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Podcast Episode: From Your Face to Their Database

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Episode 005 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

Abi Hassen joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss the rise of facial recognition technology, how this increasingly powerful identification tool is ending up in the hands of law enforcement, and what that means for the future of public protest and the right to assemble and associate in public places.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

  • The Black Movement Law Project, which Abi co-founded, and how it has evolved over time to meet the needs of protesters;
  • Why the presumption that people don’t have any right to privacy in public spaces is challenged by increasingly powerful identification technologies;
  • Why we may need to think big when it comes to updating the U.S. law to protect privacy;
  • How face recognition technology can have a chilling effect on public participation, even when the technology isn’t  accurate;
  • How face recognition technology is already leading to the wrongful arrest of innocent people, as seen in a recent case of a man in Detroit;
  • How gang laws and anti-terrorism laws have been the foundation of a legal tools that can now be deployed against political activists;
  • Understanding face recognition technology within the context of a range of powerful surveillance tools in the hands of law enforcement;
  • How we can start to fix the problems caused by facial recognition through increased transparency, community control, and hard limits on law enforcement use of face recognition technology,
  • How Abi sees the further goal is to move beyond restricting or regulating specific technologies to a world where public protests are not so necessary, as part of reimagining the role of law enforcement.

Abi is a political philosophy student, attorney, technologist, co-founder of the Black Movement-Law Project, a legal support rapid response group that grew out of the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. He is also a partner (currently on leave) at O’Neill and Hassen LLP, a law practice focused on indigent criminal defense. Prior to this current positions, he was the Mass Defense Coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild. Abi has also worked as a political campaign manager and strategist, union organizer, and community organizer. He conducts trainings, speaks, and writes on topics of race, technology, (in)justice, and the law. Abi is particularly interested in exploring the dynamic nature of institutions, political movements, and their interactions from the perspective of complex systems theory. You can find Abi on Twitter at @AbiHassen, and his website is https://AbiHassen.com

Please subscribe to How to Fix the Internet via RSS, Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your podcast player of choice. You can also find the Mp3 of this episode on the Internet Archive.  If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org.

Below, you’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio.

Resources

Current State of Surveillance

European Regulation of Data and Privacy

State Use and Mis-Use of Surveillance

Flaws and Consequences of Surveillance

Protecting Oneself from Surveillance

Lawsuits Against Facial Recognition and Surveillance

Surveillance and Black-Led Movements

Activism Against Surveillance

Other Resources

Transcript of Episode 005: From Your Face to Their Database

Danny O’Brien:

Welcome to How to Fix the Internet with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a podcast that explores some of the biggest problems we face online right now, problems whose source and solution is often buried in the obscure twists of technological development, societal change, and the subtle details of Internet lore.

Cindy Cohn:

Hi everyone. I’m Cindy Cohn, and I’m the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And like a lot of us here, I’m a lawyer.

Danny O’Brien:

And I’m Danny O’Brien. I work at EFF too, but I’m not a lawyer.

Cindy Cohn:

Then what are you, Danny?

Danny O’Brien:

I’ve spent so long with lawyers, I’ve kind of forgotten what I am. It’s a bit like if you’re raised by wolves.

Cindy Cohn:

Well, this week, we’re tackling facial recognition, which will tell us whether you’re turned into a wolf, Danny. In the last few years, face recognition has gone from a high-tech party trick to a serious threat to civil liberties. Companies are already touting the ability to turn any photo into a name and identity based on pictures, taking from private records and also the public Internet. Cities and police forces are being sold equipment that can identify and track citizens as they go about their business in real time. And then permanently record that information for later investigations or, as we’ve seen, misuse.

Danny O’Brien:

I think most people have yet to realize just how good facial recognition has gotten recently. I think it’s reached the point where it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to expect the software to do, that you can take a photograph of a demonstration or live video, and the facial recognition software will be able to pick out the faces from a crowd. All of the faces, or as many as it can, and then correlate those to a database. A database that could contain everybody who’s put their faces up on the Internet in a photograph or even a profile picture. That’s a reasonable thing to expect modern facial recognition software to do. And that’s the pitch that’s being given to law enforcement by commercial companies selling this technology, and at a pretty cheap price as well. This is getting to the point of being off-the-shelf software rather than an expensive service that maybe only the NSA can use or large companies can fund.

Cindy Cohn:

At the same time that facial recognition is getting really good in some ways, it’s also still really bad in some others, and quite dangerous. Then the results are often terribly biased. They fail to identify nonwhite people, People of Color correctly, far more often than it fails with white people. It’s often embedded in systems and structures and policies that are racist as well. AI and machine learning inferences can only guess about the future based upon the data you fed them about the past. So if the training data is slanted or racist the guesses about the future will be, too. And in addition, there’s a growing body of research and a budding set of tools being developed to fool facial recognition. In COVID time, we’re seeing even that masks are causing flaws as well. We already have seen the first couple of false arrests based on bad uses of facial recognition and more on the way. And it’s only a matter of time before this spills into political protests.

Danny O’Brien:

This is a sort of paradox that we see a lot at EFF in emerging technologies. If the technology really worked as well as it’s being hyped, it’s maybe terrifying for civil liberties. But it’s still bad, even when it doesn’t live up to those promises because it fails in ways that the authorities refuse to acknowledge or mitigate against.

Cindy Cohn:

Yeah, so we’re damned if it works, and we’re damned if it doesn’t.

Danny O’Brien:

Joining us today is Abi Hassen, co-founder of the Black Movement Law Project, who has been watching just how facial recognition can be misused to silence dissent and track legitimate protest. He’s been a key figure in the campaign to place limits on the use of this anything-but-benign technology, where it’s increasingly problematic on the streets during protests. Welcome, Abi.

Abi Hassen:

Thank you so much, Danny and Cindy, for having me.

Cindy Cohn:

For our purposes, of course, Abi is a lawyer as well. So h

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Read the original article: Podcast Episode: From Your Face to Their Database