How the Police Use AI to Track and Identify You
October 3rd, 2020Via: The Gradient:
Surveillance is becoming an increasingly controversial application given the rapid pace at which AI systems are being developed and deployed worldwide.
While protestors marched through the city demanding justice for George Floyd and an end to police brutality, Minneapolis police trained surveillance tools to identify them. With just hours to sift through thousands of CCTV camera feeds and other dragnet data streams, the police turned to a range of automated systems for help, reaching for information collected by automated license plate readers, CCTV-video analysis software, open-source geolocation tools, and Clearview AI’s controversial facial recognition system. High above the city, an unarmed Predator drone flew in circles, outfitted with a specialized camera first pioneered by the police in Baltimore that is capable of identifying individuals from 10,000 feet in the air, providing real-time surveillance of protestors across the city. But Minneapolis is not an isolated case of excessive policing and technology run amok. Instead, it is part of a larger strategy by the state, local, and federal government to build surveillance dragnets that pull in people’s emails, texts, bank records, and smartphone location as well as their faces, movements, and physical whereabouts to equip law enforcement with unprecedented tools to search for and identify Americans without a warrant.
The federal government has worked hand in glove with state and local police to create the kind of pervasive and precise surveillance systems that the Founder Fathers explicitly sought to reject with the Fourth Amendment. Explicitly written to tie the police powers of the state, the Fourth Amendment grew out of the colonists’ experience with agents of the British Crown who, in an effort to stamp out rampant smuggling in the colonies, used “writs of assistance” to search any American and confiscate his or her important documents and possessions without a warrant or even an arrest. The Fourth Amendment forces the government to produce evidence that a suspect committed a crime (called probable cause) and a warrant signed by a judge stating what documents or information they believe they’ll find when they search him or her. However, those protections have eroded in the digital age. Technology and lax data and privacy laws have enabled the rise of dragnet surveillance systems that regularly search and seize critical data and devices from Americans without a warrant or a crime committed, relying on automated systems to carry out modern-day, digital writs of assistance on Americans.
