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big brother
Now Is the Time for a Federal Ban on Facial Recognition Surveillance
A bill in Congress would ensure that federal agencies cannot use this invasive technology to track, identify, and misidentify millions of people.
Apr 06, 2023
Cities and counties across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco, Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis, elected officials and activists know that face surveillance gives police the power to track us wherever we go. It also disproportionately impacts people of color, turns us all into perpetual suspects, increases the likelihood of being falsely arrested, and chills people’s willingness to participate in first amendment protected activities. Even Amazon, known for operating one of the largest video surveillance networks in the history of the world, extended its moratorium on selling face recognition to police.
Now, Congress must do its part. We’ve created a campaign that will easily allow you to contact your elected federal officials and tell them to support the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act.
Police and other government use of this technology cannot be effectively regulated. Face surveillance in the hands of the government is a fundamentally harmful technology, even under strict regulations and if the technology was 100% accurate.
Face surveillance disproportionately hurts vulnerable communities. The New York Times published a long piece on the case of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested by Detroit police after face recognition technology erroneously identified him as a suspect in a theft case. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on his behalf against the Detroit police.
The problem isn’t just that studies have found face recognition disparately inaccurate when it comes to matching the faces of people of color. The larger concern is that law enforcement will use this invasive and dangerous technology, as it unfortunately uses all such tools, to disparately surveil people of color.
Williams and multiple other Black men (Michael Oliver, Nijeer Parks, Randal Reid, and Alanzo Sawyer) have garnered the attention of national media after face recognition technology led to them being falsely arrested by police. How many more have already endured the same injustices without the media’s spotlight? These incidents show another reason why police cannot be trusted with this technology: a piece of software intended only to identify investigative leads is often used in the field to determine who should be arrested without independent officer vetting.
This federal ban on face surveillance would apply to increasingly powerful agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Customs and Border Patrol. The bill would ensure that these and other federal agencies cannot use this invasive technology to track, identify, and misidentify millions of people.
Tell your Senators and Representatives they must co-sponsor and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. It was recently introduced by Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Earl Blumenauer (OR-03), Cori Bush (MO-01), Greg Casar (TX-35), Adriano Espaillat (NY-13), Barbara Lee (CA-12), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), and Jan Schakowsky (IL-09).
This important bill would be a critical step to ensuring that mass surveillance systems don’t use your face to track, identify, or harm you. The bill would ban the use of face surveillance by the federal government, as well as withhold certain federal funds from local and state governments that use the technology. That’s why we’re asking you to insist your elected officials co-sponsor the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, S.681 in the Senate and HR.1404 in the House.
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Calls for US Facial Recognition Ban Grow After Mom Booted From Theater Over Her Job
"This is exactly why we need an outright ban on all use of facial recognition surveillance in places of public accommodation like bars, restaurants, retail stores, and music and sports venues," said one digital rights campaigner.
Dec 20, 2022
Digital rights advocates on Tuesday called for a ban on private use of biometric surveillance technology after a mom taking her daughter to see a Christmas show in New York City was kicked out of the theater after its facial recognition system identified her as an employee of a law firm involved in legal proceedings against the venue's operator.
"There are just so many ways that biometric surveillance technology can be abused to discriminate and put people in danger."
Kelly Conlon was accompanying her daughter and her New Jersey Girl Scout troop on a post-Thanksgiving outing to Midtown Manhattan to see the "Christmas Spectacular" at Radio City Music Hall starring the iconic Rockettes. However, as soon Conlon entered the venue's lobby, security informed her that she'd been flagged by facial recognition and that she would have to leave.
That's because she's an attorney for a law firm currently embroiled in litigation with Madison Square Garden (MSG) Entertainment, which operates Radio City--even though Conlon has nothing to do with the case.
"They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there," Conlon told WNBC.
"I was just a mom taking my daughter to see a Christmas show," she added. "I did wait outside... It was embarrassing. It was mortifying."
\u201cAll we want for Christmas is for NY to ban facial recognition.\ud83c\udf84#BanTheScan #Rockettes @TheGarden @RadioCity\u201d— S.T.O.P.\u2014Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (@S.T.O.P.\u2014Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) 1671565527
MSG Entertainment defended its actions, explaining that is has "instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved."
"While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment," the company added.
Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, said in a statement that "this is exactly why we need an outright ban on all use of facial recognition surveillance in places of public accommodation like bars, restaurants, retail stores, and music and sports venues."
"There are just so many ways that biometric surveillance technology can be abused to discriminate and put people in danger," she added. "Madison Square Garden should immediately stop using this invasive, harmful technology, and lawmakers should act to ban this practice for good."
\u201cOh. my. god.\n\nMadison Square Garden used facial recognition to identify and stop a mom from attending a Christmas show with her kid because she's an attorney at a firm who is engaged in litigation with them.\n\nBan this shit yesterday.\n\nhttps://t.co/mY6mPypdQY\u201d— Evan Greer is on Mastodon (@Evan Greer is on Mastodon) 1671563994
While campaigners have successfully fought for limits and bans on government use of facial recognition at the local level, only three states--Illinois, Texas, and Washington--have enacted comprehensive biometric privacy legislation, with Illinois offering the strongest protections of the three. There are no federal restrictions on the technology.
Greer tweeted that Conlon's case shows that "this is exactly why it is not enough to just ban government and law enforcement use of facial recognition and biometric surveillance."
"There are so many ways private corporations and even individuals can abuse this tech," she added. "It should be banned for all commercial use and public use."
Common Dreams reported last year that a coalition of more than 20 human rights groups called for a total ban on corporate use of facial recognition technology, arguing that "letting this tool of authoritarian control spread throughout the private sector has serious implications for worker organizing rights and heightens the risk of catastrophic biometric data breaches."
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Snowden Says Shut Down DHS After Report Revealed Secretive Effort to Police Online Speech
The NSA whistleblower said creating the Department of Homeland Security "was always a mistake," but "its plan to become the Speech Police is the final straw."
Nov 02, 2022
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should be shut down after reporting shined light on the agency's sweeping campaign to police what it deems disinformation online, an effort that raised alarm among civil liberties groups.
"It's time to talk about shutting down the Department of Homeland Security," Snowden, a former NSA contractor who exposed the agency's illegal mass spying program in 2013, wrote on Twitter.
"The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere."
DHS, formed in 2002 in the wake of the September 11 attacks, "was always a mistake, a costly artifact of the hysteric post-9/11 authoritarianism that left us no more safe, but much less free," Snowden continued. "Its plan to become the Speech Police is the final straw."
Snowden was responding to an in-depth story by The Intercept on Monday detailing secretive DHS attempts to "curb speech it considers dangerous" by trying to pressure and "influence tech platforms" such as Twitter and Facebook. The department's "stepped up counter-disinformation effort" began under former President Donald Trump and has continued under President Joe Biden, the outlet noted.
"According to a draft copy of DHS' Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS' capstone report outlining the department's strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target 'inaccurate information' on a wide range of topics, including 'the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine," The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang reported.
"How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech," Klippenstein and Fang stressed.
"DHS justifies these goals--which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically--by claiming that terrorist threats can be 'exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online," they added. "But the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been used to conceal political maneuvering."
\u201cFacebook and Twitter created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content. The portals, along with NGO partners used to censor a wide range of content, including obvious parody accounts and content disagreeing w gov pandemic policy.\u201d— Lee Fang (@Lee Fang) 1667228121
The ACLU, which has previously called for the dismantling of DHS over its myriad abuses, expressed concerns in response to the The Intercept's story, which noted that the agency's efforts to police disinformation online have only expanded in the wake of the agency's decision to scrap its widely derided Disinformation Governance Board earlier this year.
"The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere," the ACLU tweeted earlier this week. "Our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights."
Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at FIRE--a free speech organization that is fighting right-wing censorship campaigns across the U.S.--told The Intercept that "no matter your political allegiances, all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the government's preferred decisions about what content we can see online."
"Any governmental requests to social media platforms to review or remove certain content should be made with extreme transparency," Goldstein added.
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