Sarah Harte: Recognition technology’s flaws a slap in the face for civil liberties

It left two young female gardaí traumatised, signed off work, and highlights the challenges An Garda Síochána faces.

Assaults on gardaí in the five years to 2020 rose by over 50%. In February, in a particularly disgusting and vicious attack, an unarmed garda was held at gunpoint and severely beaten before being doused in petrol.

In July, Cork Judge James McNulty queried the "epidemic of disrespect" against gardaí after remarking on the number of cases of abusive behaviour towards officers coming before the courts in recent months.

Judge McNulty wondered how others would feel if abused in the line of their duties, and said: “If this is a trend, it needs to be reversed.”

So, what should we do to equip the police to do their job?

Additional Garda powers

In June, Justice Minister Helen McEntee received government approval for draft proposals giving gardaí powers to use facial recognition technology (FRT).

An amendment to the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill 2022 is expected this autumn for FRT to be used with biometrics and could be enacted by the end of the year.

The new powers to use FRT along with artificial intelligence and expanded surveillance power could lead to the identification of criminals in minutes supplanting the need for gardaí to spend thousands of hours trawling through CCTV footage.

Gardaí will be able to feed an image of a suspect into a computer which will compare it quickly with thousands of faces captured on cameras.

Solving crimes and finding missing persons sounds good. Spare us liberal handwringing around privacy rights that doesn’t cut the mustard on the streets. 

As Ms McEntee said, sometimes public safety and national security must override the right to privacy.

Except these trade-offs do not affect all individuals equally.

And the use of FRT in policing has long-term hard-core ramifications for privacy, civil liberties, and social cohesion that can’t easily be batted away. This is a landmark issue of our time, and not just for Ireland.

FRT is rapidly becoming "more accurate", but it still struggles to perform consistently across various demographic factors because of ethnic, racial, and gender biases.

In plain English, the technology is less accurate in matching photos of women, people of colour, the elderly, and younger people.

In 2020, IBM pulled out of the market calling for a dialogue on whether and how this technology should be used in law enforcement because of its fears around its misuse. 

Amazon and Microsoft followed suit but other companies — such as Clearview AI — continued to sell facial recognition to police.

'Too dangerous'

Companies are working to fix the biases, but many researchers remain deeply sceptical.

Timnit Gebru, a former (emphasis on ‘former’) leading member of Google’s ethical artificial intelligence team, has publicly said that she believes that facial recognition is too dangerous to be used for law enforcement purposes.

FRT is a highly lucrative market with privately owned companies developing the tech. Unsurprisingly academic research demonstrating systemic inaccuracies in the technology has been attacked.

So, there’s the serious issue of the technology’s inaccuracy, then there’s the big issue of how it’s used.

Doireann Ansbro, legal officer of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), has said this technology “has enabled mass surveillance and discriminatory targeted surveillance”. 

She’s referring here to the over-policing of the population at large, which pertains to everyone. And to the over-policing of certain groups in society including marginalised groups and, to put it bluntly, people of colour.

Societal biases

Surveillance patterns often reflect existing societal biases. In June, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) recommended amendments to the Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill to define and prohibit racial profiling.

In its report to the UN Human Rights Committee, the human rights watchdog called for the State to ensure that Garda powers are exercised in “a consistent and unbiased way”, saying that An Garda Síochána must properly define and prohibit racial profiling.

It was recently reported that the British Metropolitan police force is profiling children on a large scale by collecting “children’s personal data” from social media sites with concerns that they are focusing on young black children for signs of criminality.

We have been told that the use of FRT in Ireland will be limited to murder, missing persons, and child sex abuse cases. 

Can we honestly believe that the technology will only be used in bounded appropriate ways and that there is no risk of systematic monitoring or profiling on a larger scale?

Body-worn cameras and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) can already be used by gardaí but there have been several breaches of the law. This happened in Limerick last year when the Data Protection Commission found multiple instances of non-compliance with GDPR and Irish data protection legislation concerning ANPR, the use of drones, and the deployment of a camera surveillance network.

Parking the question of accuracy for a moment, key questions include what conditions should be met by police before they use the technology, and which independent government agencies would scrutinise their use of the technology.

The prospect of false arrests and miscarriages of justice should resonate with us given our history.

Between 2019 and 2021 the use of FRT technology in law enforcement was suspended in many US cities and states although sentiment is shifting in certain quarters. China loves it.

Amnesty International is one of many organisations calling for a global ban on the use of FRT by law enforcement agencies.

The EU has flagged the use of FRT in law enforcement as high risk. Its framework for the use of AI is still not ready and is expected in mid-2024. Last October, the EU Parliament voted to ban police use of facial recognition in public places.

In the wake of the ramming incident, the GRA reinforced what we know, namely that there is a “huge lack of frontline gardaí to uphold the law".

Maybe giving the gardaí more bodies might be an obvious starting point in supporting them.

Budget 2023 seems to recognise this fact, as allocation has been made for 1,000 new gardaí but doubtless more can be done.

People in Cherry Orchard picked up the phone and called the police. This wouldn’t happen in parts of Britain.

In July, the Dublin-based EU agency, Eurofound, reported that Irish people have higher-than-EU average regard for the police pointing out that trust once lost is difficult to restore.

FRT will impact the trust between police and communities.

Notable portions of our lives are already being tracked and monitored by government agencies, corporations, and advertisers.

Understandably, gardaí are enthusiastic about the technology, but we need to think hard before drinking the facial recognition Kool-Aid.

June 1996 was a watershed moment in Irish society when journalist Veronica Guerin and Garda Jerry McCabe were murdered. The highly successful Criminal Assets Bureau was introduced to combat a threat to the security of the State posed by subversive and organised crime.

Another proposal was to severely curb the right to silence in criminal trials. This kneejerk proposal arose from heightened temperatures and fortunately was watered down when cool heads prevailed.

Make no mistake the introduction of FRT into Irish policing is another such pivotal moment.

Let’s hit the pause button, see how the EU handles it, and have a public consultation around the issue involving all stakeholders.

If we rush this measure through, there may be no putting the genie back in the bottle.