“There are a lot of different tools available to law enforcement. Facial recognition is one of the tools that is effective, said Dr. Nicole Napolitano, research director at the Center for Policy Equity. But it is not without pitfalls. Like PimEyes, tools like Clearview AI can make mistakes and incorrectly identify people, leading to caught by mistake. “Police become increasingly dependent and then biased by what the model tells them,” Napolitano said.
“There is no constitution right to cover one’s face in public,” charged Meyers, the Manhattan Institute’s police director.
Indeed, the legal landscape surrounding how law enforcement can use surveillance technologies remains vague, said Beth Haroules, staff attorney for the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Ky, explains, largely because the law has not kept up with the pace of technological development. develop.
For Haroules, the prospect of total surveillance means that people can never really have a reasonable expectation of privacy—an important historical legal standard. “[Surveillance] cameras are not just the eyes of the police,” she said. “They are being watched, probably 24/7, in real time. They’re feeding images into artificial intelligence, powered by algorithms that then kick in and match you with some faces and places you’ve been to.”
However, that legal haze may finally be starting to lift.
This summer, a federal appeals court judge declared that the geofence order violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, despite the decision This is only valid in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Likewise, a New York judge rule Warrantless phone searches at border crossings are unconstitutional. Although the ruling only applies to part of New York, it includes JFK, one of the country’s busiest airports.
Phone manufacturers are also making strides in technological solutions to circumvent surveillance methods. Google changes are announced about how it stores users’ location data, making it impossible to comply with geofencing guarantees in the future.
Even so, determining when police are using surveillance technology can be difficult. Tushar Jois, a City College of New York professor who studies the intersection of privacy, technology and censorship, said that police departments “will often suppress evidence in their cases instead of for sharing data” about their use of surveillance technology.
Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the technology-focused civil liberties nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that many things that law enforcement officials once only dreamed of are now This is becoming increasingly possible.
“I think there has been a sea change in the way we need to think about what it means to have an expectation of privacy in public spaces,” Lipton said.
Half a century ago, Lipton explains, you could see someone following you on the street, listening in on your conversation. Now, that kind of surveillance isn’t so obvious.
“It’s something that we, as a country, really need to reassess,” she added. “We don’t want to be in a situation, whether as protesters or just regular individuals, trying to live a life where we’re basically always being watched and listened to.”
