Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

The answer, in our view, was for legislation to permit law enforcement agencies to use facial recognition to engage in ongoing surveillance of specific individuals only when it obtains a court order such as a search warrant for this monitoring or when there is an emergency involving imminent danger to human life. This would create rules for facial-recognition services that are comparable to those now in place in the United States for the tracking of individuals through the GPS locations generated by their cell phones. As the Supreme Court had decided in 2018, the police cannot obtain without a search warrant the cell phone records that show the cell sites, and hence the physical locations, where someone has traveled.22 As we put it, “Do our faces deserve the same protection as our phones? From our perspective, the answer is a resounding yes.”