Yahoo Autos The Feds May Be Peeking at Your Driver's-License Photo, and You Can't Do Anything about It
The Washington Post unearthed a trove of information showing how federal agencies are using state DMVs to match potential criminal suspects.
Facial-recognition software is more than two decades old but is not accurate enough to provide a single match among hundreds of millions of photos.
Federal agencies say they only use the technology in ongoing criminal investigations.
In yet another example of how the 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report was prescient, federal agents are reportedly using driver's-license photos to run facial-recognition scans without the license holders' knowledge or permission. The FBI doesn't need the precog twins from that movie to identify a suspect—or a suspect who looks strikingly like you. They only need the DMV.
In our 2014 report on license-plate readers, we wrote that "the potential fusion of public records, DMV databases, and facial-recognition software is already on the horizon." A Washington Post exposé published this week confirms it's happening now—and has been for years in some places. The Post made public-records requests and uncovered internal documents, including email, over the past five years showing that federal investigators are using states' DMV databases for surveillance.
The Post describes a "gold mine" of driver's-license photos numbering in the hundreds of millions made available to the FBI and to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A total of 21 states, according to the paper's research, give federal agencies explicit access to scan these photos in the hopes of matching a blurry surveillance video of a potential murderer with a mugshot from a license—possibly the one you had taken after waiting for hours on a plastic chair.
The protocol, as with license-plate readers, is to restrict these photo searches to legitimate law-enforcement agents working on a documented criminal investigation. But in practice, the FBI "provides little information about when the searches are used, who is targeted, and how often searches return false matches," the Post wrote. The relationship between FBI agents and state DMV employees is also at play, the Post said, which can involve sending emails with photo attachments and asking DMV offices to manually comb through their databases.
The report said the searches are not only done to find people suspected of criminal activity; they're also used to find "possible witnesses, victims, bodies, and innocent bystanders" as well as "other people not charged with crimes."
Federal agencies and local police departments stress they only use facial recognition as one tool to solve crimes and would not press charges on an individual solely based on artificial intelligence.
But there are important flaws in the process, as the Post story notes. Image quality, lighting quality, and the color of the subject's skin all affect how accurately an image can be evaluated by facial-recognition software.
The New York Times reported on the issue this week, too. The paper cited, among others, a study titled "Characterizing the Variability in Face Recognition Accuracy Relative to Race," which found that facial-recognition software is more likely to return false matches when the faces being looked at have darker skin.
Were you looking at that parked car a little too long? Maybe you resemble someone in the MS-13 gang? The precogs are watching, and they're not flawless by any means.
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