Police use controversial technology abroad

By RNZ
The high-tech investigative tools imported by the police are generating controversy abroad.

Many of these are capable of facial recognition, although police say they are not using it in public.

Police earlier this year made a technology inventory that they released.

Advanced systems that they are spending tens of millions on are often being rolled out after wide adoption abroad, particularly by US law enforcement.

“Police do not use face-to-face or ‘live’ facial recognition technology,” police said in a statement.

However, this feature is an integral feature of many systems, suggesting that the police may be paying to use a fraction of a system’s power.

The use of the technology is restricted by the Privacy Act and the Search and Surveillance Act of 2012, but several researchers have said these should be updated, given more teeth, or added with laws that specifically regulate biometrics and facial recognition in particular. .

“There is currently no official position on this, nor a legal or regulatory barrier to police deployment of this technology,” an investigative report said Friday.

‘Telephone hacker’
Three systems in the police inventory are of special interest: Cellebrite, BriefCam, and body cameras.

The police already have the first two, and they had been looking at body cameras for some time, but then they arrested him.

Cellebrite has been dubbed by CNN as the FBI’s “phone hacker of choice.”

It extracts personal data from Android or iPhone mobile phones, even locked or encrypted, and reaches beyond the device to more than 50 social networks and cloud-based sources or applications, including Snapchat and Instagram, without the need for any permission from Apple, Google or similar. .

Cellebrite Marketing for Law Enforcement says it can track and analyze a suspect’s Facebook likes and events and Twitter posts and connections “to gain a better understanding of the interests, relationships, opinions and daily activities of a suspect or victim. “

New Zealand Police have had Cellebrite for years.

Court affidavits show they used their tool called UFED in 2014 to extract data from a cell phone obtained during a search of journalist Nicky Hager’s home, a search that was later declared illegal.

Police said they used the tool on “legally seized cell phones.”

Cellebrite had facial recognition added in 2017. “The police have not made use of” this, police said on the balance sheet.

Wellington’s facial recognition researcher, Associate Professor of Law Nessa Lynch, said New Zealand law was not created to deal with this, but reflects times when police officers were on street corners spotting trouble.

“Adding facial recognition and capability to that [phone extraction], downloading that data provides a great picture of my associates and my life, “said Lynch.

“I’m not sure our search and surveillance laws really capture the amount of data that we now have on our phones.”

Video analysis
BriefCam was developed in Israel and is now owned by the leading Japanese Canon.

Add footage that occurs at different times to analyze as if the events were simultaneous. It goes beyond facial recognition – it adds 27 other ways to narrow a search.

“Advanced multi-camera search effectively identifies men, women, children and vehicles of interest with speed and accuracy, using facial recognition filters, similarity of appearance, clothing, color, size, speed, route, direction, time of permanence and change of lighting “. marketing to researchers says.

Allows police to create face and license plate watch lists.

Its use was approved by the New Zealand Police Executive in February this year.

Police said their version of BriefCam could not take live CCTV broadcasts, but was used retrospectively, initiated by a small number of forensic personnel, which then allowed investigators to view the results if necessary.

When they already had a face or a car in a photo, then they scanned the images for that. That search protected privacy more than a manual search, by overlooking what was not relevant, police said.

The goal is to analyze CCTV images hundreds of times faster than before, for what police call a “familiar face or the movement of a car.”

BriefCam declined to comment.

Bodycam controversy
Police have started searching for officers in Body Worn Cameras (BWC).

“[The] The Operations and Response Group has been analyzing the BWC technology for some time and is eager to run a proof of concept, but a directive was given to stop any further work on this idea, “said the balance sheet.

Overseas, a controversy is brewing over companies wanting to enable these cameras with facial recognition.

A study for the US Department of Justice in 2016 outlined some benefits, saying that this “may allow law enforcement to overcome the difficulties and time involved in achieving accurate identification by reviewing video footage at a later time. “.

However, one of the biggest players in body cameras, and tasers, Axon, walked away from this on ethical grounds, saying that facial recognition was not reliable enough to prevent a possible abuse of people’s rights.

Facial recognition “wasn’t bad,” but whether its use was benign or not depended on the person, researcher Lynch said.

“If I am a vulnerable member of society … those are the people who are going to bear the brunt of the surveillance.

“A question also about who designs this technology? As a general trend … it is a very diverse group of people who design these systems,” with little consultation, particularly with Maori, he said.

Function and share
There was limited visibility into policing technology until the media exposed its Clearview AI judgment earlier this year.

For example, the police minister did not have briefings on facial recognition technology initiatives in the last legislature, until Clearview. I didn’t even know about the $ 23 million launch of a much more powerful image management system called ABIS 2.

By contrast, Internal Affairs briefed its minister twice in 2018 on the upgrade to the $ 24 million facial recognition passport system, according to a new response from the OIA.

“He’s near the threshold of cabinet approval [of $25m]. It will guide us whether you decide to approve the business case “or refer it to Cabinet, Internal Affairs said in a briefing.

Facial recognition is a “cornerstone” of passport processing here, unlike in most countries where it is primarily used to detect fraud, the documents say.

It was also used to verify that a person was not on the department’s “watch list,” according to a response from the OIA.

Passport data is shared with the police, but Internal Affairs said “it is important to note that the department does not share facial algorithms with any agency.”

Police said the passport images they obtained from DIA, including on officers’ mobile phones, were only viewable and not stored.

“The photos that are retrieved are not stored on the phone, not even temporarily,” said Deputy Executive Director of Information and Deployment Mark Evans:

“The system allows officers to perform simple visual verification when interacting with a person and does not involve the use of any matching or recognition software.”

Facial recognition was used in a limited way, “to compare still images of unidentifiable suspects, where those images have been submitted as part of an investigation,” he said.

Only trained personnel from the National Biometrics Office could use the RF tools and their use was audited.

Facial recognition is an integral part of your Identity Verification Service (IVS) and RealMe services that allow a passport holder to verify who they are online.

Internal Affairs also led the work called Identity in the Justice Sector to establish standards for identity management and data sharing within the justice and border control sectors, he said.

This would influence the technology that was purchased.

Immigration has a biometric capacity update until next October to implement the latest face and fingerprint matching algorithm for visa processing.

This is in addition to at least three other updates since 2016 to its Identity Management Engine (IDME) system, which cost $ 26 million to install in 2016.

The 2019 update focused on identity processing rather than face matching, Immigration said.

One part of IDME, called Enroll, had captured 21,000 sets of biometric data between 2016 and this year, another response from OIA showed.

Responsible AI
A vision of where the global proliferation of biometric collection and analysis technology in law enforcement and border control could go is provided by Accenture, a leading global consultancy.

It contemplated three stages of penetration of surveillance, with the full consent of society, where a large amount of citizen data was constantly updated within predictive analytical artificial intelligence.

The end goal was a comprehensive public safety system, he said.

“Imagine a future where the entire city is overseen by responsible AI, providing law enforcement with the tools and intelligence to stop atrocities and virtually all crime in real time,” Accenture said.