This week, the House of Representatives is deciding on a proposed bill from Maine that would force their State Police to be more transparent about their use of surveillance technology. Maine is one of two states that has a legislative measure that prohibits police from disclosing information about their intelligence records or methods and now, a representative claims the police are concealing whether or not they are conducting mass surveillance of citizens. The ACLU has been in fervent support of this bill with a spokesperson stating “We can’t regulate what we don’t know” and “Surveillance technology is developing at an incredible pace, and we can’t afford to wait another year to find out what our law enforcement agencies are doing with it.”
The reason this story caught my eye is because it led me to start thinking about the greater implications of the use of technology in our current policing systems. With the rapid growth of what technology is able to do and accomplish, there are also dozens of ethical questions always being posed about whether we even SHOULD do those things. With regards to policing, the questions being raised now are “how far is too far?” and when do measures start delving into the area of preventative policing and not reactionary.
Currently, communities across the country are starting to have discussions on this issue because federal law enforcement affects all citizens. The two types of technology being discussed and under the most scrutiny are facial recognition and cell site simulators.
Facial recognition technology can map an individual’s facial features using a digital image or surveillance video, creating a profile similar to a fingerprint. The profile is then compared to faces in existing databases, such as those from driver’s licenses, state IDs, immigration records, or passport photos. Along with the fact that this can allow the government to track individuals, many are questioning the accuracy of facial recognition software. While the FBI’s current system boasts an accuracy rate of 85%, studies have shown that facial recognition has significantly greater inaccuracy in identifying people of color, especially black women. One does not need to think too deeply to realize the greater negative implications of this. Already, people of color are frequently charged and prosecuted incorrectly and the presence of a faulty identifying system would only exacerbate this problem, not mitigate it. In addition, to many Americans, the technology is an infringement of privacy. According to a May 2018 report, the FBI has access to 418 million facial images for searches. The framework for what seems to be a dystopian state of surveillance straight out of fiction is currently being created in our country and that scares many people, myself included.
The second piece of technology in question are cell site simulators. These devices can easily be fit into briefcases and be carried in police cars or airplanes to ping for cell phones and turn them into tracking devices. In addition, these devices could potentially then be used to intercept messages sent and received by the cell phone. What is most alarming to me about this part of the story is that the Department of Public Safety said he stands by their previous response that “The State is neither confirming nor denying a broad range of information related to technology.”
This week’s topic overall was just really eye opening about the extent of surveillance and I hope it has left you with as many lasting ethical questions regarding policing and technology as it has left me.
I think there is a lot of upsides to using technology in law enforcement. Body cameras are a fairly new piece of technology that has benefitted police and citizens in a lot of cases. The whole facial recognition thing freaks me out though, and I think it might be a little excessive.
It’s interesting to gauge people’s reaction to surveillance since some people are comfortable living in ignorance while some people are very uncomfortable with the idea of it. I’ve heard that in China, they regularly use facial recognition to check people for boarding trains, etc and I think it might be easier there since they do have a more racially homogenous population as opposed to the U.S.
Technology is an imperative part of policing. Even the two uses you mentioned are imperative to policing. It also reminds me of the whole debate on body cams and whether police should carry them and who would have access to see what the body cams had captured.
When my brother was applying to Schreyer, it was at a time where safety through surveillance became a hot button issue, and he ended up writing one of his essays about this debate. When it comes down to it, increases in technology are going to have their upsides and downsides. While technology gets creepier each year, more ways to keep citizens safe are discovered. I tend to go back and forth with this topic.
Technology is so scary sometimes (its super cool but also just terrifying). When talking about the future of technology in public policing my mind often wanders to various conspiracy theories and how this technology could easily be abused without regulation.