A tech-tidal wave is hitting the criminal justice system, transforming faces into license plates and your smart phone into a snitch.
These new technologies allow criminal-justice systems unparalleled surveillance capacity of vast amounts of data. The Economist magazine anticipates the future in the technology report “Justice Data Detectives.”
DATA FOR DETECTIVES
Technology has changed the relationship between information and crime in two ways: people create massive amounts of data and current laws have not kept pace with this change, reports The Economist.
Smartphones track and record where people go or whom they talk to and their apps reveal personal information on what they search, buy, read and watch.
To capture this data, police no longer need to follow or stake out a suspect nor get a warrant. They can seize the suspect’s phone and bypass its encryption. If he drives, police cars, streetlights and car parks equipped with automatic number-plate readers (ANPRS) that can track all movements and facial recognition software will confirm his identity.
Even your smartphone will snitch on you. “Uber filed for a patent on AI technology that can determine a potential passenger’s level of inebriation based on movements of his or her smartphone, as well as location near bars,” reports The Guardian.
Privacy laws have not kept pace with technology. The laws were written in the time of post offices and landlines. The courts generally give citizens protection from police entering a home, however, “the law on people’s digital presence is less clear.”
Law enforcement actions have become less visible to the public, but new technology is being widely used across the world.
“If you drive in a city anywhere in the developed world, ANPRS are almost certainly tracking you. This is not illegal,” reports The Economist.
Policy, due process and public opinion are lagging behind the uses of these new technologies.
“Police need oversight, not because they are bad people, but because maintaining the appropriate balance between liberty and security requires constant vigilance by engaged citizens,” concludes The Economist.
STREET-LEVEL SURVEILLANCE
The ANPRS commonly monitor via street signals, police cars, parking garages and bridge tolls. Facial recognition software is coming.
Your face is now a license plate and watching cameras are police body-cams, store security cameras and every smartphone.
In China, facial recognition is “widely deployed” and used for everything from ticketing jaywalkers to finding thieves in a huge crowd, according to Maya Kosoff in The Week.
Amazon, America’s biggest e-commerce company, launched Rekognition recently – an online service to help identify faces in real time.
While amusement parks have used Rekognition to locate lost children, Amazon has also been pitching the technology to police departments, reports Nick Wingfield in The New York Times. The Orlando Police Department in Florida and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon are paying customers.
Last June, “more than two dozen civil rights organizations demanded that Amazon stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement, saying it could become an instrument of mass surveillance,” reports The Week magazine.
Police in Hagerstown, Md., have been among the first to admit using facial recognition software to identify a robbery suspect from an Instagram photo, according to The Herald Mail Media.
“Thirty-one states now allow police to access driver’s license photos in facial-recognition searches,” according to the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.
While Texas, Illinois and California have laws to regulate facial recognition technology, there are no federal laws.
Other countries, however, regulate the use of a citizens’ unique face information and other biometric data. The European Union has a General Data Protection regulation that requires private companies to have consent for its use of collection biometrics from citizens.
Privacy advocates have opposed such use in New York City. Police may only search mug shots, not driver’s license photos in their facial recognition searches.
“People provide their photo for a driver’s license database so they can drive…not become suspects in a criminal investigation,” said Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
A.I.-powered facial detection software has glitches.
It “can actually reinforce bias and exclusion, even when it’s used in the most well-intended ways,” accord to a New York Times opinion by Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League and a graduate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Buolamwini found that facial detection software was inaccurate when attempting to identify people of color.
Parolees’ hard transition from stigmatized past
Convicted felons continue to be stigmatized by their criminal past, particularly when they search for legitimate work. But employers are facing a growing, nationwide pressure to change their anti-felon hiring policies.
Upon reentry, finding and maintaining employment becomes the main factor that determines an inmate’s success or recidivism. The “ban the box” movement seeks to abolish the yes or no question about felony conviction on standard job applications, according to a recent article.
Intimate partner violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime. One in three women and one in four men in the United States has experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. Husbands are five times more likely to kill wives than vice versa. A third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate male partner or ex-partner, according to FBI reports. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf
“Any sentence for criminal activity will, for many, ultimately become a life sentence of under- or unemployment,” wrote Arthur Rizer and Rachel Liebman in an article on the issue. “That destructive cycle needs to change, and businesses have a big role to play.”
Nearly one-third of Americans have criminal red flags on their jackets; and 95 percent of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated will eventually be released into society.
“We cannot afford to toss aside this vast human potential.…These millions of former inmates will hit the streets of a country that has, for the most part, locked them out of economic opportunities, consigning many to a cycle of homelessness, crime and poverty,” according to the article.
“In a strong economy, there should be room for everyone who wants to and can contribute work and talent”
Almost 60 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals are unemployed a year after their release, while those who do sustain employment are paid on average 40 percent less than persons without any criminal record.
Because one-third of all U.S. jobs require some type of professional license or certification, routine background checks prevent ex-offenders from being qualified for such work—even when the job does not entail any public safety considerations.
“But there is hope for a better path,” according to the article. “…Twenty-nine states and 150 jurisdictions have implemented ban-the-box policies that delay employers—in most cases, just public employers—from asking about criminal convictions until a conditional offer of employment has been extended.”
“Too many employers still rely on discriminatory biometric information, like fingerprints and name-based background checks,” the authors wrote. Such methods fail to take into account inaccurate, outdated or incomplete data, any mitigating factors surrounding the offense, the age at which the crime was committed or the number of years since the offense.
“In a strong economy, there should be room for everyone who wants to and can contribute work and talent,” the article concluded. “…No one who has served their time should be expected to automatically serve a ‘life sentence’ of unemployment.”