Rein in face recognition

Feds’ use of driver photos is over the line

The revelation that officials from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been sifting through state databases of driver’ s license photos using facial recognition technology should ignite a fire under Congress, which neither approved this program nor worked meaningfully to prevent its implementation.

According to public records obtained by Georgetown Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology, federal officials have been using facial recognition technology to comb through these databases in search of undocumented immigrants with driver’s licenses. But this dragnet technique involves analyzing as many as 640 million photos, meaning that millions of American citizens have had their images processed and analyzed by the feds’ facial recognition technology.

Harrison Rudolph, an associate with the Georgetown center, told The New York Times that this practice “is a scandal. States have never passed laws authorizing ICE to dive into driver’s license databases using facial recognition to look for folks.”

Facial recognition is a highly problematic and faulty technology. Researchers from both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the FBI have found that facial recognition misidentifies people of color, women and children as often as 35% of the time.

The technology is also ripe for abuse, as there are few regulations or restrictions on its use. Law enforcement officials with access to facial recognition have committed what is essentially an end run around due process. For example, no warrants or court orders were needed to comb through the driver’s license databases. Congress didn’t approve the action nor did any state legislative body. But the FBI and ICE were free to analyze millions of faces, free from meaningful oversight.

Taking decisive action to curtail the use of facial recognition should be an issue that bridges the partisan divide. Given facial recognition’s potential to both perpetuate inequities in the criminal justice system and usurp people’s constitutional rights, it shouldn’t be difficult to form a broad coalition of support for such action.

Congress should act quickly to prohibit federal agencies from using facial recognition technology, at least until controls and procedures are in place. State legislators should also enact laws limiting the feds’ access to driver’s license databases. There is no reason federal agents should have unfettered access to view and analyze millions of innocent people’s pictures.

Our politicians seem to be out of step an awful lot lately, particularly when it comes to performing the fundamental functions of their jobs. But allowing Americans’ fundamental rights to be trampled like this is unacceptable.