Patterico's Pontifications

5/17/2019

San Francisco Bans Use Of Facial Recognition Technology By Law Enforcement

Filed under: General — Dana @ 12:45 pm



[guest post by Dana]

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 8-1 this week to ban what many police departments consider a useful investigative tool:

The ban is part of a broader anti-surveillance ordinance that the city’s Board of Supervisors approved on Tuesday. The ordinance, which outlaws the use of facial-recognition technology by police and other government departments, could also spur other local governments to take similar action. Eight of the board’s 11 supervisors voted in favor of it; one voted against it, and two who support it were absent.

[…]

San Francisco’s new rule, which is set to go into effect in a month, forbids the use of facial-recognition technology by the city’s 53 departments — including the San Francisco Police Department, which doesn’t currently use such technology but did test it out between 2013 and 2017. However, the ordinance carves out an exception for federally controlled facilities at San Francisco International Airport and the Port of San Francisco. The ordinance doesn’t prevent businesses or residents from using facial recognition or surveillance technology in general — such as on their own security cameras. And it also doesn’t do anything to limit police from, say, using footage from a person’s Nest camera to assist in a criminal case.

“We all support good policing but none of us want to live in a police state,” San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who introduced the bill earlier this year, told CNN Business ahead of the vote.

Another stated problem with using the technology is the issue of a built-in bias which can lead to incorrectly identifying certain groups:

There are concerns that they are not as effective at correctly recognizing people of color and women. One reason for this issue is that the datasets used to train the software may be disproportionately male and white.

The decision will also make it more difficult for city agencies to continue the usage of any surveillance programs:

Any city department that wants to use surveillance technology or services (such as the police department if it were interested in buying new license-plate readers, for example) must first get approval from the Board of Supervisors. That process will include submitting information about the technology and how it will be used, and presenting it at a public hearing. With the new rule, any city department that already uses surveillance tech will need to tell the board how it is being used.

The ordinance also states that the city will need to report to the Board of Supervisors each year on whether surveillance equipment and services are being used in the ways for which they were approved, and include details like what data was kept, shared or erased.

Yet one needs to also consider the benefits of law enforcement (at large) using the technology in fighting crime:

Perhaps the most compelling argument for FRS is that it can make law enforcement more efficient. FRS allows a law enforcement agency to run a photograph of someone just arrested through its databases to identify the person and see if he or she is wanted for other offenses. It also can help law enforcement officers who are out on patrol or monitoring a heavily populated event identify wanted criminals if and as they encounter them.

Imagine a law enforcement officer wearing a body camera with FRS software identifying, from within a huge crowd, a person suspected of planning to detonate a bomb. The ambient presence of FRS applied to a feed from stadium cameras would allow law enforcement to identify dangerous attendees in cooperation with the company managing event security.

There are many contexts in which this law enforcement technology has already been brought to bear. Beyond spotting threats in a crowd, facial recognition software can be used to quickly suss out perpetrators of identity fraud; the New York Department of Motor Vehicles’ Facial Recognition Technology Program has been doing just that, with 21,000 possible identity fraud cases identified since 2010. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is also experimenting with FRS to assist in identifying abducted and exploited children. Just this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has started teaming up with airlines in Boston, Atlanta, Washington, and New York to use FRS for boarding pass screening. In a safety context, some American schools are installing cameras with FRS to identify the presence of gang members, fired employees, and sex offenders on school grounds.

In spite of the Fourth Amendment and cited benefits of the technology, those supporting the need to ban facial recognition technology as used by law enforcement are worried about a larger, more threatening picture :

Civil libertarians worry that the technology could morph into pervasive automated authoritarianism in which individuals can be tracked everywhere, in real time, similar to the version being developed by the Chinese government. The Chinese government reportedly aims, as part of its Skynet surveillance system, to add an additional 400 million video cameras to its existing 170 million over the next three years. The cameras employ real time facial recognition technology.

Where do you draw the line: ban it altogether or closely regulate its usage because of the risks associated with it? Which reminds me, the New York City Police Department – an agency where facial recognition has reportedly helped break open more than 2,500 cases – used the face of a well-known celebrity (apparently without his knowledge) in order to help identify a suspect:

The New York Police Department used a photo of Woody Harrelson in its facial recognition program in an attempt to identify a beer thief who looked like the actor, according to a report published Thursday.

Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology highlighted the April 2017 episode in “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” a report on what it says are flawed practices in law enforcement’s use of facial recognition.

The report says security footage of the thief was too pixelated and produced no matches while high-quality images of Harrelson, a three-time Oscar nominee, returned several possible matches and led to one arrest.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

31 Responses to “San Francisco Bans Use Of Facial Recognition Technology By Law Enforcement”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (779465)

  2. Well, regardless of how good the tech is, GIGO and lack of standards/training will complicate law enforcement’s actual use of it. You get the same problems with trusting the results of “lab” work too, as recent events show.

    For far more daily impact, look at how personal data, including photos, are being used by the private sector just for marketing purposes. It could make robocalls seem quaint.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (6e7a1c)

  3. Maybe it’s the libertarian streak, but I’m all for banning facial recognition software in the public outside of certain hardened targets (ie, airports/government buildings/etc…).

    whembly (fd57f6)

  4. It’s not really called SKYNET.

    I have no problem with facial recognition in an attempt to solve a crime, or to locate a fugitive. I do have issues if it is used as a raw data collection tool to build databases of citizen’s movements for later reference or data-mining.

    The problem is that local police are never going to be able to do the latter, but you would want them doing the former (who’s the burglar?). It’s the NSA or DHS that is the problem with the massive databases (or maybe Google or Amazon for other purposes), and no city council is going to affect that.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  5. In China (or the UK), all the security cameras are run by the government, so the danger is real. In the US, almost all cameras are private and disconnected from the government, with video obtained only by direct contact with the camera’s owner.

    This is paranoia and grandstanding at the cost of effective crime solving.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  6. While I tend to agree with your comment at 5, Kevin M, there is always a tension between government and the citizenry as we recognize that holding the levers of power comes with an inherent risk. While we have protections currently in place, depending on who is in power, it doesn’t mean that there won’t be a slow push toward wider use. And subsequent abuse of power. As it stands though, I think law enforcement can use all the help it can get. I’d like to see the numbers of abuse vs. the number of crimes cracked as a result of using the technology because the NYPD are pretty impressive for a five-year span.

    Dana (779465)

  7. How is this going to stop China, or Syria or other totalitarian countries from using facial recognition software? It would be good to be very careful about developing better software.

    Sammy Finkelman (3fda43)

  8. I’m a LOT more concerned with cops going through an arrestee’s cell phone looking for evidence of other crimes.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  9. If someone breaks into my house and steals my wife’s diamonds (I wish), and I catch the culprit on my 4K full color super-whizbang camera, I’ll be mighty pissed if the cops tell me that they can’t do facial recognition of the perp because of his privacy rights.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  10. I wish she had diamonds, not that they’d get stolen.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  11. Regarding privacy protections/civil liberties, I watch a number of British detective series and it always strikes me as so odd that CCTV is literally everywhere and of course, difficult cases are cracked due to some significant thing/action caught on camera. They like their surveillance

    The vast majority of CCTV cameras are not operated by government bodies, but by private individuals or companies, especially to monitor the interiors of shops and businesses. According to 2011 Freedom of Information Act requests, the total number of local government operated CCTV cameras was around 52,000 over the entirety of the UK.[108]

    An article published in CCTV Image magazine estimated the number of private and local government operated cameras in the United Kingdom was 1.85 million in 2011. The estimate was based on extrapolating from a comprehensive survey of public and private cameras within the Cheshire Constabulary jurisdiction. This works out as an average of one camera for every 32 people in the UK, although the density of cameras varies greatly from place to place. The Cheshire report also claims that the average person on a typical day would be seen by 70 CCTV cameras.[25]

    The Cheshire figure is regarded as more dependable than a previous study by Michael McCahill and Clive Norris of UrbanEye published in 2002.[25][109] Based on a small sample in Putney High Street, McCahill and Norris extrapolated the number of surveillance cameras in Greater London to be around 500,000 and the total number of cameras in the UK to be around 4,200,000. According to their estimate the UK has one camera for every 14 people. Although it has been acknowledged for several years that the methodology behind this figure is flawed,[24] it has been widely quoted. Furthermore, the figure of 500,000 for Greater London is often confused with the figure for the police and local government operated cameras in the City of London, which was about 650 in 2011.[108]

    The CCTV User Group estimated that there were around 1.5 million private and local government CCTV cameras in city centres, stations, airports, and major retail areas in the UK.[110] This figure does not include the smaller surveillance systems such as those that may be found in local corner shops and is therefore broadly in line with the Cheshire report.

    Dana (779465)

  12. That level of surveillance seems creepy to me. Even given the already prevalent surveillance possible with cell phone tracking and overseas phonecalls and internet data collection, this seems at least one step beyond reasonable. And the idea that the government would have to get the info from private entities is wishful thinking IMO. If the government had access to really good facial recognition tech (we aren’t there yet), you can be there’d be cameras everywhere pretty soon. I am not a fan of that idea.

    Nic (896fdf)

  13. Did Woody have an alibi? Just askin’.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  14. Rubber hoses are considered “a useful investigate tool”, too. I agree with Dana, and with San Francisco.

    nk (dbc370)

  15. (Based on interviews like this one, I’m not a fan. I was interviewing with Fifth Circuit Judge Irving Goldberg in Dallas when Woody’s dad assassinated U.S. District Judge John H. Wood, Jr. in San Antonio. By the time I left the Dallas federal courthouse, it was swimming with U.S. Marshals with shotguns, with DPD backup outside. It was a cowardly killing for money, at long range with a deer rifle. Harrelson is not responsible for the sins of his father, of course. He’s to be commended for not quibbling about his father being a contract killer in this interview. But in it, and others, he’s been … equivocal. I find him a one-dimensional actor — pretty much Woody from “Cheers” in every role, even the ones in which he plays psychopaths — but YMMV.)

    Beldar (fa637a)

  16. Interesting about Woody. I had no idea. Having a dad like that is bound to damage a young boy. What a lot to grapple with and overcome. If you haven’t watched Harrelson with Kevin Costner in The Highwaymen, you might consider it, Beldar. I found him compelling.

    Dana (779465)

  17. Surveillance is surveillance, and this is surveillance at its finest. Sorry, if I wanted this, I’d go live in a casino.

    Bellman (c5f2e6)

  18. That’s really something, nk.

    Dana (779465)

  19. It is really crazy to worry about what city cops do with this, while the real danger is DHS and other TLAs building massive databases to troll through. Or even companies like Amazon and Google doing the same thing for other reasons. Imagine Amazon’s voiceprint database by now.

    Cory Doctorow wrote a fun little spec-fic book about the surveillance state called “Little Brother.” While it was set in SF, it wasn’t about the city cops.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  20. Surveillance is surveillance, and this is surveillance at its finest. Sorry, if I wanted this, I’d go live in a casino.

    So, if your camera system had recorded a video of a crime against your family, and you gave that to the cops to run against their mugshots, you’d be OK if they said they couldn’t do that?

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  21. Hey, Beldar, when Harrelson committed that contract killing in San Antonio, he was living in this very apartment complex in Edinburg at the time. Yep, in an upstairs unit in building B. Then, my mother was the apartment manager, and I her young son was the groundskeeper and pool cleaner. (That was a lot of work for a third grader, but hey $20/month was a lot of money to a child.)

    One day there was a knock on our door. It was two Texas Rangers, asking to speak to the manager. I told them she wasn’t home and asked if I could help. They showed me a picture. Have you seen this man? I’ve seen him walking around, but I never met or spoke with him. I don’t know his name, but he lives in that unit over there.

    This is what I’m talking about, good old fashioned detective work. The Texas Rangers, as you know, were the first law enforcement agents in the country. Their formation preceded that of the New York police department. If you’re a criminal in Texas, you do no want the Rangers on your trail. These guys do not mess around.

    See, apparently, this was Harrelson’s plan. The assassination of a US district judge? That’s going to draw the attention of law enforcement. So he rents a hideout in Edinburg–it has the advantage of being just a few miles from the Mexican border, thus providing an escape route–then drives 300 miles north to San Antonio and commits the crime, thinking he could drive back to his hideout, where presumably no one would be looking for him, and easily flee the country.

    It was a smart plan actually. For a contract killer, I mean. Set up a hideout close to the border and commit the crime hundreds of miles away. That is how a professional hitman would do it.

    Except he didn’t get away with it. I don’t know if it was days, weeks or months after the shooting, but the Texas Rangers had his picture and were at his apartment hideout, investigating, following leads. What a small boy who mowed the grounds and cleaned the pool could tell them about the suspect he didn’t know and had never met could tell them, or what the apartment manage could tell them for that matter–he was just some guy who rented an apartment for all we knew–is unclear, but the Texas Rangers interviewed us both, my mother later in the day. That’s detective work.

    I got to tell you, it’s intimidating to be interviewed by a Texas Ranger, especially for a child. You do not want to lie to a Ranger, or leave anything out. These guys are very thorough in their investigations, and you absolutely do not want to cross ways with them, come across as uncooperative. These guys are scary and very powerful, elite law enforcement. You do not mess with them, because they do not mess around.

    About ten years go, we got this assignment on a repossessed property, a nice two-story home in a gated community. I met the locksmith to rekey and secure the house, and while I was taking pictures and notes, performing an inspection, the a/c repairman we contract with showed up to conduct his, should any repairs be required. He came downstairs with a cigar box he had found in one of the ducts; it was full of (fake?) passports. Okay, what to do with a box of passports for what looked like some mean, ugly criminals? Um, contact the authorities. The result was two days of interviews with agents from the US Marshals, the DEA, the FBI, and the Texas Rangers. Of those, the latter were far more detailed in their questioning. But what could I tell them? All I had was a name and an address for an assignment. I never met this guy, didn’t know anything about him. I simply located and secured the house, and while I was there, the a/c repairman found this box in the duct. I don’t know any of these people. But I was the realtor on the scene, the first to enter the property, and the Texas Rangers wanted to know full damn well what I knew. It was scary enough as a boy to be interviewed by the Texas Rangers about a suspected contract killer who happened to have chosen an apartment for his hideout, but as an adult to be interviewed by the Texas Rangers about a suspected cartel boss who happened to buy a house was even scarier. They leave no stone unturned, and as a licensed professional I wasn’t about to go crossways with tehm. Full disclosure, this is what I know in all honesty.

    Anyway, I don’t know about the reliability of this facial recognition technology. I suppose it might have some use for investigative purposes, but as evidentiary proof of identification in court, it is suspect. Any good defense lawyer could argue that the parameters used were biased, because of the prejudices of the programmer who wrote the code. Eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable in court and often cannot withstand cross-examination. Computer witness testimony has even less credibility.

    It’s like this. There was an episode of Law & Order some years back, titled “The Myth of Fingerprints.” Yeah, I know it’s just a television show, but it highlights the fact that forensic examination of fingerprints varies from lab to lab–some require a higher number of matches on ridge detail, others allow a lower number, and the discretion for matches is left solely to the forensic examiner. So, in this case, the detectives and the prosecuting district attorney thought they had found the perpetrator of the crime, and the forensic examiner, thinking it was her job to support the police in their convictions, lowered the number ridge match details, and testified in court that the defendant was guilty, that his fingerprints were found at the scene. And so he was convicted.

    As it turned out, his actual fingerprints, upon later, further and closer examination, did not match those found at the scene. He was an innocent man sent to jail, on the basis of false identification, testified to by the forensic examiner, who assumed the assumptions of the detectives and prosecutor; she wanted to help them out. This is how an innocent man goes to jail. The police and the prosecutor are fixated on him, and the forensic examiner maladjusts or falsifies the evidence in order to ensure a conviction, because that is what she thought her job was. In the end, she ended up going to jail, after the innocent man was set free, who had spent years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

    It is so easy to set someone up, to prop them up for a crime they did not commit. It is so easy for prosecutors to convict someone of a crime they did not commit. It is far more difficult for prosecutors to convict someone of a crime they did commit.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  22. @ Gawain: Knock me over with a feather! Thanks for sharing that tale!

    Beldar (fa637a)

  23. @ Dana: The last role I saw Harrelson in was as Haymitch Abernathy in the Hunger Games movies. They might as well have just called the character, “Old Broken-Down Woody-from-Cheers.” But de gustibus non est disputandum, and for your sake I’m genuinely glad you’ve enjoyed his work.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  24. It is so easy for prosecutors to convict someone of a crime they did not commit. It is far more difficult for prosecutors to convict someone of a crime they did commit.

    How could it possibly be easier to convict someone of a crime they didn’t commit than one they did?

    Dave (1bb933)

  25. Professional criminals, like contract killers, are not stupid. They are in fact very smart. That’s why they make meticulous plans to get away with their crimes. And some of them do, as a matter of fact, leaving no clues at the scene of the crime and a trail that is hard for law enforcement to follow.

    An innocent civilian, on the other hand, has no idea what is going on. We have your fingerprints! We have your DNA! How does one defend oneself in a situation like that? The fingerprints could have been mismatched by a forensic examiner who used the lowest number of ridge detail to make a determination, because she or he wanted to help the police and the prosecutor make their case in court. This is how the presumption of guilt overrides the presumption on innocence.

    DNA, which is supposedly, scientifically, the most conclusive of all evidence can easily be faked. There was an episode of Special Victims Unit on this exact subject. It’s so simple, an eighth grader with access to a lab can do it. All you need is two vials of blood and a centrifuge. Filter out the white blood cells, which carry DNA, and transfer from one to the other, then sprinkle the contaminated blood at the crime scene. That’s how someone’s DNA can be found at a murder scene that the presumed suspect had never entered.

    What is a jury going to believe? The forensic examiner and the DNA evidence. But the former is faulty and the latter planted. That’s how innocent people get convicted of crimes they did not commit. It happens in a lot more cases than most want to admit.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  26. Gawain–

    I agree that computer matching of photographs should not be used in court as evidence, but it does provide probable cause sufficient for a warrant, and to direct an investigation. It is, as they say, a lead.

    In a court, one presumably has the images recorded and the defendant as well. Jurors can be shown the images and make their own conclusions. It is better than eyewitness testimony, which is both allowed and fraught with error. The final call lies with the jurors.

    My issue with the SF rule is that they won’t allow computer image-matching to be used in driving an investigation, but are perfectly fine with someone picking a suspect out of a six-pack.

    The perspective loss is huge here.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  27. DNA, which is supposedly, scientifically, the most conclusive of all evidence can easily be faked

    No, it cannot. It can be PLANTED. There is a difference. You cannot create a blood sample out of whole cloth unless you decided to forgo your Nobel Prize in chemistry for a life of crime.

    To say that the possibility that evidence can be planted means that all similar evidence is suspect makes all criminal law unenforceable.

    The OJ lawyers apparently got a jury to believe that blood drawn from OJ days later somehow went back in time to be spread at the crime scene, or that DNA from someone else will degrade into DNA that matches the client if left on the bedpost overnight.

    Just because something can be called suspect doesn’t mean it always is.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  28. BTW, getting science from an episode of a TV show is pretty credulous. Consider how wrong they are when they deal with stuff you DO know.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  29. Gawain’s Ghost,

    What a fascinating account. Ironic, then, that Woody ended up portraying Maney Gault in The Highwaymen. He was a former Texas ranger.

    Dana (779465)

  30. Kevin, my first degree was in biology. I’ve been a student of the sciences for decades, and I do know the difference between real science and science fiction. I did not gain my perspective from watching television. There’s more science fiction than science fact to be found in shows and in movies, but also in textbooks and classrooms. I’m simply pointing out that the screenwriters of the above mentioned episodes were able to clearly illustrate how evidence can be misinterpreted and planted.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)


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