Realtime facial recognition cameras used at Super Bowl

[Greg Broiles]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 03:26:51PM -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:56:14AM -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
> | 
> | According to the LA Times at 
> | <http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/updates2/lat_cameras010201.htm>,
> | police used real-time face recognition systems to scan the faces
> | of about 100,000 people who attended the Super Bowl in person. The
> | cameras were hidden. 19 people with "criminal histories" were 
> | identified, but no arrests were made.
> | 
> | The article quotes usual suspects like Bruce Schneier, Cliff Stoll,
> | and Erwin Chemerinksy saying that the system is troubling, as well
> | as an Oakland Raiders official who views it positively.
> 
> One of the more troubling (to me) things is Chemerinsky's comment that 
> people have no expectation of privacy in public.  The idea that you
> may follow someone around with a video camera, take mm scale radar
> pictures through their clothes, etc, etc without their permission
> because they are in a public space is simply wrong.

I think it's important to flesh out what you mean by "wrong" - if you
mean that he's misread US law on this topic, I agree with him, not you -
the privacy and publicity (and 4th Amendment) cases have for the most
part agreed that it's perfectly permissible to record (mechanically
or electronically) whatever's perceptible from or in a public place.

This summary of the legal and practical history of video surveillance 
may be of interest -

<http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/>

There are a few limited exceptions - as of Jan 1 2000, California
criminalized surreptitious nonconsensual videotaping under or
through another person's clothing for sexual purposes, where the
victim had a reasonable expectation of privacy (CA Penal Code 
647(k)(2)), but that's pretty limited. There's a table of state
voyeurism statutes at
<http://www.law.about.com/newsissues/law/library/docs/n98voyeurlaws.htm>
but it's a few years old - of the 12 states listed there, I'd say
that only two (AK and TN) appear to even potentially criminalize
surveillance or recording in public places. 

I get the impression that other states may eventually criminalize
sexually oriented surveillance - but I anticipate the statutes will
be aimed at sexual or voyeuristic content, and won't touch garden
variety baby-brother surveillance for behavior control. 

> The free-speech-chilling nature of this technology should be clear.

Yes, but that's a two-edged sword - the free press implications of
limiting recording, depicting, and describing public content are
also very serious - I think the people most likely to successfully
use a law against public recordings would be police officers going
after people like the ones who videotaped the beating of Rodney King.
There's a persistent rumor that in CA, cops act very aggressively
to prosecute people who surreptitiously tape encounters like traffic
stops - I've got no idea whether or not that's true.

--
Greg Broiles gbroiles at netbox.com
PO Box 897
Oakland CA 94604