WHY ARE WE SCANNING CONGRESS?

Facial recognition technology threatens basic rights and safety. It’s spreading quickly within law enforcement, and allows officers to search databases without warrants—or even reasonable suspicion that you’ve done anything wrong. There has been significant reporting on the ways that facial recognition algorithms exhibit systemic racial bias, misidentifying people with darker skin at higher rates. It enables automated and ubiquitous monitoring of an entire population, and it is nearly impossible to avoid. If we don’t stop it from spreading, it will be used not to keep us safe, but to control and oppress us—just as it is already being used in authoritarian states.

We’re calling on Congress to ban government use of facial recognition technology, and to get their attention, we’re scanning Congress to show them exactly how invasive facial recognition is.

IS THIS LEGAL?

Yes. Until Congress does their jobs and bans the use of facial recognition for surveillance purposes.

CAN ANYONE ACCESS THE TECHNOLOGY TO DO THIS?

Yes. And it’s not even that expensive. We did this to prove a point. But until Congress bans facial recognition surveillance, anyone could do what we did with the intent to do harm: a government agency, a corporation harvesting our biometric data for profit, or just a stalker or criminal