Face Recognition + Mandatory Police Body Cameras = Mass Surveillance? (siliconvalley.com)

Facial recognition software is already in use, and it has privacy advocates worried. An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup. Southern California-based FaceFirst sells its facial recognition technology to retail stores, which use it to identify shoplifters who have been banned from the store, and alert management if they return. Corporate offices and banks also use the software to recognize people who are wanted by police... Several local law enforcement agencies have expressed interest in the technology, but so far none have had the budget for it. FaceFirst sells software police officers can install on their smartphones and use to identify people in the field from up to 12 feet away.

Some privacy experts worry facial recognition technology will show up next in police body cameras, with potentially dangerous consequences... The problem, say privacy advocates, is that all kinds of people come into contact with police, including many who are never suspected of any crimes. So lots of innocent people could be caught up in a police database fed by face-recognizing body cameras. The body cameras could turn into a "massive mobile surveillance network," said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
One-third of America's police departments use body cameras. (And just in San Jose, there's already 450 neighborhood cameras that have also agreed to share their footage for police investigations.) The new technologies concern the ACLU's policy director for technology and civil liberties. "You have very powerful systems being purchased, most often in secret, with little-to-no public debate and no process in place to make sure that there are policies in place to safeguard community members."

Comments

Body cameras should be retail surveillance

[alispguru]

Body cameras should encrypt their contents as they capture them.

Records at the station house should be dumps of the encrypted data.

The keys should be stored elsewhere, available by subpoena or warrant.

In addition to making body cam data useless for mass surveillance, wearers can be required to have the camera running all the time - nobody gets to see officers in the bathroom unless they are accused of beating someone up there.

Re:Body cameras should be retail surveillance

[MatthiasF]

I have argued this in the distant past and am glad it is getting attention, but we all need to worry about long-term recorded surveillance and the growing developments in machine learning. In the past, the majority of surveillance was recorded short-term and often examined in real-time for human operators to watch over larger areas easily. But we have quickly come to the point where long-term recording is getting cheap enough for indefinite storage. This might seem like a bad thing in itself but made even worse with the fact machine learning also improving to the point where processing hours of the recordings is easily possible with automated software.

This combination means that anyone could in theory be charged with a "recorded crime", meaning that law enforcement did not notice your crime in real-time and no one filed a crime against you but later follow up systems/software found the infraction. At first these systems will probably only be used to help existing investigations but no doubt it will be used later in much the same way as red-light and speeding cameras trying to generate revenue for municipalities.

Should this be allowed in our society? Where do we draw the line?

Secondly, the integrity of the recordings should be paramount. Your idea for encryption is a good one, perhaps expanding it to breaking down the recordings on a 10-15 minute basis with an individual key and checksum for each.

I mention a checksum because we are already at the point where computer generated imagery (CGI) has photo-realism and it could be possible for someone to easily plant images into these streams, allowing the changing of faces, clothing, etc. Body cam footage need to be handled as a chain of evidence and their recordings must be kept secure while also well documented against manipulation.

Law makers need to address this issue now, otherwise this will create a kind of police state that even makes the world of 1984 look like utopia.