Facial Recognition? Security Help or Hurdle?

BIOMETRICS

FACIAL RECOGNITION? SECURITY HELP OR HURDLE?

A recent freedom of information request by The Independent revealed that the Metropolitan recent freedom of information request by The Independent Police has spent more than £200,000 on controversial facial recognition trials that resulted in no arrests.

The newspaper claims that the police force spent over £222,000 on several live facial recognition trials – not including the cost of uniformed and undercover officers – and didn’t make a single arrest. In fact, six deployments were made by the police which resulted in only two people being stopped, and then released.

Trials carried out between August 2016 and July last year saw 110 people’s faces registered as potential ‘alerts’ against watchlists of wanted criminals, the majority of which came at 2017’s Notting Hill Carnival. Despite the police saying that members of the public were informed facial recognition was being used by posters and leaflets, the Independent claims that no one questioned after having passed through a scanning zone in central London in December had seen police publicity material, causing campaigners to suggest that the technology is being rolled out ‘by stealth’.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council is reported to be considering drawing up national guidance on how the technology should be used, despite the lack of arrests during trials, in a move that critics have labelled as a ‘shambles’ and a waste of public money. Cressida Dick, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, has publicly claimed that the government desire for the police service to transform itself and make use of new technology is being ‘hamstrung’ by outdated technology.

After some schools in the US discussed bringing in facial recognition technology to combat gun violence, critics asked the state Education Department to block the technology from any New York school, saying it would ‘have a chilling effect on school climate’. So, to what extent can biometric technology be seen as aiding the fight against terrorism?

BIOMETRIC DATA

In December 2017, INTERPOL revealed that it was working to increase the use of its biometrics databases and capabilities to better track their movements globally. Project First, launched earlier this year, is among INTERPOL’s initiatives to assist law enforcement in member countries in enhancing their border security through the use of biometric data – such as fingerprints and facial recognition – on foreign terrorist fighters and other individuals linked to terrorist activities.

Speaking at the 1st INTERPOL Fingerprint and Face Symposium, also held in December 2017, INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock highlighted the importance of law enforcement moving from a ‘need to know’ to a ‘need to share’ culture relating to biometric data on known and suspected terrorists, and ensuring that this data reaches officers on the frontlines in a timely manner.

The police force network, whose fingerprint database contains more than 180,000 records supporting more than 40,000 searches every year, contributes the success of biometric monitoring with the capture of an individual wanted in connection with a terrorist attack in the Caucasus, after Greek authorities ran checks of migrants arriving by boat against INTERPOL’s fingerprint database. More recently, in February last year, police in Buenos Aires arrested an internationally wanted murder suspect after his image was identified as a likely match by facial recognition technology.

AIRPORT SECURITY

In October 2018, Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport became China’s first to launch an automated security clearance system using facial recognition. The eight security machines that form the system scan passengers’ ID cards and faces to check they match, reducing the clearance procedure time to around 12 seconds.

Although primarily focused on speeding up the passenger journey through the airport, from the check-in desk to boarding, Shanghai, which took three years to develop the system, is just the latest in a long line of airports keen to jump on the biometrics bandwagon. Plans for a full-scale roll out of new Heathrow facial recognition biometric services from the summer of 2019 were also announced in October, promising to reduce the average passenger’s journey time by up to a third. The airport, recently under fire for drone sightings, claims that, as well as being beneficial for the passenger, facial biometrics offer increased security. Gatwick Airport promised something similar in May.