Even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, facial recognition software was being touted as the next big thing in law enforcement to capture criminals. The technology received a big boost when it was used at the 2001 Super Bowl, and apparently will be used at the 2002 Super Bowl as well. The only problem is, as the American Civil Liberties Union documented in a recent report, the technology simply does not work.
The Tampa Police Department in Florida bought and installed a facial recognition system called Face-It, which is manufactured by Visionics Corporation. The system went into use on June 29, 2001, and the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the log sheets filed by the officers who monitored the system. Although Face-It was apparently abandoned by the Tampa police in early August, its record in the intervening month and a half was pretty clear — not only was there not a single suspect arrested, but the system apparently never accurately identified even one person.
Not that Face-It did not produce a lot of matches — it did, but all of the matches were false positives. Some were the sort of false positives that human beings would be very unlikely to make, such as matching women’s faces to male suspects. In other cases, the logs indicated that the age, weight and other features of the faces that came up as “matches” made it obvious that the person identified by Face-It was not the suspect in the database.
On August 11, 2001, the system was suspended by the Tampa Police Department. A department spokesperson told the ACLU that this was due to redistricting in Tampa and the need to train new officers, but the ACLU was rightly skeptical of this claim noting that, “it is reasonable to assume that the professionals in the Tampa PD would not have let the system sit unused for so long because of a mere redistricting process had they previously found facial recognition to be a valuable tool in the effort to combat crime.”
Aside from the fact that the system did not work, the ACLU also discovered something very disturbing — the database the Tampa Police Department used included not only photos of suspects wanted for questioning related to specific rimes, but also people who had criminal records or who the police identified as possibly having “valuable intelligence” for the police. As the ACLU argues, that raises the specter of individuals being tracked without any sort of court oversight simply because the police decide he or she might have some “valuable intelligence” or in some other way is worth monitoring.
Source:
Drawing a Blank: the failure of facial recognition technology in Tampa, Florida. Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, American Civil Liberties Union, January 3, 2002.