Facial-recognition database to be revamped

Ohio is spending $21.4 million to revamp its controversial facial-recognition software next year to better identify suspects and missing persons by matching their photos with updated driver’s license and mugshot pictures, Attorney General Dave Yost announced Thursday.

The announcement came as a task force examining Ohio’s facial-recognition system recommended limiting use of facial-recognition database to officials at the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

However, the panel recommended — among other things — that the FBI and other federal agencies should still be allowed to ask BCI to conduct photo searches on their behalf.

Ohio’s seven-year old facial-recognition database, which contains about 24 million photos (almost all of which are driver’s license photos submitted in 2011), is used by law enforcement officials to identify criminal suspects, people who are found dead or who have amnesia, among other things.

While the use of BMV photos in Ohio’s facial-recognition program has been known for years, the system came under scrutiny again last year, after the Washington Post reported that many states, including Ohio, have helped the FBI and other federal agencies conduct searches with driver’s license photos.

In 2021, Tokyo-based NEC will install a new system that’s expected to significantly improve BCI’s ability to match photos. The current system, officials say, has problems finding accurate matches of photos depicting women and minorities.

“It will be a quantum improvement in the technology,” Yost said.

Yost said the decision to replace it was made last summer, before the Post story was released, but the update wasn’t announced until Thursday.

Yost’s office also released a three-week-old report from the 29-member task force he convened in the wake of the Post’s story to study Ohio’s facial-recognition program.

The panel, composed of state lawmakers, law-enforcement officials, technology experts, and civil libertarians, recommended on Jan. 26 that Yost’s office make permanent his decision, made last summer, to limit access to the facial-recognition database to

BCI employees. Prior to that, state officials offered access to about 4,500 police departments and other law-enforcement agencies around the state, as well as a few FBI agents and federal officials stationed in Ohio.

Yost said at the time that he was cutting off access to officials from other law-enforcement agencies only until they received training in the system.

But Beth Owens, BCI’s identification director and a task force member, said the panel felt it was important to centralize the system and permanently cut off locals’ access.

The attorney general said last August that his office found no evidence that Ohio’s facial-recognition program has been misused for things like mass surveillance or political targeting.

“This is a pivotal time to consider structure and protocols to build public trust and confidence in powerful technology that has limitations and can be easily misunderstood,” the report stated.

Yost said he will decide in the coming weeks which recommendations to implement.