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Amnesty International urges New York City to pass a ban on facial recognition technology as a form of mass surveillance by law enforcement as a means to amplify racist policing, as well as threatening the rights to protest. This is a part of Amnesty’s new campaign called Ban the Scan, a global campaign calling for the banning of the use of facial recognition systems. The campaign has begun in New York City with the hopes to expand to other parts of the world in 2021. Amnesty argued that the use of facial recognition tech is a form of mass surveillance that violates the right to privacy and threatens the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression.
Facial recognition software identifies individuals by their faces against millions of images in a database. According to Amnesty International, in the city of New York alone it has been used 22,000 times since 2017. The major problem with facial recognition technology is that it is open to being discriminatory, as a previous article for Relawding looked at how facial recognition technology has been racially discriminating against migrants.
AI and human rights researcher for Amnesty International, Matt Mahmoudi said: “Facial recognition risks being weaponised by law enforcement against marginalised communities around the world. From New Delhi to New York, this invasive technology turns our identities against us and undermines human rights.”
In terms of the campaign to ban facial recognition tech in New York City, the focus is on racially biased policing. This form of technology has been developed from combing through images from social media profiles without the individual’s permission. Black and minority communities are at higher risk of being misidentified and falsely arrested. Amnesty found in some cases, facial recognition has been 95 per cent inaccurate and even when it “works,” it can exacerbate discriminatory policing and prevent the free and safe exercise of peaceful assembly by acting as a tool of mass surveillance.
The use of facial recognition technology in the United States became particularly prominent in tracking down individuals who attended the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the Summer of 2020. Activist Derrick “Dwreck” Ingram was one of the individuals affected by this. On August 7th, 2020 the New York Police Department (NYPD) officers attempted to arrest Ingram by besieging his apartment for five hours, after using facial recognition technology to identify and locate him.
Ingram tells Amnesty how he remembers the NYPD bringing dozens of officers, a helicopter, riot police and police dogs in a five-hour attempt to arrest him following an alleged assault on an officer by shouting loudly into a megaphone on June 14th. The officers had no warrant for his arrest, in which they falsely claimed that his legal counsel was with them and attempted to interrogate him through his front door and later threatening to break the door down if he did not leave his apartment.
The implications of Dwreck’s case are worrying for several reasons. Firstly, the images obtained to identify him were taken from his private Instagram photos which were then shared all over his neighbourhood and NYPD socials. The police’s accesses to individual’s private media accounts without the permissions is worrying for privacy and surveillance reasons. Furthermore, it threatens the right to protest, Dwreck was allegedly shouting through a megaphone and that was the charge. Megaphones are essential to protest movements so key chants, messages and taglines of the movement can be shared, by that becoming a crime it threatens the right to peaceful protest.
New York State has banned the use of facial recognition technology in schools, it is now time for them to extend the ban to policing. This is essential to reduce racial discrimination in the policing system, to ensure individuals right to privacy on the internet and the right to safe protest.
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