Smoking gun evidence of state surveillance tech in the U.S. and Mexico
Authoritarian governments around the world are well known for their mass surveillance technologies. But it’s not just the West’s favorite bad guys, like China and Russia, who take advantage of these capabilities.
The U.S. is deep in the game too. The American Civil Liberties Union recently won the release of thousands of documents, as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the FBI, that detail the role played by U.S. officials in the building of a mass surveillance apparatus. Working with academic researchers, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense wanted to develop facial recognition technology to watch and follow millions of people, some at “target distances” of more than half a mile, without their knowledge. The system was ultimately folded into a tool operated by the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which provides military technologies to civilian police forces across the country.
These are serious revelations, especially since we know that police in New Jersey, Michigan, Louisiana and a handful of other states have wrongfully arrested people — most of them people of color — on the basis of a bad match by a facial recognition algorithm. We also know from independent research and a massive, federally-funded study that these tools have higher error rates for people with darker skin and for women.
Legislators in a handful of cities and states in the U.S. have started trying to rein in the use of such technology, but it hasn’t been easy, especially given how fast the industry is moving. For a closer look at the push and pull of these proposals in cities across the country, check out this piece by my colleague Erica Hellerstein.