More than half of the twenty U.S. federal agencies that have used facial recognition technologies in the last several years could not tell Congressional investigators which systems they were using and had not assessed their privacy risks. 

The new revelations were published in a sweeping new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, which examined how a network of federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service, used controversial facial recognition technologies with little to no oversight and regulation. 

Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law specializing in privacy, civil rights, and surveillance, called the first-of-its-kind study a “red flag” that exposed “how ad hoc and happenstance the adoption of all of these technologies are.” 

The report surveyed 42 federal agencies employing law enforcement officials about their use of facial recognition systems from January 2015 through March 2020. Nearly half of those surveyed — 20 — reported using the technology, investigators found. Those included the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Secret Service, among others, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.