Police in NYC and Miami have reportedly used facial recognition software to arrest people who allegedly committed crimes during Black Lives Matter protests
Cops' use of the tech among the list of things protesters are demonstrating against. — Law enforcement in several cities …
Ars TechnicaKate Cox
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands mid-arc. The year before, coverage of the Hong Kong protests had already shown facial recognition cutting both ways — police using it for repression, protesters using it to doxx officers in return. The NYC and Miami arrests bring that dynamic home to the US, where the technology is now reportedly part of the very policing practice demonstrators are marching against.
Protesters in New York and Miami lose practical anonymity: identification that once required a witness or informant can come from a face match, making demonstration participation itself an evidence-generating act.
Second-order effects
Activists answer in kind — within months, organizers begin building their own facial recognition tools to identify police officers, extending the mirror-image escalation Hong Kong's protests had already demonstrated.
Miami PD's later use of the identical capability against Capitol riot defendants puts civil-liberty and privacy advocates in the position of contesting a tool whose protest-era deployment they had just documented.
Third-order effects
The endpoint visible from here is investigative: reporting finds departments across a dozen states arresting suspects on facial recognition alone with no corroborating evidence, and New Orleans police running a hidden camera network apparently in violation of the city's own ordinance — evidence that adoption is outrunning local control and feeding the case for formal governance rules.
The trend: Facial recognition is becoming the default layer of US protest policing, with each deployment prompting activist counter-deployments and eventually the oversight fights now surfacing in city ordinances and state-level investigations.
NEW: Following our story on the NYPD's use of facial recognition on a Black Lives Matter protester, @NYCMayor promises to “reassess” NYPD rules. Currently, police can run facial recognition on anyone who may be a witness to a crime of any level: https://gothamist.com/...
Tech has NEVER been neutral, nor apolitical Also, most tech companies are led by mediocre white dudes with absolutely no understanding, nor desire to, of how their “great idea” could cause harm because that harm, rarely visits their doorstep We most prioritize harm reduction http…
“We're looking into it” doesn't instill a lot of confidence when protesters are being actively targeted by police facial recognition. #BanFacialRecognition https://gothamist.com/...
In other words, if you're at a protest and happen to be next to a man accused of screaming into an officer's ear, your face image, caught on CCTV, could also be searched against the NYPD's database of known faces👇🏽 https://twitter.com/...
thinking of all the times lobbyists for tech companies that make facial recognition said we were “exaggerating” when we said that this exact thing would happen https://arstechnica.com/...
I wrote a short story in 2014 about the use of facial recognition tech obtained via a drone as the primary piece of evidence for arresting someone on terrorism technology. It was probably a bit scifi at the time, but of course now is to be expected. https://arstechnica.com/...
It's bad enough they're using cameras or Instagram to match protesters facial IDs then accost them at home — but, to what facial ID record, with his home address attached, did they match it up with, and who is funding such a dox database and is that legal? @WarriorsITG https://tw…
This comes after the NYPD used FR to find and arrest a BLM activist. NYPD says it's being cautious with its use of FR, but as we reported before, the department's own officers were using Clearview and ran 11,000 searches without higher up approval: https://gothamist.com/...