Facial Recognition Technology Is the New Rogues’ Gallery

Fueled by explosive reporting, foreign totalitarian regimes, and a lifetime of dystopian sci-fi, the movement to ban the government’s use of face recognition technology is growing. As of now, seven cities across the country—San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California, and Brookline, Somerville, Northampton, and Cambridge in Massachusetts—have banned the government use of face recognition.

The entire state of California also passed a three-year moratorium on the use of face recognition on police body cameras. Part of the opposition stems from the fact that many don’t want police to have the ability to track movement around a city or learn the identities of protesters. But it’s also related to people’s unwillingness to be regarded with perpetual suspicion. Inclusion in a face recognition database means your face is always part of a lineup, and every time grainy surveillance footage surfaces of a robbery or assault, the suspect’s face is being compared with your own. And as a result of many states sharing driver’s license photos with the FBI, or private companies like Clearview A.I. harvesting billions of pictures off social media, this searching could happen from anywhere in the country. This doesn’t just mean there’s a small possibility that you could be mistaken for the suspect—it also means that your government doesn’t trust you.

The government has always sought a way to file away and compare the faces of the guilty, but until very recently the technology only allowed for it to occur in a much more rudimentary way. Before there was the fingerprint, or even the police file, there was the rogues’ gallery, which you could find in most U.S. police departments. The gallery was a large wall or cabinet filled with photographs of alleged criminals that could be used as a way of identifying repeat offenders and  coordinating surveillance, and as an example for witnesses.

Police often scrawled on the back of the photographs a basic biographical sketch of the suspect, including known aliases and previous arrests. In many larger cities during the 1890s and early 1900s, the booking and photographing of an arrested person was also accompanied by the taking of Bertillon measurements. Developed in France, the system involved taking at least five specific bodily measurements including head length, foot length, and length of the middle finger. This data could be easily filed away and cross-referenced in case a suspect changed his appearance drastically. As cumbersome as this technology was, its use in the early 20^th century posed the same ethical questions about guilt, innocence, and the nature of governance that we continue to grapple with on an exponentially larger scale…

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