Agencies sued over use of facial recognition

ICE, FBI accused of failing to provide information about use

Facial recognition technology concerns public advocacy groups, policymakers and others so much that its use by police and other public agencies has been banned in three Bay Area cities and one in Massachusetts. But federal government agencies use it, and they’re not being forthcoming about how, according to a couple of lawsuits filed in the past couple of weeks.

The Project on Government Oversight has sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement over what it says is the agency’s inadequate response to the group’s request for information about its use of facial recognition. That follows a lawsuit filed by the ACLU last week against the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration over the same thing. Both groups submitted Freedom of Information Act requests because they want to know how the federal agencies are using the technology, and what safeguards they’re employing to prevent abuse.

“The records would be likely to contribute to public understanding of ICE’s system for collecting data absent knowledge of consent of citizens, as well as civil rights and civil liberties complaints,” said the POGO complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

Because numerous studies have shown facial recognition can be inaccurate, especially when identifying minorities and women, public advocacy groups and others are worried that the technology can be used to mistakenly arrest, detain and punish people.

“It is certainly a red flag when a government agency won’t disclose what it is doing in the people’s name, especially when it pertains to such an invasive technology like facial recognition,” said Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice and chair of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, on Friday. He helped draft measures banning facial recognition in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. “It’s even more alarming when that agency is willing to ignore federal FOIA law to keep their practices secret.”

In their lawsuit, the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts cited news stories that shed light

on those practices, including ICE’s use of facial recognition — sometimes by mining state driver’s license databases — in arresting undocumented immigrants. For example, according to media reports, Amazon has offered its Rekognition technology to ICE, and the FBI is also testing it, but the ACLU says the government has refused to share documents and communications related to the marketing or purchase of the technology. The ACLU also expressed concern about government use of other biometrics, which includes iris scanning and other unique identifiers that can be checked digitally.

“These technologies have the potential to enable undetectable, persistent, and suspicionless surveillance on an unprecedented scale,” the ACLU said in its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

The ACLU and POGO are asking the courts to force the federal agencies to comply with their requests for information. ICE and the Department of Justice have not returned requests for comment.

Other cities in the Bay Area and around the nation are considering facialrecognition bans. State and federal lawmakers have also discussed the potential pitfalls of the technology, which involves the use of images, machine learning and artificial intelligence.