ACLU Obtains Documents Showing Amazon Is Handing Out Cheap Facial Recognition Tech To Law Enforcement

from the Prime-membership-not-required dept

More bad news on the privacy front, thanks to one of America's largest corporations. Documents obtained by the ACLU show Amazon is arming law enforcement agencies with cheap facial recognition tech, allowing them to compare any footage obtained from a variety of sources to uploaded mugshot databases.

The company has developed a powerful and dangerous new facial recognition system and is actively helping governments deploy it. Amazon calls the service “Rekognition.” Marketing materials and documents obtained by ACLU affiliates in three states reveal a product that can be readily used to violate civil liberties and civil rights. Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.

It's already been deployed to several areas around the country, with Amazon acting as the government's best friend a la AT&T historic proactive cooperation with NSA surveillance efforts. The documents [PDF] obtained by the ACLU show Amazon has been congratulated by local law enforcement officials for a "first-of-its-kind public-private partnership," thanks to its deployment efforts. On top of providing deployment assistance, Amazon also offers troubleshooting and "best practices" for officers using the tech. It has even offered free consulting to agencies expressing an interest in Rekognition.

These efforts aren't surprising in and of themselves, although Amazon's complicity in erecting a law enforcement surveillance structure certainly is. Amazon is looking to capture an underserved market, and the more proactive it is, the more market it will secure before competitors arrive. To further cement its position in the marketplace, Amazon is limiting what law enforcement agencies can say about these public-private partnerships.

In the records, Amazon also solicits feedback and ideas for “potential enhancements” to Rekognition’s capabilities for governments. Washington County even signed a non-disclosure agreement created by Amazon to get “insight into the Rekognition roadmap” and provide additional feedback about the product. The county later cited this NDA to justify withholding documents in response to the ACLU’s public records request.

Documents also suggest Amazon is looking to partner with body camera manufacturers to add its facial recognition tech. This is something body camera manufacturers are already considering, and licensing an established product is far easier than building one from the ground up.

The system is powerful and can apparently pull faces from real-time footage to compare to databases. It also allows agencies to track individuals. It puts passive cameras on surveillance steroids, giving any person who strolls past a government camera a chance to be mistaken for a wanted suspect. To date, facial recognition software has managed to generate high numbers of false positives, while only producing a handful of valid arrests.

These efforts have been deployed with zero input from the largest stakeholder in any government operation: the general public.

Because of Rekognition’s capacity for abuse, we asked Washington County and Orlando for any records showing that their communities had been provided an opportunity to discuss the service before its acquisition. We also asked them about rules governing how the powerful surveillance system could be used and ensuring rights would be protected. Neither locality identified such records.

It may be the NDAs discourage public discussion, but more likely the agencies acquiring the tech knew the public wouldn't be pleased with having their faces photographed, tracked, stored indefinitely, and compared to pictures stored in law enforcement databases. And if public agencies are unwilling to discuss these programs with the public, they're far less likely to create internal policies governing use of the tech. Amazon's push to secure a sizable portion of this market is only making things worse, and its use of NDAs is going to further distance these public agencies from being accountable to the people they serve.

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Filed Under: face recognition, law enforcement, police, privacy, rekognition, surveillance

Companies: aclu, amazon