Yet Another Bad Idea: Dropping Facial Recognition Software Into Police Body Cameras

The FBI (and other US government agencies) are already moving forward with facial recognition technology, which will allow law enforcement to scan people like license plates, if everything goes to plan. So far, consultation with the meddling public has been kept to a minimum, as have any government efforts to address civil liberties concerns.

Just because the public's been kept out of the loop (except for, you know, their faces and other personal information), doesn't mean members of the public aren't working hard to ensure police officers can start running faces like plates, even when there's no legitimate law enforcement reason for doing so.

Digital Barriers, a somewhat ironically-named tech company, is pushing its latest law enforcement offering -- one that supposedly provides real-time face scanning.

The software can pick out and identify hundreds of individual faces at a time, instantly checking them against registered databases or registering unique individuals in seconds.

Demonstrating the software at the Forensics Europe Expo 2017, vice president of Digital Barriers Manuel Magalhaes said the company was introducing the technology to UK forces.

He said: "For the first time they (law enforcement) can use any surveillance asset including a body worn camera or a smartphone and for the first time they can do real time facial recognition without having the need to control the subject or the environment.

"In real time you can spot check persons of interests on their own or in a crowd."

But why would you? Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be done. This will basically allow officers to run records checks on everyone who passes in front of their body-worn cameras. There is nothing in the law that allows officers to run checks on everyone they pass. They can't even stop and/or frisk every member of the public just because they're out in public. Expectations of privacy are lowered on public streets, but that doesn't make it reasonable to subject every passerby to a records check. And that's without even factoring in the false positive problem. Our own FBI seems to feel a 15% bogus return rate is perfectly acceptable.

Like so much surveillance equipment sold to law enforcement agencies, Digital Barrier's offering was developed and tested in one of our many war zones. The head of the company is inordinately proud of the product's pedigree, which leads to a statement that could be taken as bigoted if it weren't merely nonsensical.

Mr Magalhaes continued: "If we can overcome facial recognition issues in the Middle East, we can solve any facial recognition problem here in the United Kingdom.

Hopefully, this just refers to the sort of issues normally found in areas of conflict (hit-and-miss communications infrastructure, harsher-than-usual working conditions, etc.), rather than hinting Middle Eastern facial features are all kind of same-y.

Taking the surveillance out of the Middle East isn't going to solve at least one logistical problem keeping this from becoming a day-to-day reality for already heavily-surveilled UK citizens. As is pointed out by officers in the discussion thread, Digital Barrier's real-time face scanning is going to need far more bandwidth than is readily available to law enforcement. One commenter notes they can't even get a strong enough signal to log in into their email out in the field, much less perform the on-the-fly facial recognition Digital Barrier is promising.

The other pressing issues -- according to the law enforcement members discussing the post -- is one far more aligned with the general public's. A couple of members point out no one PNC's entire crowds (referring to the UK's law enforcement database: the Police National Computer) and that doing so might not even be legal.

Unfortunately, the rank-and-file rarely get to make these decisions. These choices will be made by people who think the public needs to give til it hurts when safety and security are on the line. Dropping this capability into body cameras will make them more of an intrusion on the lives of citizens and far less likely to result in police accountability. Faces being linked automatically to databases full of personal info creates complications in obtaining camera footage. It won't result in improved policing, even though there are plenty of supporters who mistakenly believe "easier" is synonymous with "better."