FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches
A cache of records shared
with The Washington Post reveals that agents are scanning millions of
Americans’ faces without their knowledge or consent.
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a
facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos
without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.
Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails
over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by
researchers with Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology and provided
to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state
departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented
surveillance infrastructure.
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other “biometric data”
taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of a vast
majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have never been charged with a
crime.
Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of
such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers
are criticizing the technology as
a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool.
“Law enforcement’s access of state databases,” particularly DMV databases,
is “often done in the shadows with no consent,” House Oversight Committee
Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement to The Post.
Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican,
seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at
the use of driver’s license photos in federal facial-recognition searches without
the approval of state legislators or individual license holders.
“They’ve just given access to that to the FBI,” he said. “No individual
signed off on that when they renewed their driver’s license, got their driver’s
licenses. They didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh, it’s okay to turn my
information, my photo, over to the FBI.’ No elected officials voted for that to
happen.”
Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned facial recognition
into a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than
390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including
state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the records show that
federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV
officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000
facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and
other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having
returned a “possible match.”
San Francisco and
Somerville, Mass., have banned their police and public agencies from using
facial-recognition software, citing concerns about governmental overreach and a
breach of public trust, and the subject is being hotly debated in Washington.
On Wednesday, officials with the Transportation Security Administration,
Customs and Border Protection and the Secret Service are expected to testify at
a hearing of the House
Committee on Homeland Security about their agencies’ use of the technology.
The records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local contact, the records show.
“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” said Jake
Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government
Oversight. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but
these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The
FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state
DMVs.”
The records also underscore the conflicts between the laws of some states
and the federal push to find and deport undocumented immigrants. Though Utah,
Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s
licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents
have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases.
More than a dozen states, including New York, as well as the District of
Columbia, allow undocumented immigrants to drive legally with full licenses or
driving privilege cards, as long as they submit proof of in-state residency and
pass the states’ driving-proficiency tests.
Lawmakers in Florida, Texas and other states have introduced bills this
year that would extend driving privileges to undocumented immigrants. Some of
those states already allow the FBI to scan driver’s license photos, while
others, such as Florida and New York, are negotiating with the FBI over access,
according to the GAO.
“The state has told [undocumented immigrants], has encouraged them, to
submit that information. To me, it’s an insane breach of trust to then turn
around and allow ICE access to that,” said Clare Garvie, a senior associate
with the Georgetown Law center who led the research.
An ICE spokesman declined to answer questions about how the agency uses
facial-recognition searches, saying its “investigative techniques are generally
considered law-enforcement sensitive.”
Asked to comment, the FBI referred The Post to the congressional testimonylast
month of Deputy Assistant Director Kimberly Del Greco, who said that
facial-recognition technology was critical “to preserve our nation’s freedoms,
ensure our liberties are protected, and preserve our security.” The agency has
said in the past that while facial-recognition searches can provide helpful
leads, agents are expected to verify the findings and secure definitive proof
before pursuing arrests or criminal charges.
Twenty-one states, including Texas and Pennsylvania, plus the District of
Columbia, allow federal agencies such as the FBI to scan driver’s license
photos, GAO records show. The agreements stipulate some rules for the searches,
including that each must be relevant to a criminal investigation.
The FBI’s facial-recognition search has access to local, state and federal
databases containing more than 641 million face photos, a GAO director saidlast month. But the agency provides little
information about when the searches are used, who is targeted and how often
searches return false matches.
The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person
if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested
its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when
a facial search returns only a few possible matches.
Civil rights advocates have said the inaccuracies of facial recognition
pose a heightened danger of misidentification and false arrests. The software’s
precision is highly dependent on a number of factors, including the lighting of
a subject’s face and the quality of the image, and research has shown that the
technology performs less accurately on people with darker skin.
“The public doesn’t have a way of controlling what information the
government has on them,” said Jacinta González, a senior organizer for the
advocacy group Mijente who was particularly concerned about how ICE and other
agencies could use the scans to track down immigrants. “And now there’s this
rapidly advancing technology, with very few guidelines and protections for
people, putting all of this information at their fingertips in a very scary
way.”
The records, which include thousands of emails and official documents from
federal agencies, as well as Utah, Vermont and Washington state, show how easy
it is for a federal investigator to tap into an individual state DMV’s
database. While some of the driver photo searches were made on the strength of
federal subpoenas or court orders, many requests for searches involved nothing
more than an email to a DMV official with the target’s “probe photo” attached.
The official would then search the driver’s license database and provide
details of any possible matches.
The search capability was offered not just to help identify criminal
suspects, but also to detect possible witnesses, victims, bodies, and innocent
bystanders and other people not charged with crimes.
Utah’s DMV database was the subject of nearly 2,000 facial-recognition
searches from outside law enforcement agencies between 2015 and 2017 —
sometimes dozens of searches a day, the records show. One document from Utah’s
Statewide Information & Analysis Center coached officers on how to make
facial-recognition requests; offered four tips for better facial photographs
(“lighting, distance, angle, eyes”); and said the database included “over 5
million Utah driver’s license & state identification card photos,” about 2
million more than the state’s population. State officials did not respond to
requests for comment.
Many of the requests for searches in Utah came from local police forces
across the country seeking to find suspects who may have traveled to the state,
but roughly half the searches came from federal agents, according to a log of
the searches. The records do not provide suspect names or say whether cases
ended in arrests or convictions.
Washington state’s Department of Licensing said that its “facial
recognition system is designed to be an accurate, non-obtrusive fraud detection
tool” and that the agency does not share use of the system with law enforcement
unless compelled by a court order.
Vermont officials said they stopped using facial-recognition software in
2017. That year, a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union revealed
records showing that the state DMV had been conducting the searches in
violation of a state law that banned technology involving “the use of biometric
identifiers.” The state’s governor and attorney general came out against the
face-scanning software, citing a need to balance public safety with residents’
privacy rights.
In the years before the ban, the records show, Vermont officials ran a
number of face scans on driver’s license photos at the request of ICE agents.
Investigators from a number of federal and local agencies emailed the state’s
DMV with facial-recognition search requests as they pursued people accused of
overstaying their visas, providing false information, stealing from stores or,
in at least one case, being part of a “suspicious circumstance.”
The officers in some emails would provide descriptions of their targets:
One was dubbed a “gypsy … scamming elderly people for money,” while another was
said to have “VERY LARGE PROTRUDING EARS.” In others, DMV officials talked
about the face-scanning tool as if it were the kind of awe-inspiring technical
marvel most often seen on prime-time cop shows.
In one 2014 email, a police officer in the town of Manchester, Vt., asked a
DMV official to scan for a man caught on video “brazenly” stealing. The
official forwarded the email to a colleague with a made-for-TV flourish,
writing, “Can we play NCIS for this officer?”
Link originale: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/07/fbi-ice-find-state-drivers-license-photos-are-gold-mine-facial-recognition-searches/?fbclid=IwAR34LRtEu6-ZsWbuKlOUifUIBs1xr4hGNQnV-9nP79h1YMuCpJNCkXQzM18&noredirect=on&utm_campaign=9c5964e8d2-&utm_term=.6cb59ca45625
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento