More than 30 activist groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday urged Amazon.com Inc to stop providing facial recognition technology to law enforcement, warning that it could give authorities “dangerous surveillance powers.”
The organizations sent a letter to Amazon after an ACLU investigation found Amazon had been working with a number of US law enforcement agencies to deploy its artificial intelligence-powered Rekognition service.
“Rekognition marketing materials read like a user manual for authoritarian surveillance,” ACLU California’s Nicole Ozer said. “Once a dangerous surveillance system like this is turned against the public, the harm can’t be undone.”
A letter to Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos was signed by groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Data for Black Lives, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Human Rights Watch.
“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,” the letter said. “This product poses a grave threat to communities, including people of color and immigrants, and to the trust and respect Amazon has worked to build.”
Amazon is one of many companies in the US and elsewhere which deploy facial recognition for security and law enforcement over the concerns of activists.
Some research has indicated that such programs can be error-prone, particularly when identifying people of color, and activists argue the systems can build up large databases of biometric information which can be subject to abuse.
In China, authorities have created a digital surveillance system able to use a variety of biometric data — from photographs and iris scans to fingerprints — to keep close tabs on the movements of the entire population, and uses it to publicly identify lawbreakers and jaywalkers.
The ACLU released documents showing correspondence with police departments in Florida, Arizona and other states on Rekognition, which is operated by the Amazon Web Services unit of the US technology giant.
The US activist groups say a large deployment by Amazon could lead to broad surveillance of the US population.
“People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government,” the letter said. “Facial recognition in American communities threatens this freedom. In overpoliced communities of color, it could effectively eliminate it. The federal government could use this facial recognition technology to continuously track immigrants as they embark on new lives.”
A 2016 study by Georgetown University researchers found that one in two US adults appeared in a law enforcement facial recognition database, with most of those undisclosed and unregulated.
The researchers said that widespread use of facial recognition risks eroding constitutional guarantees against unreasonable searches.
“Police use of face recognition to continuously identify anyone on the street — without individualized suspicion — could chill our basic freedoms of expression and association, particularly when face recognition is used at political protests,” the report said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema