From Slate: Should Police Bodycams Come With Facial Recognition Software? A technology embraced to protect citizens could have major civil liberties implications.

The latest from the intersection of technology and civil liberties.

How are due process and privacy rights secured in during a time when its so easy to identify and track people?

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Imagine you’re at a large protest, thousands of demonstrators gathered. Police stand nearby, tasked with protecting those speaking out and maintaining safety. At each officer’s chest, a red light shows a body camera is recording, ensuring the officers do not engage in improper conduct. But what if that red light also meant a program was scanning, recording, and cataloging the face of every person in the crowd. Would you feel safe?

It would be a sad irony if police body cameras, brought into communities to check police power, became tools that improperly expanded it. But as they are rapidly being deployed in cities across the country, often without clear policies designed to protect privacy, we may be failing to fully consider the risks of pervasive surveillance these devices pose. And in addition to existing concerns, a huge new issue is rapidly approaching: body cameras that use facial recognition technology.

And body cameras that incorporate facial recognition technology are certainly on the horizon. This summer Taser International, by far the nation’s biggest producer of police body cameras, announced plans to incorporate facial recognition technology into its cameras in the future. And so far, not a single city places adequate limits on its use. Even if these enhanced technologies don’t lead to a world where “every cop will be RoboCop,” as Taser vice president Steve Tuttle once suggested, we need to talk about the real ways in which facial recognition devices could be used—and misused—and what limits should be put on their use.

. . . The least controversial use of facial recognition would be to identify individuals in relation to emergencies—setting police cameras to scan the city for the face of a missing child or a suspect in an ongoing kidnapping during an Amber Alert, for example, or for an active shooter. It’s hard to imagine persuasive objections to this specific use of the technology, since responding to an imminent threat is a commonly accepted exception to Fourth Amendment rules that generally require warrants for certain police action.

Law enforcement agencies might also use this biometric data to try to identify other fugitives at large in nonemergency situations—sending out face prints of individuals that have outstanding arrest warrants to body cameras, which could then scan police footage for chance matches. Such a system could take “Most Wanted” posters into the 21st century and help catch dangerous fugitives much more efficiently. The requirement of an active warrant would also give judicial oversight to the technology’s deployment.

. . . Beyond ability to target anyone with an outstanding warrant, this technology could also offer a powerful new means for location tracking and monitoring of the entire public. Law enforcement agencies commonly use location tracking for investigations—following an individual in public, attaching GPS tracking devices to cars, or obtaining cellphone locations from telecommunications companies, for example. But each of these methods requires intensive resources or, with some methods, a warrant.

By enhancing police-worn body cameras with facial recognition technology, beat cops themselves could be turned into a citywide mass automated tracking tool. But without judicial oversight, location tracking will not necessarily be limited to suspected wrongdoers. Law enforcement could use the technology to identify, monitor, and intimidate individuals involved in nonillicit activities absent any judicial review or prior arrests.

Most disturbingly, this could occur not only by tracking an individual, but also by targeting sensitive locations or events. Think if police were able to review body camera footage and use facial recognition to catalog every participant in a protest or every person that walked into a local mosque. Facial recognition and body cameras could quickly create a much more powerful, digital version of J. Edgar Hoover’s secret “enemies” lists.

From Radiolab: Eye in the Sky

For our look at the 4th amendment, and privacy - among other things.

You are never not monitored, but neither are criminals.

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In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it. After the war, Ross McNutt retired from the airforce, and brought this technology back home with him. Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from the podcast “Note to Self” give us the low-down on Ross’s unique brand of persistent surveillance, from Juarez, Mexico to Dayton, Ohio. Then, once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.

The Drone Lobby and the Drone Caucus

Why not?

We've had Drone Court and Drone Journalism, now here's a story about the individuals who argue in favor of drone technology and the members of Congress who support them.

Here's a snippet describing a meeting among drone supporters worried about how the technology is perceived:

“As you can see,” [Lobbyist Ben] Gielow said dryly, “we have a challenge with the media.”

As the second day went on, the focus shifted to solutions. I overheard attendees muttering that maybe the safest thing to do for now was to market to farmers who wanted drones to survey their crops. “No one’s gonna say you’re spying on the corn,” one said darkly.

It was also agreed that the D-word had to go. “That term ‘drone’ kills us every time,” said Don Roby, a garrulous Baltimore County police captain leading a nationwide push to deploy drones for police work. Barton mentioned that, when doing business in England, he’d been urged to call drones “remote-sensing platforms.” Unfortunately, this euphemism proved to be overly euphemistic. One potential investor told Barton: “That remote-sensing platform—if it had wings, just imagine what it could do!”

Jerry Wright, a retired Air Force colonel, had another idea. When the police chief of Seattle sought approval to use drones, he brought in an ominous-looking black Draganflyer X6 to display during his presentation. City officials recoiled in horror. So, Wright said, the chief went back to the manufacturer. “They came back with the same platform painted pink and they were going to call it the Soft Kitty 2000.” To Wright, there was a clear lesson to be drawn here: “As an industry, we need more pink ones and less black ones.”

A pink drone - great idea. The Soft Kitty 2000.

Here's a link to the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. Local Reps Gene Green, Michael McCaul, and Pete Olson are members.

Should the Bill of Rights be updated?

Here's an argument that recent developments in surveillance technology (drones etc...) make updating a good idea, even an imperative one.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether we trust the authorities to impose limits upon themselves when it comes to deployment of surveillance technologies that legislators nor courts have specifically circumscribed. The fact is that the law is out of date. The Bill of Rights was written a long time ago, well before cellphones, the internet, spy drones or even video cameras were invented. Our Electronic Communications Privacy law is woefully obsolete, itself predating widespread usage of three of those four technologies.

We need to bring the Bill of Rights into the 21st century for the same reason the ACLU and others want the Obama administration to tell us its legal rationale for its overseas killing operations: the public should know what rules the government is bound by, particularly when it comes to our rights to privacy and due process. Unfortunately, that's simply not the case. Today, we live in an era of secret law, from top-secret CIA and military killings abroad, all the way down to the DOJ's view of law enforcement location tracking powers here in the US. Where the law doesn't explicitly provide guidance, we are largely ignorant of how the government interprets its authorities with respect to new technologies, its powers, and our rights.

Have Attitudes About Surveillance Cameras Changed?

Once seen as contrary to civil liberties -- living in a police state and all -- the Times Square near miss seems to have led to a reappraisal of the relative merits of police surveillance cameras. See the third lesson from the Times Square bomb.