28 newyork| november11–24, 2019
MAR 14
Congress
considers
banningfacial
recognition,
thendoes
nothing.THERE WILL BE NO
TURNING BACK ON FACI AL RECOGNITION
By Lane BrownHIS MARCH, REPUBLICAN senator Roy Blunt
and Democratic senator Brian Schatz intro-
duced the Commercial Facial Recognition Pri-
vacy Act, a bill that would prohibit companies
from using facial recognition to track you in
public. It was the kind of common-sense bipar-
tisan proposal that almost everybody can agree
with; the bill was referred to a Senate commit-
tee and never made it to a vote. This has been,
more or less, the pattern for this tech: creepi-
ness and protest and gestures toward action with no limitation to
show for it. Facial recognition just keeps eating the world. That
goes doubly for law enforcement, where the principle of consent
is not exactly paramount.
On Friday, August 16, at around 7 a.m., a pair of suspicious ap-
pliances was found on a subway platform at the Fulton Street sta-
tion in lower Manhattan and, an hour later, a third was found near
a garbage can on West 16th Street. Initially, police thought they
might be improvised bombs, but on inspection they turned out to
be harmless empty rice cookers, probably meant to scare but not
explode. Trains were delayed for hours during the morning com-
mute, but since that happens often enough without any terrorist
help at all, the scariest thing about this episode might have been the
way the alleged perpetrator was caught.
Minutes after the discovery, the NYPD pulled images of a man
leaving the devices from subway surveillance cameras and gave
them to its Facial Identification Section (FIS), which ran them
through software that automatically compared his face to millions
of mug shots in the police department’s database. The program spit
back hundreds of potential matches among which officers quickly
spotted their person of interest: Larry Griffin II, a homeless 26-year-
old the NYPD had arrested in March with drug paraphernalia. FIS
double-checked its surveillance pictures against Griffin’s social-
media accounts, and by 8:15 a.m., Griffin’s name and photos had
been sent to the cell phones of every cop in New York. He was
arrested in the Bronx just past midnight and charged with three
counts of planting a false bomb. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
This might seem like a feel-good story: A potentially dangerous
person was apprehended with impossible speed thanks to by-the-
book use of new technology. But zoom out and it looks more like a
silver lining on one of this year’s biggest feel-bad stories: The system
that ensnared Griffin is only a small piece of a sprawling, privacy-
wrecking apparatus that now surrounds us, built under our noses
(and maybe using our noses) by tech companies, law enforcement,
and a secretive array of data brokers and other third parties.
In 2019, facial recognition may have graduated from dystopian
underdog—it was only the fourth- or fifth-most- frightening thing