Comment by Ashley Gorski

Unlike other ways of verifying a person’s identity, face recognition technology can enable persistent government surveillance on a massive scale. The public has a right to know when, where, and how the government is using face recognition, and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect our rights. This unregulated surveillance technology threatens to fundamentally alter our free society and is in urgent need of democratic oversight. [...] That we even need to go to court to pry out this information further demonstrates why we should be wary of weak industry proposals and why lawmakers urgently need to halt law and immigration enforcement use of this technology. There can be no meaningful oversight or accountability with such excessive, undemocratic secrecy.