A look at the increasing prevalence of facial recognition and AI tech across the globe, as the US and EU governments' efforts to limit their use have stalled
Politico : Tweets: @mikelarsenoh and @viacristiano Tweets: Mike Larsen / @mikelarsenoh : Jordan said “I've been all focused all on impeachment.” Jim is more focused on protecting the president than the privacy of his constituents. We must act now to prevent facial recognition technology from being used to spy on law-abiding Americans." https://www.politico.com/... Cristiano Lima / @viacristiano : Now on @politico: Our story on how the fight to rein in facial recognition tech is sputtering across the West https://www.politico.com/... w/ @JanoschDelcker
Context & Ripple Effects
In January 2020, Politico's reporting found that both Washington and Brussels had let momentum slip on reining in facial recognition — a moment when the technology was already spreading globally but no major Western jurisdiction had locked in rules. The piece captured the gap between lawmaker rhetoric and action, with one congressman conceding his attention was consumed by impeachment while constituents' privacy went unaddressed.
What came after shows the stall mattered: two years later the FBI and ICE were contracting facial recognition vendors like Clearview AI, and by mid-2022 US states and cities were retreating from bans altogether under lobbying pressure and rising crime concerns. The EU took the opposite path, agreeing in 2023 to ban public-space facial recognition and predictive policing, while the UK has since ramped up facial recognition and AI use against crime.
First-order effects
- With US federal legislation stalled, agencies free to procure — FBI and ICE contracts with Clearview AI and Trust Stamp followed within two years of this report.
- Privacy-minded lawmakers lose their legislative vehicle: the article quotes Rep. Jordan pressing colleagues to act 'now,' but the stall left constituents without federal protection.
Second-order effects
- State and local governments reversed course on bans as crime concerns and vendor lobbying mounted, fragmenting the US patchwork instead of tightening it.
- Even where government use gets restricted, the same tech's ubiquity in consumer devices keeps deployment growing — regulation of agencies alone cannot contain it.
Third-order effects
- The West is splitting into divergent regimes — an EU ban on public-space use versus expanding government deployment in the US and UK — making facial recognition governance a jurisdictional question rather than a shared standard.
- If the pattern holds, surveillance capability becomes embedded infrastructure by default, with civil-liberties fights shifting from whether to adopt the tech to how its outputs are audited and contested.
The trend: Western governments are diverging rather than converging on facial recognition — the EU restricting public-space use while the US and UK fold it into routine policing.