“Law enforcement has many different tools at its disposal. “Facial recognition is one of those tools where usability matters,” said Nicole Napolitano, research director at the Center for Policing Equity. But it is not without its pitfalls. Like PimEyes, tools like Clearview AI can make mistakes and incorrectly identify people, leading to wrong arrests. “Police are increasingly relying on what their model is telling them and then being biased,” Napolitano said.
“There is no constitution the right to cover one’s face in public places,” charged Meyers, police director of the Manhattan Institute.
Indeed, the legal landscape surrounding how law enforcement can use surveillance technologies is unclear, explained Beth Haroules, a lawyer for the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, largely because the law has not kept pace with technological developments. development.
For Haroules, the potential for ubiquitous surveillance means that people never really have a reasonable expectation of privacy – which is an important historical legal standard. “[Surveillance] cameras are not just the policeman’s eyes,” she said. “They are monitored, perhaps 24/7, in real time. They feed images into artificial intelligence, powered by algorithms, which then throws you out and matches you with lots of faces and places you’ve been.”
But perhaps this legal fog will finally begin to clear.
This summer, a federal appeals court judge ruled that geofence warrants violate constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, although that decision only applies to Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Likewise a judge from Novel York ruled warrantless telephone searches at border crossings are unconstitutional. While the ruling only applies to parts of Novel York City, it covers John Paul II International Airport. John F. Kennedy, one of the busiest airports in the country.
Phone manufacturers have also made progress with technological solutions aimed at subverting surveillance methods. Google announced changes how user location data is stored, making it impossible to comply with future geofence orders.
Still, it can be difficult to determine when police are using surveillance technology. Tushar Jois, a professor at City College of New York who studies the intersection of privacy, technology and censorship, said police departments “routinely abandon evidence in their cases rather than share data” on the use of surveillance technology.
Beryl Lipton, a senior research fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said many of the things law enforcement officials previously only dreamed about are now increasingly possible.
“I think there has been a big shift in thinking about what it means to expect privacy in public spaces,” Lipton said.
Half a century ago, Lipton explained, you could potentially see someone following you down the street and eavesdropping on your conversation. This type of surveillance is no longer so obvious.
“It’s something that we really need to re-evaluate as a country,” she added. “We don’t want to be in a situation, whether as protesters or just regular people, of trying to lead a life where we’re basically being watched and listened to all the time.”