Portland Passes Ban On Facial Recognition Use By City Agencies And Private Businesses
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Portland, Oregon has now joined parts of Massachusetts and all of California in protecting its residents from the sketchy surveillance method known as "facial recognition." For something that's supposed to recognize faces, it's usually pretty bad at it and gets worse when it has to deal with minorities. Of course, the same can be said about the law enforcement agencies deploying it, which might explain their love of tech that gives them more people to arrest but rarely the probable cause to do so.Portland's ban is more restrictive than others already in place. It doesn't just affect the local government.In addition to halting city use of the surveillance technology, the new rule prevents "private entities in places of public accommodation" in Portland from using it, too, referring to businesses that serve the general public — a grocery store or a pizza place, for instance. It does not prevent individuals from setting up facial-recognition technology at home, such as a Google Nest camera that can spot familiar faces, or gadgets that use facial-recognition software for authenticating users, like Apple's Face ID feature for unlocking an iPhone. This means no one gets to use it but private citizens surveilling their own doorways. Sure, that's going to capture people moving up and down the street, but unlike law enforcement agencies, private citizens can't deprive someone of their freedom just because the tech thought it recognized someone.The hit to businesses doesn't take effect until 2021. The rest of it starts immediately. Portland is still in the throes of civil unrest -- something that started in late May and shows no sign of letting up, no matter how many federal officers the Administration throws at the "problem." There's the obvious concern facial recognition is being used to identify people engaged in First Amendment activity for reasons unknown to anyone but those deploying the tech. The local cops will be blocked from doing this going forward (if they were ever doing it at all) but it will have no effect on facial recognition deployment by federal officers.It seems inevitable some business owners will challenge the law. This tech allows internal security to keep an eye out for banned individuals and suspected shoplifters. But private tools don't appear to be any better at identifying people than the tech being sold to government agencies. Allowing private companies to use the tech puts law enforcement only a phone call away. And it can lead to the same results (false positives, bogus arrests) despite being owned and operated by non-government entities. It's a bold move by the city of Portland. But it's probably also a necessary one if you're serious about protecting residents from unproven tech that has the latent ability to destroy lives.More bans are sure to come, especially now that everything law enforcement-related is under the microscope. Portland has set the ban bar pretty high. Other cities that believe they're serious about keeping their residents safe from surveillance creep now have something to shoot for.
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posted at: 12:00am on 22-Sep-2020
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Fourth Circuit Appeals Court Seems Skeptical That Baltimore's Aerial Surveillance System Violates The Fourth Amendment
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The legal fight over Baltimore's aerial surveillance system continues. Airplanes armed with powerful cameras fly constantly over the city, allowing law enforcement to view the movements of people and vehicles over a 32-square mile area. The resolution may be high (192 million megapixels) but the area covered reduces people to (nearly) unidentifiable dots on a screen. However, these recordings can be accessed to trace movements of pixels/people as they move to and from suspected crime scenes.The city isn't paying a dime for these cameras and airplanes. The equipment -- provided by Persistent Surveillance Systems -- is paid for by a private donor. This perhaps explains why the city chose to roll it out with zero public notice back in 2016. After a brief shutdown, it has resumed, with a bit more public involvement. It may be audacious, but it hasn't been all that successful. Reports show the program logged 700 flights but only one arrest.The ACLU sued, claiming this persistent surveillance of nearly everyone in the city violated the Fourth Amendment. The federal court disagreed, even taking into consideration the ability of the program to engage in persistent tracking of individuals when combined with the PD's cameras on the ground. Despite the word "persistent" being used by the company itself, the program is far from persistent, with darkness preventing recording and inclement weather occasionally grounding spy planes.There's an appeal underway, but as Louis Krass reports for Baltimore Brew, the ACLU doesn't appear to have found much more sympathy one level up. The ACLU argued the untargeted surveillance system is an unreasonable search. In other words, Baltimore residents would not consider it reasonable to have their public movements surveilled for up to 12 hours a day for six months straight.Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson disagrees.“Whose constitutional rights is this violating?” Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, asked.“These are simple observations of public movements, and it’s not inside someone’s dwelling, it’s public streets, where someone’s expectancy of privacy is minimal,” he said. “We’re not talking about excessive police force, so is it the right of the pixel whose rights are being violated?” The judge is right that the expectation of privacy is lower in public areas. But this is too reductive. A pixel isn't just a pixel -- incapable of having its rights violated. It's a person, even if that person can't be clearly identified using these recordings alone. The entire purpose of the aerial surveillance system is to help police identify criminal suspects. And police do this by cross-referencing this footage with surveillance equipment on the ground, which is completely capable of turning a "pixel" into a person.But Wilkinson isn't the only judge being asked to rule on this. Judge Roger Gregory is far more critical of the government's arguments. The government said there were no Constitutional concerns in tracking the movements of millions of Baltimore "pixels" since the PD was only interested in the "pixels" who may have been near a crime scene. Most of the recordings collected are never used by the Baltimore PD's analysts.That doesn't make it okay, says Judge Gregory.Gregory, a Clinton appointee, countered that it is unconstitutional to gather such information in the first place.“That would turn the Fourth Amendment on its head,” he said. “That’s like invading someone’s home with a camera and taking a photograph of you, then say, ‘It’s no problem because we never developed the film.’” It seems unlikely the Appeals Court will be any more impressed with the ACLU's arguments. As long as people are still rendered as pixels -- and planes incapable of capturing footage 24 hours a day -- there appears to be very little violation of privacy. If there's no sympathy for the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment -- where multiple Constitutional surveillance techniques combine to form an unconstitutional invasion of privacy -- Baltimore residents will still be watched by multiple eyes in the sky.
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posted at: 12:00am on 22-Sep-2020
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