The Infinite Brief

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and e-mails over the past five years reveal that federal investigators have turned state DMV databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.

Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive, and error-prone surveillance tool.

Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases.