Category: USA

Milwaukee police sink efforts to contract facial recognition with unsanctioned use

Milwaukee police sink efforts to contract facial recognition with unsanctioned use

Milwaukee police sink efforts to contract facial recognition with unsanctioned use
A meeting on whether and how Milwaukee police should use facial recognition in criminal investigations took an unexpected turn Thursday night, with revelations that the technology is already in use, complete with transparency and governance failures. By Friday morning, the Milwaukee Police Department had placed a moratorium on the use of facial recognition by its staff.

MPD revealed in a Fire and Police Commission meeting discussing its procurement options and whether the force should be allowed to use the technology that it has already been doing so in investigations, as reported by NPR affiliate WUWM. Further, it did so without a standard operating procedure, and was still doing so when MPD Chief of Staff Heather Hough asked late last night for acknowledgement that we recognized this was an issue and we disclosed it.”

Those attending the meeting had expected a draft policy to be presented for consideration ahead of any implementation of face biometrics for local law enforcement investigations.

MPD officials said they used the technology through neighboring police departments. They said it has only been used in criminal investigations, but could not support the claim with any evidence.

The disclosure prompted Commission Vice Chair Bree Spencer to suggest a moratorium was needed.

An internal MPD memo reported by ABC affiliate 12 News this morning shuttered the practice.

“Despite our belief that this is useful technology to assist in generating leads for apprehending violent criminals, we recognize that the public trust is far more valuable,” says the memo obtained by 12 News.

The twist follows a widely-misunderstood effort by MPD to contract facial recognition capabilities from Biometrica. MPD is now abandoning those efforts, according to the memo.

ICE’s facial recognition app is new, but the NEC tech behind it is well known

ICE’s facial recognition app is new, but the NEC tech behind it is well known

ICE’s facial recognition app is new, but the NEC tech behind it is well known
The revelation that the Mobile Fortify app used by ICE to identify suspected immigration procedure violators, and increasingly protestors, uses face biometrics capabilities supplied by NEC has sparked renewed interest in how well the technology works, and where else it is used.

NEC introduced its NeoFace system well over a decade ago, and it gained notoriety (in some circles at least) when it was used to identify Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in 2013.

NEC’s NeoFace has been used by police in the UK for operator initiated facial recognition (OIFR), the same kind of system as Mobile Fortify since 2023. UK police also use the software for mobile public deployments of live facial recognition.

The company’s facial recognition algorithms have consistently placed among the most accurate tested in NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Evaluation (FRTE) for identification (1:N).

In 2023 testing by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) conducted for London’s Metropolitan Police, NeoFace had a false match rate of one in 6,000 and “no statistically significant race and gender bias” at specified thresholds with a reference database of 10,000 records. The finding about lack of bias has been disputed, however, on grounds that at lower confidence thresholds the technology shows uneven error rate between groups of people based on how dark their skin is.

The UK deployments remain controversial in their home country, The Conversation reports, and public understanding of the technology’s use is low. Only 55 percent of those surveyed in the UK trust police to use the technology responsibly, and only 10 percent say they know much about how and when it is used.

The controversy sparked in America by Mobile Fortify is partly related to the way it is being used, and partly to the processes behind that use.  The facial recognition algorithm is not licensed directly by ICE, according to the Inventory, but rather through CBP’s TVS.

In the U.S., NeoFace has previously been piloted at Dulles Airport in Washington, used at sporting events and in fast-food restaurants.

NeoFace is also used by police in Canada, airport checks for flydubai crew, and for biometric passport checks in New Zealand and Kenya, amongst dozens of other implementations.

White House taps Hamas-sympathetic Drop Site News in press corps rotation

White House taps Hamas-sympathetic Drop Site News in press corps rotation

In her first week on the job last year, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that she planned to shake up the establishment-oriented press corps by creating a seat at White House press briefings reserved for new media outlets —a broad category that would include “independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers and content creators,”… Read More