Smart Cities World reported recently that Somerville in Massachusetts had become the second US city, after San Francisco, to ban the use of facial recognition technology by the city government.
It quoted a Boston Globe report that the motion had been passed unanimously by the city council, and quoted the council’s ordinance saying the council had expressed “concerns around the ethics and accuracy of facial recognition technology.”
That’s good news, but I don’t think it will last. Accuracy will certainly increase and I’d expect the security imperative will override ethical considerations, even in liberal democracies.
We’ve already seen plenty of questionable legislation introduced in Australia in the name of national security, justified on the basis of the threat to our security posed by terrorism. And if you believe what the vendors of facial recognition technology are saying, accuracy is already very good.
And in Australia we are already closer to the Orwellian scenario of mass individual surveillance than you might expect.
Darwin “using Chinese-inspired surveillance”
In May the NT News reported: “Darwin Council will use Chinese-inspired surveillance technology to gather data on what people are doing on their phones and to put up ‘virtual fences’ that will instantly trigger an alert if crossed.
It quoted Josh Sattler, the council’s innovation, growth and development services general manager saying: “The artificial intelligence program will be watching, we won’t be.
“We’ll be getting sent an alarm saying ‘there’s a person in this area that you’ve put a virtual fence around’ … boom, an alert goes out to whatever authority, whether it’s us or police to say ‘look at camera five’.”
Writing in The Conversation Peter Rogers, senior lecturer in sociology of law at Macquarie University, argued that Sattler’s statement “equates to real-time tracking of a private citizen by law enforcement and local council.”
It doesn’t but as Rogers points out by ‘joining the dots’ of a series of Darwin Council initiatives, such a scenario is only one dot away, and he notes that Darwin and Palmerston council have bought five new high-definition mobile CCTV units with $635,000 in funding from the Australian government’s Safer Communities Fund to be used to police “crime and anti-social behaviour” and to “protect organisations that may face security risks”.
With the technology in place there will undoubtedly be temptations to use its considerable potential for fighting “crime and anti-social behaviour,” and the vendors of the technology are actively promoting its capabilities.
The case for smart city face recognition
NEC, for example, has a publication How digital technology can be the difference in making cities safer in which it argues the case for universal facial recognition in the cause of national security.
It notes that one of the London Bridge attackers in 2017 “was filmed in a British documentary unfurling an ISIS flag and being involved in an altercation with police officers a year before the incident,” and that Man Haron Monis perpetrator of the Lindt Café siege, had “been observed at protests against counter- terrorism police operations.”
It then asks “What if there is a way to map out a possible sequence of activities, from an attacker’s passive radicalisation to active involvement online to the actual acting out of the extremist agenda?”
It says such mapping could help stop terroristic leanings from being taken to a deadly conclusion, but to be successful, “surveillance is needed in both the digital and physical spaces.”
And surveilling physical spaces is what NEC facial recognition is all about. “Surveillance will be more effective if it can triangulate three criteria – the person, place and time of interest. It must be able to make sense of the context provided by the raw data captured on video cameras.
“If a person on a watchlist turns up at a high-profile area, say, a parliament building and a time when the government is meeting, it could mean that the possibility of an incident could be higher than usual. An alert has to be sent out at a higher level than if one or two of the criteria are met.
“This could mean the difference between foiling an imminent attack and having the information being missed in a sea of data flooding in today.”
The use of facial recognition by the government of China has been well-publicised, but it is not restricted to totalitarian regimes. According to NEC. n 2017 NEC boasted about the sale of its facial recognition technology to UK police in Wales.
It quoted assistant chief constable Richard Lewis saying: “Facial recognition technology will enable us to search, scan and monitor images and video against a range of offender databases leading to faster and more accurate identification of persons of interest.
“This has been borne out by the recent arrest of a 34-year old man from Cardiff who was wanted for a recall to prison. He had walked past several officers on a main street in Cardiff before he was identified by the cameras and it is probably an arrest we would not have made at any previous time.”
Face recognition accuracy improving
Ethical concerns were one reason the Somerville Council voted against face recognition technology. Accuracy was the other. Whatever the accuracy limitations are today, the will certainly reduce and if you believethe marketing literature of NEC, whose NeoFace Watch technology was rated world’s best in 2017 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) accuracy is already pretty good.
NEC claims 85 percent accuracy in a ‘difficult environment’: detection a suspicious individual in an indoor stadium.
Australian security organisations are already close to being primed for the introduction of video surveillance and individual recognition.
Preparing the way in Australia
In October 2017, the Prime Minister and state and territory leaders agreed to establish a National Facial Biometric Matching Capabilityand signed an Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services to “make it easier for security and law enforcement agencies to identify suspects or victims of terrorist or other criminal activity, and help to protect Australians from identity crime.”
It allows agencies to match an individual’s image against those held in passport, visa, citizenship, and driver licence databases.
The capability will be enabled by two pieces of legislation:The Identity-matching Services Bill 2018will authorise the Department of Home Affairs to collect, use and disclose identification information in order to operate the systems that will support a set of new biometric face-matching services.
The Australian Passports Amendment (Identity-matching Services) Bill 2018will authorise the Minister for Foreign Affairs to disclose personal information for the purpose of participating in a service to share or match information relating to the identity of a person.
Both bills were being reviewed by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security but the inquiry lapsed when Parliament was dissolved and has yet to be restarted.
That I fear is just a temporary setback.
