This week’s riots in the U.S. Capitol could herald a shift in attitudes towards the use of facial recognition surveillance by law enforcement, according to digital rights experts interviewed by Coda Story. 

Many of the rioters who mobbed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday did not cover their faces or use any of the elaborate schemes protesters worldwide have developed in recent years to avoid identification by police cameras — leading to calls on social media for facial recognition software to be used to track and arrest them.

While facial recognition is not known to have been used in the arrests of more than 80 Capitol protesters, a debunked, and since retracted, story in the Washington Times claimed facial recognition technology had been used to identify the presence of “Antifa members” in the crowd. 

The protest in Washington occurred at a moment in which public perception of facial recognition has dramatically soured, with outright bans of police use of the technology in cities like San Francisco and Portland. Recent studies have also pointed to the disproportionate inaccuracy of automated facial recognition technology in recognizing darker-skinned people.