Human rights organisations slammed technology giant Amazon for selling a tool known as “Rekognition” to the US government, allowing the latter to ‘compare anonymous faces against other images to try and establish identity.’
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Whereas the US government is nowhere near being able to give its police officers facial recognition tools like the Chinese Communist Party plans to do, neither legally nor via hardware, the contracts certainly offer a clear indication as to where it wants to go in matters of national surveillance.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Amazon has promoted Rekognition for use with officer body cameras, a use that would fully transform those devices into surveillance machines, further threatening communities of color. This letter demands additional info about any Amazon plans to promote this dangerous use. 4/ <a href="https://t.co/Diyg2Evoj9">pic.twitter.com/Diyg2Evoj9</a></p>— Matt Cagle (@Matt_Cagle) <a href="https://twitter.com/Matt_Cagle/status/1000078559237455874?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 25, 2018</a></blockquote>
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A post on Amazon’s website indicates that the technology offers “security and surveillance applications” which include “crime prevention” by identifying “persons of interest.”
Civil rights organisations had obtained an email from a Washington County, Oregon sheriff’s who stated he had already built a searchable database of some 300,000 faces. The sheriff stated: “I am hoping to expand our backend of images to every law enforcement agency in the metro Portland area. And possibly even to all of Oregon and beyond.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Stop <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Rekognition?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Rekognition</a> <a href="https://t.co/jNYc7jkajN">https://t.co/jNYc7jkajN</a></p>— Matteo @ somewhere in between SF + cyberspace (@geminiimatt) <a href="https://twitter.com/geminiimatt/status/1000194948317114368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 26, 2018</a></blockquote>
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The ACLU has therefore sent a letter to the US Congress in which it states that this technology cold “effectively eliminate” the ability to “walk down the street without being watched by the government”.
“Amazon must act swiftly to stand up for civil rights and civil liberties, including those of its own customers, and take Rekognition off the table for governments.”
Amazon responded that Rekognition could be used for example to locate missing children or any person who’s been abducted: “Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology.”
“Imagine if customers couldn’t buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal purposes?”
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