“There are a lot of different tools available to law enforcement. Facial recognition is one of those tools that is about expediency,” said Nicole Napolitano, director of research at the Center for Policing Equity. But its disadvantages are also no less. Like PimEyes, tools like Clearview AI can make mistakes and misidentify people, resulting in wrongful arrests“Police have become more dependent on, and then biased by, what the models tell them,” said Napolitano.
“There is no constitutional “The right to cover your face in public,” alleged Meyers, director of policing at the Manhattan Institute.
Indeed, Beth Harrols, a staff attorney at the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out that the legal landscape regarding how law enforcement can use surveillance technologies is unclear, in part because the law has not kept pace with technology. Development.
For Harlows, the potential for ubiquitous surveillance means that people never have a reasonable expectation of privacy – an important historical legal standard. ,[Surveillance] Cameras are not just the eyes of a police officer,” he said. “They are being monitored in real time, probably 24/7. They're feeding the images into artificial intelligence, with the help of algorithms that then go out and match you with multiple faces and places you've been to.
However, that legal fog may finally be beginning to lift.
This summer, a federal appeals court judge declared that geofence warrants were a violation of the Constitution's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, though the ruling only applies in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Similarly, a New York judge Government Warrantless cross-border phone searches are unconstitutional. Although the ruling only applies to a portion of New York, it covers one of the nation's busiest airports, John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Phone manufacturers are also making progress in terms of technological solutions to circumvent surveillance methods. Google announced changes How it stores users' location data makes it unable to comply with future geofence warrants.
Still, it can be difficult to determine when police will use surveillance technology. Tushar Jois, a professor at the City College of New York who studies the intersection of privacy, technology and censorship, said police departments “would routinely give up evidence in their cases rather than share data” about their use of surveillance technology.
Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech-focused civil liberties nonprofit, said many of the things law enforcement officials used to only dream about are now increasingly possible.
“I think we need to think about what it means to have an expectation of privacy in a public space, a sea change,” Lipton said.
Half a century ago, Lipton explained, you could potentially see someone following you on the street, listening in on your conversation. Now, that type of monitoring is not so obvious.
“As a country we really need to reevaluate this,” he said. “We don't want to be in a situation, neither as protesters, nor just as regular people, trying to live a life where we're essentially being followed all the time and listened to.” Doing.”