{"id":59659,"date":"2018-05-22T08:12:46","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T15:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.46.6.243\/?p=59659"},"modified":"2018-05-22T08:12:46","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T15:12:46","slug":"aclu-targets-amazon-over-dragnet-surveillance-tool-citing-privacy-concerns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/?p=59659","title":{"rendered":"ACLU Targets Amazon Over Dragnet Surveillance Tool Citing Privacy Concerns"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco, CA…Today the American Civil Liberties Union Foundations of California\u00a0released emails<\/a>\u00a0between Amazon employees and local law enforcement revealing how the company has been pushing its facial recognition product, prompting privacy objections about how the technology is being used. The emails were obtained through freedom of information requests submitted by the ACLU.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The\u00a0documents<\/a>\u00a0are the result of a six-month ACLU investigation into how Amazon has been helping government agencies from Oregon to Florida deploy a new surveillance product called Rekognition, which is powered by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Also today, a diverse coalition of organizations including the ACLU sent a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that the company stop providing its facial recognition tool to the government. The letter emphasizes that the company\u2019s product is primed for abuse in the hands of governments, poses a grave threat to communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate, and undermines public trust in Amazon.<\/p>\n

Amazon has touted its Rekognition service as able to search against databases holding millions of faces and identify up to 100 people in a single image. It can track people in real time in streaming video of crowds and public places. Amazon\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0it expects a \u201ccommon use\u201d to be \u201ctracking people.\u201d The company has also encouraged the use of Rekognition to scan footage from police body cameras, a use-case that would fully transform devices intended for government accountability into widespread surveillance devices aimed at the public.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s documents show that Amazon worked with the city of Orlando, Florida, and the Washington County Sheriff\u2019s Office in Oregon to roll out Rekognition. Orlando has since deployed Rekognition to search for people in footage drawn from the city\u2019s video surveillance cameras, according to Amazon. Washington County has built a Rekognition-based mobile app that its deputies can use to scan any image through the county\u2019s database of 300,000 faces.<\/p>\n

According to the emails, law enforcement agencies in California, Arizona, and multiple domestic surveillance \u201cfusion centers\u201d have all indicated interest in Rekognition, but it is unknown how many governments Amazon has sold the facial recognition tool to.<\/p>\n

\u201cRekognition marketing materials read like a user manual for authoritarian surveillance,\u201d said Nicole Ozer, Technology and Civil Liberties director for the ACLU of California. \u201cOnce a dangerous surveillance system like this is turned against the public, the harm can\u2019t be undone. Particularly in the current political climate, we need to stop supercharged surveillance before it is used to track protesters, target immigrants, and spy on entire neighborhoods. We\u2019re blowing the whistle before it\u2019s too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe already know that facial recognition algorithms discriminate against Black faces, and are being used to violate the human rights of immigrants,\u201d said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, which signed on to today\u2019s letter to Bezos. \u201cWe know that putting this technology into the hands of already brutal and unaccountable law enforcement agencies places both democracy and dissidence at great risk. Amazon should never be in the business of aiding and abetting racial discrimination and xenophobia \u2014 but that\u2019s exactly what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is doing when he sells these loosely regulated facial recognition tools to local police departments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCAIR-SFBA works in communities that live under fear of and actual surveillance,\u201d said Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) San Francisco Bay Area Office, which also signed on to today\u2019s letter. \u201cGuilt and innocence matter less to law enforcement today than vague descriptions, ethnic identities, and activism. Rekognition amplifies these concerns by increasing access to and use of surveillance systems under the guise of public safety, while instead empowering the police departments who use it with increased access and authority.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the national ACLU and several affiliate offices, 35 organizations from throughout the nation dedicated to protecting communities have signed on to today\u2019s\u00a0open letter<\/a>, and the ACLU has launched a\u00a0petition<\/a>demanding that Amazon stop selling Rekognition to governments.<\/p>\n

The newly released emails and the ACLU\u2019s analysis are here:
\nhttps:\/\/www.aclu.org\/blog\/amazon-teams-law-enforcement-deploy-dangerous-new-facial-recognition-technology<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

San Francisco, CA…Today the American Civil Liberties Union Foundations of California\u00a0released emails\u00a0between Amazon employees and local law enforcement revealing how the company has been pushing its facial recognition product, prompting privacy objections about how the technology is being used. The emails were obtained through freedom of information requests submitted by the ACLU. The\u00a0documents\u00a0are the result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,5,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-government","category-life-style","category-news","last_archivepost"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/ACLU.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}