The Los Angeles Times
August 13 2001

The Digital Eye Is on You
EDITORIAL

http://latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000065614aug13.story?coll=la%2

In recent months, sophisticated "biometric" technologies--computers that
identify individuals by analyzing facial shape, retinas, hand geometry or
voice signatures--have jumped out of bad science fiction films and into
America's cities. Their chief victim is privacy rights.
This year at the 35th Super Bowl, in Tampa, Fla., police used FaceIt, a
computer software program by Visionics Corp., to electronically scan every
face in the huge crowd and then match those faces against a database of
known criminals. The system sort of worked, identifying 19 people with
pending arrest warrants (though police never got around to arresting them)
and generating new business for New Jersey-based Visionics.
Tampa now has cameras in the night-life district, and the Pentagon is
spending $50 million on a project called "Human ID at a Distance," which
includes face recognition. Last month, Virginia Beach, Va., police announced
that they want to install similar cameras and software in tourist spots. In
the sort of surprising alliance that obtrusive new technologies often
inspire, the American Civil Liberties Union and House Majority Leader Dick
Armey (R-Texas) last month denounced "Snooper Bowl 35" as an outlandish
privacy violation that has sent the nation sliding toward "high-tech racial
profiling" and "virtual lineups of Americans" not suspected of any crime.
Electronic databases are being assembled by private businesses as well as
government. Law enforcement currently has carte blanche to install video
surveillance without public notification, consultation or debate. There is
little to stop anybody who can pay the price from gaining access to
"faceprints" in vast private databanks. True, Americans' financial privacy
already is all but wrecked, but that does not justify more intrusion.
Visionics' president, Joseph Atick, says that his face-recognition
technologies are the logical next step to take after digital fingerprinting.
There is, in fact, enormous difference between analyzing electronic
fingerprints given with permission or after an arrest and surreptitiously
surveying faces in a crowd.
Even Atick agrees that both public and private companies should support
requiring clearly visible signs that tell people where surveillance cameras
are, along with backing guidelines limiting how police agencies can share
photographic images, automatic deletion of images that don't match
photographs of criminals and other safeguards.
That is far from enough. The debate has to include whether these
technologies provide the overwhelming benefit that must be proved to justify
such an offense against privacy. Technology is advancing more rapidly than
public policy. Legislators must decide which technologies enhance security
and which ones merely invade privacy. It is better to err on the side of
privacy until an overriding public good can be proved.