Facial recognition may be coming to a police body camera near you

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: May 10, 2018 at 9:15:47 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Facial recognition may be coming to a police body camera near you
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]
>
> Facial recognition may be coming to a police body camera near you
> By Drew Harwell
> Apr 26 2018
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/26/facial-recognition-may-be-coming-to-a-police-body-camera-near-you/>
>
> The country’s biggest seller of police body cameras on Thursday convened a corporate board devoted to the ethics and 
> expansion of artificial intelligence, a major new step toward offering controversial facial-recognition technology to 
> police forces nationwide.
>
> Axon, the maker of Taser electroshock weapons and the wearable body cameras now used by most major American city 
> police departments, has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition for its body-worn cameras. The technology could 
> allow officers to scan and recognize the faces of potentially everyone they see while on patrol. A growing number of 
> surveillance firms and tech start-ups are racing to integrate face recognition and other AI capabilities into 
> real-time video.
>
> The board’s first meeting will likely presage an imminent showdown over the rapidly developing technology. Shortly 
> after the board was announced, a group of 42 civil rights, technology and privacy groups, including the American 
> Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, sent members a letter voicing “serious concerns with the current direction of 
> Axon’s product development.”
>
> The letter urged an outright ban on face recognition, which it called “categorically unethical to deploy” because of 
> the technology’s privacy implications, technical imperfections and potentially life-threatening biases. Most 
> facial-recognition systems, recent research found, perform far less accurately when assessing people with darker 
> skin, opening the potential to an AI-enabled officer misidentifying an innocent person as a dangerous fugitive.
>
> Axon’s founder and chief executive, Rick Smith, said the company is not currently building facial-recognition systems 
> but said the technology is “under active consideration.” He acknowledged the potential for “bias and misuse” in face 
> recognition but said the potential benefits are too promising to ignore.
>
> “I don’t think it’s an optimal solution, the world we’re in today, that catching dangerous people should just be left 
> up to random chance, or expecting police officers to remember who they’re looking for,” Smith said. “It would be both 
> naive and counterproductive to say law enforcement shouldn’t have these new technologies. They’re going to, and I 
> think they’re going to need them. We can’t have police in the 2020s policing with technologies from the 1990s.”
>
> Axon held the board’s first meeting Thursday morning at its Arizona headquarters with eight company-selected experts 
> in AI, civil liberties and criminal justice. The board, whose members are paid volunteers and have no official veto 
> power, will be asked to advise the company on “future capabilities Axon's AI Research team is working on to help 
> increase police efficiency and efficacy,” the company said in a statement.
>
> Face recognition has long had major appeal for law enforcement and government surveillance, and recent advances in AI 
> development and declining camera and hardware costs have spurred developers to suggest it could be applied for 
> broader use. Roughly 117 million American adults, or about half the country, can be found in the vast 
> facial-recognition databases used by local, state and federal law enforcement, Georgetown Law School researchers 
> estimated in 2016.
>
> Faces are regarded as a quick, reliable way to identify someone from video or afar — and, in some cases, seen as 
> easier to acquire than other “biometric identifiers,” such as fingerprints, that demand close proximity and physical 
> contact. The Department of Homeland Security scans the faces of international travelers at many of the country’s 
> biggest airports, and plans to expand to every traveler flying overseas.
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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