The Telegraph and Liberty Investigates, however, has found that the practice has been taking place since at least 2019 – with searches increasing in the months before Mr Philp’s speech on the plans at October’s Conservative Party conference.

Data obtained by the UK Telegraph from the Home Office through a Freedom of Information (FOI) Request shows police forces searched the UK passport database using facial recognition technology more than 300 times in the first nine months of 2023. Searches have also been carried out of the UK immigration database which holds information on foreign nationals. This development has quite properly sparked concern among MPs and watchdogs.

Last December, US drugstore chain Rite Aid accepted a ban of its use of facial recognition software for five years due to false accusations stemming from the technology that disproportionately affected people of colour.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that the retailer failed to impose reasonable precautions in its deployment of facial recognition, resulting in thousands of false-positive matches with customers accused of shoplifting and other inappropriate behaviour.

Acting on false-positive alerts, an ABC report said that employees followed consumers around its stores, searched them, accused them of wrongdoing in front of friends and family, and called the police to remove them.

At the other extreme President Putin’s government has employed facial recognition to mercilessly crack down on any dissent. The Moscow metro uses facial recognition as part of its fare payment system as well as for security and this has enabled its users to be identified by the state security apparatus after showing up at demonstrations.

Facial recognition is riddled with all sorts of problems that this government - which has a proclivity for control and ignoring the opposition - will be unable to satisfactorily handle.