An article in the
Dayton Daily News posted June 12, 2013 highlights a budget bill amendment sponsored by Sen. Bill Coley, R-Liberty Twp. His amendment would authorize facial recognition technology at Ohio’s four casinos, racinos, and Internet cafe sweepstakes parlors. Images would be collected when patrons cash out and stored in a database for at least five years to be used to detect money launderers. Facial recognition technology works by measuring points between facial features and translating that data into code.
“Anybody who’s seen
Oceans 11 or walked into a casino understands everything is being recorded,” Coley said. The extra monitoring differs from health or phone records and there is no expectation of privacy in a casino, which operates thousands of surveillance cameras.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is concerned about the idea. Associate director Gary Daniels said the measure creates a slippery slope for the technology to be used in schools, state agencies and other areas of government. Daniels said facial recognition is not a solid technology and can be inaccurate due to changes in weight, facial hair, and other features.
Another article in
The Washington Post in their Technology section titled “State photo-ID databases become troves for police” discussed how state law enforcement is mining huge databases like driver’s license photos to identify people. The article said that the faces of more than 120 million people are in searchable photo databases that state officials assembled to prevent driver’s license fraud but that increasingly are used by police to identify suspects, accomplices and even innocent bystanders in a wide range of criminal investigations. Facial recognition systems analyze a person’s features - such as the shape of eyes, the curl of earlobes, the width of noses - to produce a digital “template” that can be quickly compared with other faces in a database.
The facial databases have grown rapidly in recent years and generally operate with few legal safeguards beyond the requirement that searches are conducted for “law enforcement purposes.” Amid rising concern about the National Security Agency’s high-tech surveillance aimed at foreigners, it is these state-level facial recognition programs that more typically involve American citizens.
A review of the 26 states with facial recognition systems that allow police search or request searches include: VT, MA, CT, RI, DE, NV, UT, CO, ND, SD, NB, TX, NM, IA, AR, IL, IN, KY, WV, PA, NC, SC, GA, AL FL, and NJ. Eleven states have facial-recognition systems and generally do not allow law enforcement searches include; NY, TN, OK, KS, WI, MN, ID, MT, OR, WA and the District of Columbia. Thirteen states do not have facial recognition systems at this time and include: NH, MD, ME, VA, OH, MI, MS, LA, MO, WY, AZ, HI and CA.
“As a society, do we want to have total surveillance? Do we want to give the government the ability to identify individuals wherever they are. . . without any immediate probable cause?” asked Laura Donohue, a Georgetown University law professor who has studied government facial databases. “A police state is exactly what this turns into if everybody who drives has to lodge their information with the police.”
But the broader trend is toward more sophisticated databases with more expansive access. The current version of the Senate’s immigration bill would dramatically expand an electronic photo-verification system, probably relying on access to driver’s license registries. “The potential for abuse of this technology is such that we have to make sure we put in place the right safeguards to prevent misuse,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a statement. “We also need to make sure the government is as transparent as possible in order to give the American people confidence it’s using this technology appropriately.”
These two articles just skim the surface of the way states use of databases. Do you think the vast federal government has even better technology, bigger budgets, and more databases to use to identify anyone? There is a simple law in technology called Moore’s Law which simply says computers will double in speed every 18 months. This simple law is seen in many areas of technology such as computers, cameras, and of course facial recognition database searches.
There is a television show on CBS called
Person of Interest which is about how the government has developed computers and software to watch every person from any camera on-line such as traffic or ATM cameras. The government then matches all calls and locations detected by cell towers or cameras with facial recognition to determine where everyone is at all times, and by monitoring all the calls they determine what the people are saying and who they are in contact with. The goal was to protect people from crime, a great intent to start with, but in the program politics has changed the direction of the original goal. Sound familiar to what you read in the news and hear on TV?
The law as we now know it has a test for determining what should be considered private. That test is ‘what would a reasonable person expect to be private’. A simple example would be if you were talking on your phone and shut the door to your room so your conversation would be private.
You would expect that conversation to be between you and the party you were speaking to, not you, your party, and the Government. But we are finding out the government has been monitoring our calls, video chats and e-mails, searching our photos we put on-line and of course the massive state databases of mug shots, driver’s license photos, fingerprints, bank reporting and real estate sales. Toss in your Income Tax returns, what you view on the internet, your credit card statements, and even your library card and you can pretty much tell what a person is doing. Anything on the internet is searchable.
Do you think you are going to fool law enforcement by erasing your browser history or your phone’s recent call log when the officer asks you if you were on your cell phone while driving? Not so if they have access and can pull up your phone records on the side of the road. Now, if they have that type of access to your phone record then they could just send you a citation by mail for using your phone while driving because they already have access to your logs. No need to catch you when they can just pull the records to prove you were doing it.
What privacy are you willing to give up in order to reduce the threat of terrorism on our soil? Put your response on
facebook.com/driverslegalplan. Be advised that anything you put there is not private!