Documents from a lawsuit show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with researchers to refine AI so it could help identify or track Americans without their consent. FBI and Pentagon help research facial recognition for drones and street cameras:
A video surveillance camera hangs from the ceiling above a subway platform in Brooklyn in 2020. The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government's ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.
Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the nation's leading computer-vision experts to design and test software that would quickly and accurately process the "truly unconstrained face imagery" recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared with The Washington Post.
The internal emails, presentations and other records offer an unmatched look at the way the nation's top law enforcement agency and military have aggressively pursued a technology that could be used to undermine Americans' privacy and already has a counterpart in mass surveillance systems in London, Moscow and across China.
The tool's use in domestic mass surveillance would be a "nightmare scenario," said Nathan Wessler, a deputy director at the ACLU. "It could give the government the ability to pervasively track as many people as they want for as long as they want. There's no good outcome for that in a democratic society."
A Government Accountability Office audit in 2021 found that 20 federal agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, had used facial recognition in some capacity, though most of the agencies did "not have awareness" of which tools employees were using and had "therefore not fully assessed the potential risks."
Named for the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and gateways, Janus launched in 2014 with the goal of "radically expanding the scenarios in which automated face recognition can establish identity," the documents show. The research, he said, was aimed at improving the performance of a technology that was already seeing increasing use by law enforcement at the local, state and federal level. And the mission was hard to refuse: An FBI official at one point spoke to the researchers about how the system would be used to identify the perpetrators in videos of child sexual abuse.
The photo system is part of a broader FBI biometric database, called Next Generation Identification, that contains the fingerprints, palm prints, face photos and eye patterns collected from millions of people applying for citizenship, getting booked into jail or requesting job background checks. Beyond government-sponsored research, federal agencies have also paid for access to private facial recognition systems. The FBI signed a $120,000 contract earlier this year with Clearview AI, maker of a facial recognition tool that uses face photos taken without consent from across social media and the public internet. FBI officials said in the contract they were paying for "a search engine of publicly available images ... to be used in ways that ultimately reduce crime.
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