MassPrivateIOn a residential street in San Diego County, Calif., Chula Vista police had just arrested a young woman, still in her pajamas, for possession of narcotics. Before taking her away, Officer Rob Halverson paused in the front yard, held a Samsung Galaxy tablet up to the woman’s face and snapped a photo.
Halverson fiddled with the tablet with his index finger a few times, and – without needing to ask the woman’s name or check her identification – her mug shot from a previous arrest, address, criminal history and other personal information appeared on the screen.
Halverson had run the woman’s photograph through the Tactical Identification System, (TACIDS) a new mobile facial recognition technology now in the hands of San Diego-area law enforcement. In an instant, the system matches images taken in the field with databases of about 348,000 San Diego County arrestees. The system itself has nearly 1.4 million booking photos because many people have multiple mug shots on record.
Compared with the number of arrests throughout the San Diego region, which has about 3.2 million residents, the system is rolling out with relatively modest numbers. In the first 10 months of 2013, officers ran 5,629 queries through the database.
The sheriff’s department and San Diego Police Department have the most devices, with 64 and 27 devices, respectively, and they have made nearly 2,000 queries into the system combined. The most active single user is an SDSU police officer who used a device 224 times from January to Oct. 30, according to the documents.
The little-known program could become the largest expansion of facial recognition technology by U.S. law enforcement. Amid an international debate over collecting and sharing huge amounts of data on the public, this pilot program is putting that metadata to use in the field in real time.
Law enforcement officials said the pilot program is a valuable tool to help them identify people who refuse to give their names or use fake identification. Immigration officials said they have used the system to help them when they encounter immigrants who don’t have authorization to be in the U.S.
“Photographs are neutral – you can’t say it’s racist when a camera is taking a neutral picture of someone,” said Halverson, the Chula Vista officer. “It’s hitting on certain points of contact. It’s doing a neutral analysis of a person.”
The use of this technology was rolled out without any public hearings or notice. In turn, the secrecy of the program has alarmed privacy experts and raised questions about whether San Diego is the leading edge of an alarming future – one in which few people escape cataloging in a government database.
Twenty-five local, state and federal law enforcement agencies – including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and San Diego State University – participate in the system. The project is coordinated by the San Diego Association of Governments and relies on a vast data-sharing program called the Automated Regional Justice Information System.
San Diego’s program, if considered successful, easily could expand beyond the county’s borders.
The system’s mug shots are pulled from the statewide Cal-Photo law enforcement database, which also has access to 32 million driver’s license photos. And, according to a report by the Automated Regional Justice Information System, the county is looking at using mug shots from statewide gang and parolee databases, as well as information stored by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The legality of law enforcement using facial recognition technology has not been tested in the courts. But a Privacy Impact Assessment, which the Automated Regional Justice Information System helped write, claims that photos of everyday people can be taken during “traditional police-civilian encounters.”
San Diego law enforcement agencies have used the facial recognition system since the beginning of this year, when 133 Galaxy tablets and smartphones were distributed to 25 law enforcement agencies around the region, according to documents obtained through a public records request by theElectronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that studies surveillance and privacy issues.
http://cironline.org/reports/facial-recognition-once-battlefield-tool-lands-san-diego-county-5502?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonua3LZKXonjHpfsX57%2B8pWqSg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YIARcd0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEAQ7fYUaNst6IEUg%3D%3D
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/san-diego-gets-your-face-new-mobile-identification-system
http://www.michiganstandard.com/8131/san-diego-gets-in-your-face-with-new-mobile-identification-system/
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/11/police-have-begun-using-tactical_12.html