The statement comes after FedScoop reported Thursday that the DOJ disclosed in its public inventory of AI use cases that the FBI was initiating use of Rekognition as part of something called “Project Tyr.” The disclosure is significant because Amazon had previously extended a moratorium on police use of Rekognition, though the company did not originally clarify how that moratorium might apply to federal law enforcement. 

In an emailed response to FedScoop, Amazon spokesperson Duncan Neasham said: “We imposed a moratorium on police departments’ use of Amazon Rekognition’s face comparison feature in connection with criminal investigations in June 2020, and to suggest we have relaxed this moratorium is false. Rekognition is an image and video analysis service that has many non-facial analysis and comparison features. Nothing in the Department of Justice’s disclosure indicates the FBI is violating the moratorium in any way.”

According to Amazon’s terms of service, the company placed a moratorium on the “use of Amazon Rekognition’s face comparison feature by police departments in connection with criminal investigations. This moratorium does not apply to use of Amazon Rekognition’s face comparison feature to help identify or locate missing persons.”

The company’s public statement about its one-year moratorium in 2020, which was reportedly extended indefinitely, stated that it applied to “police use of Rekognition.” That statement did not specifically call out the “face comparison feature” or use of the tool related to criminal investigations.

Neasham further stated on Friday that Amazon believes “governments should put in place regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and we are ready to help them design appropriate rules, if requested.”

The description of the use case in DOJ’s AI inventory doesn’t mention the term “facial recognition,” but it states that the agency is working on customizing the tool to “review and identify items containing nudity, weapons, explosives, and other identifying information.” Neither Amazon nor the DOJ have clarified FedScoop questions about whether the FBI had access to facial recognition technology through this work.

Civil liberties advocates told FedScoop that the use case surprised them, given Amazon’s previous statements on facial recognition, Rekognition, and police.

“After immense public pressure, Amazon committed to not providing a face recognition product to law enforcement, and so any provision of Rekognition to DOJ would raise serious questions about whether Amazon has broken that promise and engaged in deception,” American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California attorney Matt Cagle said in a Thursday statement to FedScoop.  

DOJ spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle did not address several aspects of the project but provided a statement pointing to the agency’s creation of an Emerging Technologies Board to “coordinate and govern AI and other emerging technology issues across the Department.” The FBI declined to comment through the DOJ.

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The ACLU’s opposition to law enforcement use of facial recognition tech — specifically Amazon’s Rekognition software — is long-standing and well-documented. But now, the organization is making it personal.

Using Rekognition, the ACLU said it paid $12.33 (“less than a large pizza,” the blog post is careful to point out) to build a database of 25,000 publicly available arrest photos and run that database against public photos of every sitting member of the House and Senate.

The results? The software, according to ACLU, incorrectly identified 28 sitting members of Congress as individuals who have been arrested.

The misidentified congresspeople were men and women, Republicans and Democrats — a diverse bunch including the likes of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J., and Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif.

The results support the concern that facial recognition technologies like Rekognition are especially likely to misidentify people of color. Thirty nine percent of the 28 misidentified members of Congress were people of color, despite the fact that people of color make up only about 20 percent of the legislative body.

“People of color are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it’s easy to see how Rekognition could exacerbate that,” the ACLU writes. The Congressional Black Caucus recently wrote a letter to Amazon head Jeff Bezos, expressing their concern about racial bias in facial recognition technology.

Rekognition is used by the Washington County police department in Oregon and by the city of Orlando — cases that have received criticisms from watchdog groups as well as Amazon employees. It’s unclear if any federal agencies are using Rekognition, but Amazon has marketed the tech to law enforcement at all levels of government.

Despite the criticism, Amazon Web Services’ vice president for worldwide public sector, Teresa Carlson, recently said the company is “unwaveringly” committed to the U.S. government.

“We provide them the tools, we don’t provide the solution application that they build,” she said at the Aspen Security Conference. “And we often don’t know everything they’re actually utilizing the tool for. But they need to have the most innovative and cutting-edge tools they can.”

Echoing previous Amazon statements, Carlson added that government users have a responsibility to use the technology in an “ethical” way. “When the government signs up with us, they still have to have ethical use rights of our tool,” she said. “So if they’re breaking the law, they’re doing something, we would pull that for those reasons. And they sign up and they know the use rights of our tools as well.”

The ACLU’s concern, meanwhile, is that as a society we haven’t fully reckoned with what “ethical” use of this technology looks like. Because of this, and the racial bias concerns, the group argues that the tech is not yet ready for primetime.

“Congress should press for a federal moratorium on the use of face surveillance until its harms, particularly to vulnerable communities, are fully considered,” Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU legislative counsel, said in a statement. “The public deserves a full debate about how and if face surveillance should be used.”

The post ACLU puts members of Congress in the facial recognition crosshairs appeared first on FedScoop.

In a blog post published last week, company President Brad Smith wrote to express the company’s support for “proactive” congressional oversight of the emerging technology, instead of leaving the industry to police itself. Most other companies that make facial recognition software have largely remained mum on the subject of privacy. Some, like Amazon, have defended the biometric tech by citing its benefits.

“Facial recognition technology raises issues that go to the heart of fundamental human rights protections like privacy and freedom of expression,” Smith wrote. “These issues heighten responsibility for tech companies that create these products. In our view, they also call for thoughtful government regulation and for the development of norms around acceptable uses.”

Smith acknowledges that facial recognition technology has some useful applications — like catching a criminal, perhaps — but also highlights some of the potential for overstepping civil liberty boundaries.

“Imagine a government tracking everywhere you walked over the past month without your permission or knowledge,” Smith writes. “This has long been the stuff of science fiction and popular movies – like ‘Minority Report,’ ‘Enemy of the State’ and even ‘1984’ – but now it’s on the verge of becoming possible.”

Where deployed by government, facial recognition technology has been controversial. A Customs and Border Protection pilot program has drawn criticism from legal circles. And the city of Orlando’s work with Amazon facial recognition software Rekognition has received public blowback from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Trump administration’s approach to emerging technologies has been characterized by the argument that any further government regulation will stifle private sector innovation. Specifically in the case of artificial intelligence, the technology that powers facial recognition software and has been a big focus for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, leaders have continuously argued against regulation.

“We didn’t roll out the red tape before Edison turned on the first lightbulb. We didn’t cut the lines before Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call,” U.S. Deputy CTO Michael Kratsios said in his remarks at the White House Select Committee on AI kickoff meeting. The unknown, he argued, “is no excuse for preemptive government intervention.”

Smith, meanwhile, rejects the idea that facial recognition is an area where industry can or should self-regulate.

“While we appreciate that some people today are calling for tech companies to make these decisions … we believe this is an inadequate substitute for decision making by the public and its representatives in a democratic republic,” he writes.

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