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By Jake Laperruque Andrea Peterson, The Daily Beast
Officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement met with
Amazon this summer and the corporate giant pitched the government agency
on its controversial technology that can identify people in real time
by scanning faces in a video feed, documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight show.
Arming ICE with real-time facial recognition surveillance technology
could supercharge the agency’s enforcement power, and make undocumented
immigrants afraid to seek out vital services in places where cameras
could be located. During this administration, ICE agents have targeted
immigrants trying to enter and leave medical facilities and houses of worship despite an official policy
that discourages apprehensions at “sensitive locations.” With facial
recognition surveillance technology, ICE could automate and
surreptitiously surveil these and other public locations permanently by
setting up video cameras and linking them to Amazon’s software.
What’s more, numerous studies, including research by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the MIT Media Lab,
have shown that facial recognition technology is more likely to
mistakenly identify people of color as targets—which can lead to wrongful arrests.
Former
ICE officials expressed concern to POGO about the potential for abuse
of this technology, especially given the current political climate.
“If
they have this technology, I can see it being used in any way they
think will help them increase the numbers of detentions, apprehensions,
and removals,” said Alonzo Peña, who served as deputy director of ICE
and was previously special agent-in-charge of its field offices in San
Antonio, Phoenix and Houston. Possible abuse “should be an area of
concern, given this new technology—there’s potential for its use to be
very widespread.”
According to the documents obtained by POGO
through a Freedom of Information Act request, officials from ICE
visited Silicon Valley this June to meet with Amazon Web Services at the
Redwood City, California office of McKinsey & Company, a consulting
firm that had a management contract with ICE that ended this summer.
McKinsey’s
role in connecting ICE to companies with cutting edge facial
recognition products and other technology is also previously unreported.
McKinsey declined to comment for this story.
In an email to
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office dated June 15, 2018,
an Amazon “sales principal” described the meeting and spelled out
follow-up “action items.” One was setting up a tech briefing for ICE
officials about tools including the tagging and analysis capabilities of
Amazon’s real-time facial matching system, dubbed “Rekognition.”
“Thanks again for your interest in AWS [Amazon Web Service] to support ICE and the HSI mission,” the Amazon salesperson wrote.
The
email lists “actions items from our conversation,” starting with an
“Innovation Workshop focused on a big HSI problem,” but does not
describe the problem. Regarding that problem, the Amazon employee wrote,
“I would be happy to arrange for a 1 day workshop. If there’s interest
in further exploration, we can schedule a meeting to review the process
in more depth and help assess your target list of ‘Challenges’.” The
list includes “Rekognition Video tagging/analysis, scalability, custom
object libraries.”
ICE would not detail how many times it has met
with Amazon to discuss Rekognition. “We can’t provide data on how often
we’ve met with a particular vendor to discuss emerging technology
they’re developing, but industry outreach and building relationships
with potential contractors is fairly standard within government
acquisition,” an ICE spokesperson told the Project on Government
Oversight (POGO) in an email.
Amazon did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Facial recognition technology can scan a face and run it against tens of millions of faces in a database to find a match in a single second. Real-time facial recognition technologies, like Rekognition, can scan a crowd using live video feeds.
Peña,
the former ICE official, said there’s a real risk that the technology
could end up being deployed at sensitive locations in ways that could
scare undocumented immigrants away from important services.
While there is an official policy ICE insists is still in effect that
requires special circumstances for immigration enforcement actions at
schools, medical facilities and places of worship, legal experts say the
policy leaves much
to the agency’s discretion. And this year there have been a number of
high profile immigration enforcement actions at such places. Enforcement agents have also arrested people, including those alleging domestic violence, at courthouses—the policy does not deem “sensitive.”
“In the past, certain areas like schools, churches, and courts were off-limits—there
were policies in place that would prevent agents from going into those
areas, but under this administration a lot of those policies are no
longer enforced,” Peña said.
Rekognition faced scrutiny earlier this year after the ACLU revealed it was already being used by some local police departments. And using Amazon’s software, the ACLU discovered
this July that inputting photos of every member of Congress into a
mugshot database misidentified 28 individuals as other people who had
been arrested for a crime, with a disproportionate error rate for people
of color.
Amazon responded with a blog post
critiquing the confidence threshold used in the ACLU study, saying that
it recommends higher thresholds that will reduce false positives.
The ACLU countered that Amazon moved the goalpost since it only increased the recommended confidence interval after the ACLU study was published.
Amazon
also argued in its blog post that law enforcement doesn’t rely on
Rekognition alone and it is only “the first step in identifying an
individual.”
Amazon has stressed that it requires “customers to comply with the law and to be responsible when using Amazon Rekognition” and advises
law enforcement not to use Rekognition “to make autonomous decisions
for scenarios that require analysis by a human,” such as “determining
who committed a crime.” However, it currently has no public terms of service requirements
to stop police from using Rekognition in that manner. Few details have
emerged from what a handful of local police departments are doing with
Rekognition.
Peña, the former ICE official, said that the risk of
misidentification posed by tools like Rekognition would require
significant safeguards to prevent abuse, but he does not believe that
the risk would be taken seriously by the current administration.
“If
they say this technology could help identify people, but there are
going to be misidentifications, they’re probably going to implement it
and deal with that later,“ he added.
Sarah Saldaña, who led ICE
during the final years of the Obama Administration, said the technology
doesn’t sound ready for deployment. “I don’t see this technology being
used on a wide-scale basis as long as it’s this problematic. I think it
makes a lot of sense for people to test, look at, and review this
skeptically,” she said. “I would be surprised if ICE would start using
it without it doing better than the results it’s showing now.”
For
now, ICE says it does not have any public contracts with Amazon for
Rekognition. “Publicly available procurement data indicates that U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have a contract with the
vendor you’ve identified below for the services referenced, so it would
be inappropriate to comment on this specific piece of technology,” an
ICE spokesperson emailed.
Saldaña, the former ICE chief, told POGO
she didn’t have “direct knowledge” of ICE’s use of facial recognition
during her tenure, but wouldn’t have been surprised if there was “very
rudimentary use of” some forms of the technology while she led the
agency. However, “it certainly wasn’t to the level of vendor
conversations” that she knew about, Saldaña said. But the Trump
administration appears keen to explore high-tech surveillance tools.
A
July 27 letter led by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) asked ICE and other
federal enforcement agencies about current use of facial recognition and
any plans for future development. In a response to Senator Wyden’s
office dated October 16,
ICE only discussed its limited use of existing Customs and Border
Patrol and State Department facial recognition databases and a system
used by a contractor as part of an alternatives to detention program.
The agency did not disclose its conversations with Amazon regarding
Rekognition.
In its communication with POGO the agency does not
rule out that it might contract with Amazon or other companies for
similar technology. The spokesperson emailed that ICE “will continue to
explore cutting-edge technology to compliment criminal investigations
going forward.”
And Amazon has worked to continue a dialogue with
ICE in the midst of critical media coverage. Amazon shared its public
response to the ACLU’s research with ICE, according to the records
obtained by POGO. On July 31, an Amazon representative emailed an
unnamed ICE employee a link to a company blog post, noting that the
criticisms of the ACLU study “may be of interest given your ongoing
effort.”
That message shows Amazon was courting ICE’s business despite protests from its own employees. Over a month earlier, Gizmodo reported
some Amazon employees signed a letter calling for the company to stop
selling Rekognition to law enforcement and to cut ties with companies
that used Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure to “enable ICE.” More
than 450 anonymous Amazon employees have now reportedly signed the letter.
In an anonymous op-ed published on Medium last week,
an Amazon employee warned that known problems with how the technology
struggles to accurately identify people with darker skin “will only
reproduce and amplify existing systems of oppression.”
Even as
Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos defended his company’s
dogged pursuit of government defense and intelligence contracts last
Monday, he tried to distance himself from current immigration
enforcement efforts.
“I’d let them in if it was me, I like ‘em, I want all of them in,” Bezos said during an interview with Wired,
referring to migrants. But just this past summer, Amazon was quietly
trying to get ICE’s business, with an employee writing the agency that
the company was “ready and willing” to support its mission.
“It
is disturbing that Amazon continues to actively ignore warnings from
members of Congress, civil rights groups, the public, and its own
shareholders and employees about the dangers of its technology,” said
Jacob Snow, technology and civil liberties attorney for the ACLU of
Northern California.
Amazon’s facial recognition in-roads with ICE
remain unclear, in part because the agency did not fully respond to
POGO’s Freedom of Information Act request. While the records produced
show Amazon’s correspondence with ICE, ICE did not provide records from
ICE employees to Amazon, despite the apparent two-way communications
between the organizations. And the agency did not search for records at
the Enforcement and Removal Operations office, the part of the agency
that directly deals with deportations. ICE declined POGO’s request to
conduct a search without providing a reason for its refusal.
The
emails obtained by POGO involve HSI, an ICE office with more than 6,000
special agents and a wide-ranging mandate to investigate crimes
involving “America's travel, trade, financial and immigration systems.” HSI has previously touted its use of facial recognition as an investigative tool in child exploitation cases.
Tools or information used by one part of ICE are often made available across the agency.
In
an email to POGO, an ICE spokesperson wrote, “ICE Enforcement and
Removal Operations may have access to resources acquired by HSI. ICE
components may use various investigative techniques and technological
tools to accomplish its mission to protect the United States from
cross-border crimes and illegal immigration that threaten national
security and public safety.”
And HSI is not the only part of ICE
and the Department of Homeland Security with an interest in using facial
recognition and automated identification technology, including for immigration enforcement.
The Department is currently replacing its massive biometric data system and Congress has directed it to include “advanced facial recognition, in its ongoing enhancements.” The replacement, called the Homeland Advanced Recognition System, supports the enforcement and administration of “our immigration laws,” and other missions, according to government documents.
This article was reported by the non-profit Project on Government Oversight. Disclosure: Andrea Peterson is a former reporter with The Washington Post,
which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Jake Laperruque has advocated
for government reforms related to facial recognition technology.
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