On July 18, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee published an assessment of the work of the biometrics commissioner and the forensic science regulator. My guess is that most citizens have never heard of these two public servants, which is a pity, because what they do is important for the maintenance of justice and the protection of liberty and human rights.
The current biometrics commissioner is Paul Wiles. His role is to keep under review the retention and use by the police of biometric material. This used to be just about DNA samples and custody images, but digital technology promises to increase his workload significantly.
“It is now seven years since the 2012 British high court ruled that the indefinite retention of innocent people’s custody images was unlawful, and yet the practice is continuing. A system was meant to have been put in place where any custody images were kept for six years and then reviewed. Custody images of unconvicted individuals at that point should be weeded and deleted,” the Commons committee said.
Yet they have not been: Photographs of innocent people remain on the police national database. Why does this matter? Basically, because these images can form the basis of “watch lists” for automatic facial recognition technology when used by police forces in public spaces.
RUNWAY TECHNOLOGY
Ten years ago, this might not have been that much of a concern. However, the explosive growth of real-time facial recognition technology — and the current fascination of UK police authorities with it — means that it has already become a scandal and could soon become a crisis.
Several forces have been conducting live trials of the technology in public places.
“There is growing evidence from respected, independent bodies that the ‘regulatory lacuna’ [ie, legislative vacuum] surrounding the use of automatic facial recognition has called the legal basis of the trials into question. The government, however, seems to not realize or to concede that there is a problem,” the Commons report said.
Facial recognition has become a runaway technology, partly because images provided a perfect test bed for machine learning software and because the Internet proved to be an inexhaustible source of images for training purposes.
As a result, the technology has been effectively commoditized. It is everywhere and it is relatively cheap. Social media companies obviously love it (spot your friends in those stag and hen-night party pics), but so do more mundane organizations that use it for access control — spotting potential shoplifters, recognizing repeat customers, etc.
EROSION OF PRIVACY
Spooks love it. Authoritarian regimes adore it, and of course, police forces are fascinated by it, not least because it provides them with “objective” grounds for stop and search.
However, there are some problems with this corporate and authoritarian tool. One is that the technology itself is flaky, prone to errors, false positives and bias.
More importantly, it is a pathologically intrusive, privacy-eroding technology that can be used for general surveillance in combination with public video cameras. In those applications it does not require the knowledge, consent or participation of the subject.
It can — and will — be used to create general, suspicionless surveillance systems: Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon on steroids.
Imagine a public space — Trafalgar Square or Oxford Street, for example — thronged with people and monitored by CCTV cameras linked to a facial recognition machine.
Every time a camera focuses on a face, superimposed on the person’s visage is his or her name, plus other information about them: nationality, age, visa status, educational qualifications, criminal convictions (if any), employment history and political party.
TODAY’S PLUTONIUM
This is not science fiction. It is possible and working now in some parts of the world, notably China. It is what has led some people to liken the technology to plutonium and for others to call for an outright ban on it.
We now have two options for controlling this runaway technology. One is to treat it like plutonium and ban its use for civilian purposes.
The other is to treat it like a radioactive isotope — which has important uses in medicine — and regulate it accordingly.
Oddly enough, this is what Microsoft suggests, arguing for “a government initiative to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission.”
When one of the tech giants starts to argue for government regulation, then you know we have really got a problem.
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