Tag: facial recognition

What’s Next For Battlefield America? Israel’s High-Tech Military Tactics Point The Way

“I did not know Israel was capturing or recording my face. [But Israel has] been watching us for years from the sky with their drones. They have been watching us gardening and going to schools and kissing our wives. I feel like I have been watched for so long.”

– Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet

If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel – a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S. – uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.

Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.

We’ve already seen many of these military tactics and technologies deployed on American soil and used against the populace, especially along the border regions, a testament to the heavy influence Israel’s military-industrial complex has had on U.S. policing.

Indeed, Israel has become one of the largest developers and exporters of military weapons and technologies of oppression worldwide.

Journalist Antony Loewenstein has warned that Pegasus, one of Israel’s most invasive pieces of spyware, which allows any government or military intelligence or police department to spy on someone’s phone and get all the information from that phone, has become a favorite tool of oppressive regimes around the world. The FBI and NYPD have also been recipients of the surveillance technology which promises to turn any “target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”

Yet it’s not just military weapons that Israel is exporting. They’re also helping to transform local police agencies into extensions of the military.

According to The Intercept, thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to Israel, “one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here,” as part of an ongoing exchange program that largely flies under the radar of public scrutiny.

A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”

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Digital IDs: The system of surveillance using biometrics does not require a physical ID card

When Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr. visited his home state of Texas to get his driving licence renewed, he never imagined the trip would result in him being wrongfully arrested and assaulted in jail.

Yet that is precisely what happened to the 61-year-old grandfather thanks to Houston Police’s reliance on facial recognition technology.

Murphy was arrested in relation to the armed robbery of a Sunglass Hut store in Houston. But while the real thieves were making off with thousands of dollars in cash and merchandise, Murphy was back home in California, nowhere near the scene. By the time the Harris County District Attorney’s office in Texas figured that out, it was already too late – three men had sexually assaulted Murphy in a bathroom in jail, leaving him with permanent injuries.

“Mr Murphy’s story is troubling for every citizen in this country,” said Daniel Dutko, a lawyer representing Murphy. “Any person could be improperly charged with a crime based on error-prone facial recognition software, just as he was.”

If you think that such things could never happen in the UK, think again. Some British police forces already use facial recognition tech. London’s Met Police use it on the streets routinely. It was also used last year to watch crowds at the King’s Coronation, at an Arsenal v Tottenham match, at a Beyonce gig, and even on F1 Grand Prix day at Silverstone.

According to civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, since the Met Police started using facial recognition tech, 85% of all matches identified by the system were wrong. The figure for South Wales police is even worse: 90% of matches were incorrect. “We’ve [personally] witnessed people being wrongly stopped by the police because facial recognition misidentified them,” the group said in a report.

Despite these disastrous figures, policing minister Chris Phelps wrote to police chiefs last October urging them to “double the number of [facial recognition] searches by May 2024, so they exceed 200,000 across England and Wales.”

“This dangerously authoritarian technology has the potential to turn populations into walking ID cards in a constant police lineup,” said Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch.

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New Report Finds Police Continue To Use Facial Recognition Even After It’s Banned

A major report in the Washington Post has found that law enforcement officers in U.S. several cities where facial recognition tech is banned for police have asked neighboring forces to search face databases for them.

Facial recognition has been prohibited in San Francisco since 2019. But Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s former district attorney, sums up the problem: “Police are using it but not saying they are using it.” The Post says the SFPD have outsourced at least five attempts to make facial matches. Some of these were done by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), a “multi-jurisdiction program serving law enforcement agencies in the region.” Others were farmed out to the Daly City Police Department. None were successful.

Police in Austin, Texas, however – also among the biggest U.S. cities to ban facial recognition – recorded 13 requests to a neighboring department for assistance with biometric face matching, and some of these led to arrests. Austin city employees are barred from using facial recognition as well as “information obtained” from the technology, with certain exceptions. But the suburb of Leander, just a 30-minute drive north of Austin, has no such restriction.

Leander’s police force has access to Clearview AI, which has courted many law enforcement agencies in the U.S., despite lingering questions about whether its method of scraping the public internet for facial images is 100 percent consensual. According to the Post, the Leander force also has a recognized Clearview AI “influencer”: Officer David Wilson, who performed several searches for the Austin force via Leander’s Clearview account. Emails seen by the Post show that officers contacted Wilson directly for the express purpose of requesting facial recognition searches.

Clearview, to its credit, officially prohibits their clients in law enforcement from sharing access to accounts. Yet anyone with a Netflix subscription knows that formal rules only matter if they are enforced. Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That has publicly promised customers that Clearview will try and close the loophole that allows police to export results of facial scans, even if they cannot share access. But Wilson sent most of his facial recognition results to Austin via email.

KXAN reports that Austin city council gave a statement saying the city was unaware of the complaint regarding police outsourcing facial recognition, and that investigations are underway.

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Appeals Court Upholds Police Right to Compel Biometric Device Unlocking

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued an opinion in a case involving the police forcing a suspect to unlock their phone via a biometric feature on the device.

The court said this practice, at least in the case it considered, is not unconstitutional.

The appeal was lodged by Jeremy Payne, a defendant in a drug distribution case, who was forced (“compelled”) by the police to unlock his phone with his thumbprint.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

Payne was hoping to have his motion to suppress evidence accepted – after this was previously denied by a district court – but the Court of Appeals found that obtaining evidence in this way does not mean that the police violated his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

And while the appellate court said that other circuits and the Supreme Court are yet to rule if the forced use of a biometric to unlock a device is “testimonial” – in this case, the forcible use of the suspect’s thumb “required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

The three-judge panel was satisfied that the police could have accomplished the same task “even if Payne had been unconscious” – so they saw no evidence of the suspect and later defendant being driven to engage in self-incrimination.

Namely, the physical action of forcibly pressing the thumb onto the device “did not intrude on the contents of Payne’s mind.”

Another reason the judges sided with the police is that Payne was not made to “acknowledge the existence of any incriminating information” – he was “merely” forced to provide access “to a source of potential information.”

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GOOGLE WON’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT ISRAEL USING ITS PHOTO SOFTWARE TO CREATE GAZA “HIT LIST”

THE ISRAELI MILITARY has reportedly implemented a facial recognition dragnet across the Gaza Strip, scanning ordinary Palestinians as they move throughout the ravaged territory, attempting to flee the ongoing bombardment and seeking sustenance for their families.

The program relies on two different facial recognition tools, according to the New York Times: one made by the Israeli contractor Corsight, and the other built into the popular consumer image organization platform offered through Google Photos. An anonymous Israeli official told the Times that Google Photos worked better than any of the alternative facial recognition tech, helping the Israelis make a “hit list” of alleged Hamas fighters who participated in the October 7 attack.

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Major League Baseball’s biometric ticketing collects 6K opening day hits

Fans entered a stadium with biometrics during the opening day of the 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) season, one of four ballparks to deploy the technology, and the league has high hopes for the touchless access program.

The Washington Nationals added biometric ticketing to their opening day lineup through MLB’s Go-Ahead Entry. The introduction of Go-Ahead Entry allows fans attending Nationals games to use the MLB Ballpark app for touchless entry at gates equipped with dedicated hardware.

Fans using the optional service register their biometrics with a selfie and then use facial authentication to enter at full walking speed through dedicated gates. Four lanes have been deployed at Nationals Park in D.C. Two of those are on the west end of the Park’s center field gates, another in center field, and one more on the first-base side of the stadium.

The rollout in Washington follows trials last year at Citizens Bank Ballpark in Philadelphia last year. Those trials showed the biometric lines moving 68 percent faster, and 2.5 times more people passing through them than the fastest lane using physical or smartphone-based tickets, reports the Fredericksburg Free Press. The Phillies have taken their deployment stadium-wide for the 2024 season.

Prior to that, face biometrics were used for entry to New York Mets games with Wicket technology, and to Cleveland Guardians games with Clear’s technology.

The facial recognition technology for MLB’s Go-Ahead Entry was developed by NEC, according to an April 1 ESPN report.

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JPMorgan To Roll Out Controversial Biometric Payments

America’s largest bank and one of the largest in the world, J.P. Morgan, is preparing to launch biometric payments next year and is currently carrying out pilot projects.

J.P. Morgan has chosen PopID – which verifies a person’s identity via facial recognition, among other methods – as the backbone for the project.

The massive financial corporation is clearly unwilling to be left behind the likes of Mastercard or Visa, who are both implementing biometrics-powered payments.

According to the bank, one of the first events where this was trialed was the Formula 1 race in Miami, and that was also the first time this happened at a Formula 1 venue.

The ultimate goal is to expand authentication based on individuals’ fingerprints, palms, and faces to anyone interested, but with a focus on stores, restaurants, and various event venues.

J.P. Morgan says this will be a faster and safer, as well as “personalized” way for customers to pay, while those with things to sell are promised higher turnover and improved customer loyalty, but also a centralized place to access transactions and marketing data, say reports.

And what’s in it for the bank, other than potentially amassing large amounts of biometric data? Merchants will have the opportunity to buy J.P. Morgan Payments tablets, though this will not be obligatory, but support and transaction processing fees will be.

In a statement, the bank revealed that it is betting on biometric payments as the industry is forecast to grow to 3 billion users and $5.8 trillion worth of transactions over the next two years. And the giant expects digital commerce to eventually cover online, mobile, and in-store checkout.

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The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze depending on who you ask on the internet. Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think 1984. You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film – or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.

Whether a surveillance state is the end goal is hard to say. The police chief of Pawnee, Indiana probably isn’t plotting the development of his own mini-Oceania. But, 18,000-plus mini-Oceanias operating across multiple platforms with varying degrees of integration, both locally and nationally, is undoubtedly the direction in which we are heading as salespeople peddle shiny new surveillance gadgets to cities big and small, making often unverified but intuitively appealing claims of how their devices will decrease crime or prove to be useful investigative tools.

Facial recognition tends to be the surveillance gadget that receives the most attention these days. You’ve seen it in movies and maybe feel some unease over visions of government agents sitting in a penumbrous room illuminated only by the faint glow of countless monitors with little boxes tracking the faces of every person walking down a busy city street. Likely, by now, you’ve also probably heard of facial recognition being used for relatively petty purposes or leading to incidents in which innocent people were harassed or arrested because a program made a mistake. Maybe you’ve even been following the efforts to ban the technology.

Yet, other surveillance gadgets that aren’t quite as sexy or as prevalent in pop culture manage to remain under the radar of even the most privacy-conscious as they are promoted through law enforcement peer referral programs organized by surveillance gadget companies seeking to have their devices in every town in America.

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Facial recognition used after Sunglass Hut robbery led to man’s wrongful jailing, says suit

A 61-year-old man is suing Macy’s and the parent company of Sunglass Hut over the stores’ alleged use of a facial recognition system that misidentified him as the culprit behind an armed robbery and led to his wrongful arrest. While in jail, he was beaten and raped, according to his suit.

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr was accused and arrested on charges of robbing a Houston-area Sunglass Hut of thousands of dollars of merchandise in January 2022, though his attorneys say he was living in California at the time of the robbery. He was arrested on 20 October 2023, according to his lawyers.

According to Murphy’s lawsuit, an employee of EssilorLuxottica, Sunglass Hut’s parent company, worked with its retail partner Macy’s and used facial recognition software to identify Murphy as the robber. The image that was put through the facial recognition system came from low-quality cameras, according to the lawsuit. While Houston police department was investigating the armed robbery, the EssilorLuxottica employee called police to say they could stop the investigation because the employee had identified one of two robbers with the technology. The employee also said the system had pointed to Murphy as committing two other robberies, according to the lawsuit.

When Murphy returned to Texas from California, he went to the department of motor vehicles (DMV) to renew his license. Within minutes of identifying himself to a DMV clerk, Murphy told the Guardian he was approached by a police officer who notified him there was a warrant out for his arrest for an aggravated robbery. Murphy said he was not told any details about his supposed crime except for the date the robbery occurred. He realized he was in Sacramento, California, at the time of the robbery – more than a thousand miles away.

“I almost thought it was a joke,” Murphy said.

Still, he was arrested and taken to the local county jail, where he was held for 10 days before being transferred to and processed in Harris county jail.

After a few days at Harris county, his alibi was confirmed by both his court-appointed defense attorney and the prosecutor, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped, according to the lawsuit.

Murphy was never convicted of a crime. Nonetheless, he says his detainment left him with deep scars. He was brutally beaten and gang-raped by three other men in the jail hours before he was released, he alleges. They threatened to kill him if he tried to report them to the jail staff, according to Murphy. After the alleged attack, Murphy remained in the same cell as them until he was released.

“That was kind of terrifying,” Murphy said. “Your anxiety is up so high, you’re still shaking the entire time. And I just got up on my bunk and just faced the wall and was just praying that something would come through and get me out of that tank.”

“The attack left him with permanent injuries that he has to live with every day of his life,” the lawsuit reads. “All of this happened to Murphy because the Defendants relied on facial recognition technology that is known to be error prone and faulty.”

Murphy did not realize facial recognition technology may have been used as evidence against him until two weeks ago, when he began working with his attorney, Daniel Dutko.

Dutko said he discovered from police documents that the Sunglass Hut worker shared camera footage with Macy’s, which employees from the department store chain used to identify Murphy. After that, Macy’s and Sunglass Hut contacted the police together, according to Dutko. Though Macy’s has retail partnerships with the eyewear brand in several locations, Macy’s had no connection to this robbery as the Sunglass Hut in question is a standalone location, he said.

“We feel very comfortable saying facial recognition software is the only possible explanation, and it’s the only reason why [Sunglass Hut] would go to Macy’s to try to identify him,” Dutko said.

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Miami Police Used Clearview AI Facial Recognition in Arrest of Homeless Man

Facial recognition technology is increasingly being deployed by police officers across the country, but the scope of its use has been hard to pin down.

In Miami, it’s used for cases big and exceedingly small, as one case Reason recently reviewed showed: Miami police used facial recognition technology to identify a homeless man who refused to give his name to an officer. That man was arrested, but prosecutors quickly dropped the case after determining the officer lacked probable cause for the arrest. 

The case was barely a blip in the daily churn of Miami’s criminal justice system, but it shows the spread of facial recognition technology and the use of retaliatory charges against those who annoy the police.

Lisa Femia, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which advocates for digital privacy rights, calls the case “a particularly egregious example of mission creep with facial recognition technology.”

“It’s often advertised as a way for law enforcement to solve the worst of the worst crimes,” Femia says. “And instead we have law enforcement here using it to harass the homeless.”

According to a police incident report, a man, who Reason is not identifying because he was ultimately not prosecuted, was sleeping on a bench in a parking garage at Miami International Airport on the morning of November 13, 2023, when he was approached by a Miami-Dade County police officer.

“While on routine patrol at the Miami International Airport I observed defendant sleeping on a bench in the Dolphin garage, covered with a blanket and unbagged personal items on airport luggage cart,” the officer wrote in his report. “The bench is provided for passengers waiting for vehicles to and from the airport. It is not designated for housing.”

The report notes that Miami-Dade police have been directed to address homelessness at the airport and that the officer initiated contact to see if the man had been previously issued a trespass warning.

The man didn’t have an ID, and he gave the officer a fake name and 2010 date of birth.

“Defendant was obviously not a 13-year-old juvenile,” the report says. “I provided defendant several opportunities to provide correct information and he refused.”

Under Florida law, police can demand identification from a pedestrian only when there is reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime. For example, two Florida sheriff’s deputies were disciplined in 2022 after they arrested a legally blind man for refusing to show his ID.

This officer had other means at his disposal, though. “I identified defendant via facial recognition from Clearview, with assistance from C. Perez, analyst at the MDPD real time crime center,” the report says.

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