8 BUN THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020Mr. Howell, 42, is a lifelong protester and
self-taught coder; in graduate school, he
started working with neural net technology,
an artificial intelligence that learns to make
decisions from data it is fed, such as images.
He said that the police had tear-gassed him
during a midday protest in June, and that he
had begun researching how to build a facial
recognition product that could defeat offi-
cers’ attempts to shield their identity.
“This was, you know, kind of a ‘shower
thought’ moment for me, and just kind of an
intersection of what I know how to do and
what my current interests are,” he said. “Ac-
countability is important. We need to know
who is doing what, so we can deal with it.”
Mr. Howell is not alone in his pursuit. Law
enforcement has used facial recognition to
identify criminals, using photos from gov-
ernment databases or, through a company
called Clearview AI, from the public inter-
net. But now activists around the world are
turning the process around and developing
tools that can unmask law enforcement in
cases of misconduct.
“It doesn’t surprise me in the least,” said
Clare Garvie, a lawyer at Georgetown Uni-
versity’s Center on Privacy and Technology.
“I think some folks will say, ‘All’s fair in love
and war,’ but it highlights the risk of devel-
oping this technology without thinking
about its use in the hands of all possible
actors.”
The authorities targeted so far have not
been pleased. The New York Times re-
ported in July 2019 that Colin Cheung, a pro-
tester in Hong Kong, had developed a tool to
identify police officers using online photos
of them. After he posted a video about the
project on Facebook, he was arrested. Mr.
Cheung ultimately abandoned the work.
This month, the artist Paolo Cirio pub-
lished photos of 4,000 faces of French police
officers online for an exhibition called “Cap-
ture,” which he described as the first step in
developing a facial recognition app. He col-
lected the faces from 1,000 photos he had
gathered from the internet and from pho-
tographers who attended protests in
France. Mr. Cirio, 41, took the photos down
after France’s interior minister threatened
legal action but said he hoped to republish
them.
“It’s about the privacy of everyone,” said
Mr. Cirio, who believes facial recognition
should be banned. “It’s childish to try to
stop me, as an artist who is trying to raise
the problem, instead of addressing the
problem itself.”
Many police officers around the world
cover their faces, in whole or in part, as cap-
tured in recent videos of police violence in
Belarus. Last month, Andrew Maximov, a
technologist from the country who is now
based in Los Angeles, uploaded a video to
YouTube that demonstrated how facial rec-
ognition technology could be used to dig-
itally strip away the masks.
In the simulated footage, software
matches masked officers to full images of
officers taken from social media channels.
The two images are then merged so the offi-
cers are shown in uniform, with their faces
on display. It’s unclear if the matches are ac-
curate. The video, which was reported earli-
er by a news site about Russia called
Meduza, has been viewed more than one
million times.
“For a while now, everyone was aware
the big guys could use this to identify and
oppress the little guys, but we’re now ap-proaching the technological threshold
where the little guys can do it to the big
guys,” Mr. Maximov, 30, said. “It’s not just
the loss of anonymity. It’s the threat of
infamy.”
These activists say it has become rela-
tively easy to build facial recognition tools
thanks to off-the-shelf image recognition
software that has been made available in re-
cent years. In Portland, Mr. Howell used a
Google-provided platform, TensorFlow,
which helps people build machine-learning
models.
“The technical process — I’m not invent-
ing anything new,” he said. “The big prob-
lem here is getting quality images.”
Mr. Howell gathered thousands of images
of Portland police officers from news arti-
cles and social media after finding their
names on city websites. He also made a
public records request for a roster of police
officers, with their names and personnel
numbers, but it was denied.
Facebook has been a particularly helpful
source of images. “Here they all are at a bar-
becue or whatever, in uniform sometimes,”
Mr. Howell said. “It’s few enough people
that I can reasonably do it as an individual.”
Mr. Howell said his tool remained a work
in progress and could recognize only about
20 percent of Portland’s police force. He
hasn’t made it publicly available, but he said
it had already helped a friend confirm an of-
ficer’s identity. He declined to provide more
details.
Derek Carmon, a public information offi-
cer at the Portland Police Bureau, said that
“name tags were changed to personnel
numbers during protests to help eliminate
the doxxing of officers,” but that officers arerequired to wear name tags for “non-
protest-related duties.” Mr. Carmon said
people could file complaints using an offi-
cer’s personnel number. He declined to
comment on Mr. Howell’s software.
Older attempts to identify police officers
have relied on crowdsourcing. The news
service ProPublica asks readers to identify
officers in a series of videos of police vio-
lence. In 2016, an anti-surveillance group in
Chicago, the Lucy Parsons Lab, started
OpenOversight, a “public searchable data-
base of law enforcement officers.” It asks
people to upload photos of uniformed offi-
cers and match them to the officers’ names
or badge numbers.
“We were careful about what information
we were soliciting. We don’t want to encour-
age people to follow officers to playgrounds
with their kids,” said Jennifer Helsby, Open-
Oversight’s lead developer. “It has resulted
in officers being identified.”
For example, the database helped jour-
nalists at the Invisible Institute, a local
news organization, identify Chicago officers
who struck protesters with batons this sum-
mer, according to the institute’s director of
public strategy, Maira Khwaja.
Photos of more than 1,000 officers have
been uploaded to the site, Ms. Helsby said,
adding that versions of the open-source
database have been started in other cities,
including Portland. That version is called
Cops.Photo, and is one of the places from
which Mr. Howell obtained identified pho-
tos of police officers.
Mr. Howell originally wanted to make his
work publicly available, but is now con-
cerned that distributing his tool to others
would be illegal under the city’s new facial
recognition laws, he said.
“I have sought some legal advice and will
seek more,” Mr. Howell said. He described it
as “unwise” to release an illegal facial rec-
ognition app because the police “are not go-
ing to appreciate it to begin with.”
“I’d be naïve not to be a little concerned
about it,” he added. “But I think it’s worth
doing.”Paolo Cirio, above, an artist
who thinks facial recognition
software should be banned,
used 1,000 photos of French
police officers he gathered
from the internet and from
photographers who attended
protests in France to collect
4,000 faces for an online
exhibition called “Capture,”
top. Christopher Howell, above
right, tapped his knowledge of
neural net technology after the
police tear-gassed him at a
protest in Portland, Ore.PAOLO CIRIOANA BRIGIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MASON TRINCA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1‘It’s not just the loss of
anonymity. It’s the threat of
infamy,’ a technologist says.
Turning Facial Recognition Tools Against Police
‘Accountability is important.
We need to know who is doing
what, so we can deal with it,’ an
activist in Oregon says.
UCC PUBLIC SALE NOTICE
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