Kathrine Frich
Walking down a typical American street usually comes with a basic sense of privacy.
People go to work, meet friends, or attend local gatherings without expecting their identity to be instantly checked by the state.
But a quiet digital upgrade inside local police departments might soon change how residents interact with law enforcement right outside their front doors.
Scans on demand
Federal immigration agents have long used sophisticated facial scanning technology to track down targets. Now, a newly uncovered government report reveals quiet plans to put that exact same power directly into the hands of local police officers.
According to NPR, the Department of Homeland Security outlined the strategy in a privacy assessment report. The tool itself is a new smartphone app called the ICE Task Force Module.
The software allows local police to instantly scan the face of anyone they stop during routine community patrols. From there, the app compares the captured image against more than 250 million federal biometric records.
These include State Department visa photos and travel verification files. Once the scan is complete, the software tells the officer whether to let the person go or provides an identification code to contact federal immigration authorities.
Storing the images
The digital footprint left behind by this scanning tool is immense. Every single photo captured on the street gets locked into a federal system for fifteen years.
DHS officials declined to share deep specifics about the program with reporters. In a statement, the agency noted it remains fully committed to ensuring that local police partners have the tools necessary to assist with massive deportation efforts.
Privacy advocates warn the program is sweeping up innocent people. Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told NPR that everyday citizens will inevitably get pulled into the dragnet.
“This kind of technology, which can impact individual rights, when it’s scaled, it can have potentially very, very large effects affecting lots and lots of people,” Eddington said. “It’s like a Bill of Rights disaster pretty much waiting to happen.”
Watching the streets
The expansion effectively turns thousands of local police officers into an extension of federal immigration enforcement. Legal experts worry about how officers will choose who to scan.
“It makes this sort of face surveillance ubiquitous on American streets,” Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist Cooper Quintin told NPR. “I don’t think that Americans should tolerate law enforcement being able to scan anyone’s face at any time for any reason to try to determine their identity. This is the new form of ‘papers, please.'”
Sources: NPR
