The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy activists are asking Amazon to stop marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to police, saying law enforcement agencies could use the technology to "easily build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone."
The tool, called Rekognition, is already being used by at least one agency — the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon — to check photographs of unidentified suspects against a database of mug shots from the county jail, which is a common use of such technology around the country.
But privacy advocates have been concerned about expanding the use of facial recognition to body cameras worn by officers or safety and traffic cameras that monitor public areas, allowing police to identify and track people in real time.
The tech giant's entry into the market could vastly accelerate such developments, the privacy advocates fear, with potentially dire consequences for minorities who are already arrested at disproportionate rates, immigrants who may be in the country illegally or political protesters.
"People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government," the groups wrote in a letter to Amazon on Tuesday. "Facial recognition in American communities threatens this freedom."
Amazon released Rekognition in late 2016, and the sheriff's office in Washington County, west of Portland, became one of its first law enforcement agency customers. A year later, deputies were using it about 20 times per day — for example, to identify burglary suspects in store surveillance footage. Last month, the agency adopted policies governing its use, noting that officers in the field can use real-time face recognition to identify suspects who are unwilling or unable to provide their own ID, or if someone's life is in danger.
"We are not mass-collecting. We are not putting a camera out on a street corner," said Deputy Jeff Talbot, a spokesman for the sheriff's office. "We want our local community to be aware of what we're doing, how we're using it to solve crimes — what it is and, just as importantly, what it is not."
It cost the sheriff's office just $400 to load 305,000 booking photos into the system and $6 per month in fees to continue the service, according to an email obtained by the ACLU under a public records request.
Amazon Web Services did not answer emailed questions about how many law enforcement agencies are using Rekognition, but in a written statement the company said it requires all of its customers to comply with the law and to be responsible in the use of its products.
The statement said some agencies have used the program to find abducted people, and amusement parks have used it to find lost children. British broadcaster Sky News used Rekognition to help viewers identify celebrities at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last weekend.
Last year, the Orlando, Florida, Police Department announced it would begin a pilot program relying on Amazon's technology to "use existing City resources to provide real-time detection and notification of persons-of-interest, further increasing public safety."
Orlando has a network of public safety cameras, and in a presentation posted to YouTube this month , Ranju Das, who leads Amazon Rekognition, said Amazon would receive feeds from the cameras, search them against photos of people being sought by law enforcement and notify police of any hits.
"It's about recognizing people, it's about tracking people, and then it's about doing this in real time, so that the law enforcement officers ... can be then alerted in real time to events that are happening," he said.
The Orlando Police Department declined to make anyone available for an interview about the program, but said in an email to The Associated Press that the department "is not using the technology in an investigative capacity or in any public spaces at this time."
"The purpose of a pilot program such as this, is to address any concerns that arise as the new technology is tested," the statement said. "Any use of the system will be in accordance with current and applicable law. We are always looking for new solutions to further our ability to keep the residents and visitors of Orlando safe."
The letter to Amazon followed public records requests from ACLU chapters in California, Oregon and Florida. More than two dozen organizations signed it, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch.
Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center, said part of the problem with real-time face recognition is its potential impact on free-speech rights.
While police might be able to videotape public demonstrations, face recognition is not merely an extension of photography but a biometric measurement — more akin to police walking through a demonstration and demanding identification from everyone there.
Amazon's technology isn't that different from what face recognition companies are already selling to law enforcement agencies. But its vast reach and its interest in recruiting more police departments to take part raise concerns, she said.
"This raises very real questions about the ability to remain anonymous in public spaces," Garvie said.
———
The Pentagon Is About To Do Something Stupid
Authored by Derek Hunter, op-ed via The Daily Caller,
By now, there’s a fairly good chance your personal information has been exposed, to one degree or another, to hackers. Personally, I’ve received notifications from several companies and my college about hacking attempts they’ve suffered that made my personal information vulnerable to identity thieves, and you or someone know likely has, too. It’s the reality of living in the 21st century - hackers are constantly attempting to access our information, which requires us to take extra precautions to protect our important information. If only government were so concerned.
In 2013, 40 million customers of Target stores had their credit and debit card information stolen. The Equifax hack exposed nearly half the country, almost 150 million people’s personal information to hackers. Even the federal government suffered a breach when, in 2015, it was announced that the records of 21.5 million government employees and others who had gone through background checks for security clearances for the Office of Personnel Management had been stolen, likely by Chinese hackers.
If it’s digital, it vulnerable.
That truth presents the federal government with a special problem. The feds amass more data than just about anyone. And, more importantly, more sensitive data than anyone. And that sensitive data is a prime target for hackers, both from hostile states and anyone willing to sell to them. The potential rewards for bad actors are limitless, which makes the danger limitless as well.
The federal government is left scrambling to stay one step ahead of the hoard seeking to breach those secrets. This race had led to some necessary innovations and strategic thinking, like a decentralized system so no one can access everything by accessing one system.
Well, they used to have a decentralized system, but in a boneheaded move only the government could concoct, the Pentagon is looking to create a single, giant database for our nation’s secrets in the cloud.
Being the government, they don’t have the ability to create their own cloud; they’re farming it out. Just imagine: the most important bits of intelligence our nation gathers — names, dates, spy satellite photos, bank accounts, everything required for our intelligence agencies to keep us one step ahead of our enemies, to keep us safe — all entrusted to one company.
And which company? Amazon. It’s not yet official, but the Pentagon has a “winner-takes-all” bidding process they’re advancing that even the other competitors for the contract admit Amazon will win.
This decision is, quite simply, crazy. Why would the government award a contract, this contract, to a company the president routinely puts in his crosshairs? As it turns out, you can thank President Barack Obama for that.
“To reward tech companies that supported his campaign, Obama populated the government’s digital services with their flunkies,” the Weekly Standard reported,including the fact that the Defense Innovation Board is “chaired by Bezos’s partner and fellow Clinton supporter Eric Schmidt.”
The swamp didn’t become so swampy by itself.
As the Standard put it, this situation “created an environment where political enemies of President Donald Trump can continue to give kickbacks to the groups and individuals who opposed him, undermining his ability to lead our national security efforts.”
So, we have a national security system on the verge of consolidating all of its intelligence in one place, making it a prime target for hacking. And the company set to get the multi-billion-dollar, multi-year contract to house all of those secrets is owned by the richest man in the world, who just happens to be one of President Trump’s targets for criticism. Add to that the fact that the government bureaucracy that set this in motion is populated with people loyal to the previous administration and you begin to see the scope of this mess.
With all that has come to light about the intelligence community in the past month, the exposure of the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign, the idea of trusting his appointees with protecting our nation’s secrets seems, at a minimum, ill-advised. And putting them all under one umbrella while trusting Amazon with them makes even less sense.
This is the swamp President Trump promised to drain.
The president, at a minimum, needs to stop the centralizing of our national security data. Unless and until we can protect our personal data and our credit card transactions, we should not put the biggest prize in international intelligence in one place. That would just be stupid.
Follow Gene Johnson at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle