Grassroots Activists are Leading the Fight to Stop Face Recognition. It’s Time for Congress to Step Up, Too.

Tech companies and police forces would like us to believe there is nothing we can do to stop harmful surveillance technologies like face recognition. We and our allies reject that narrative. Across the country, coalitions of community-based organizations are fighting back to protect our communities and our lives — and winning.

Today, many ACLU affiliates are proud to join more than 65 grassroots partners from across the United States on a letter calling on Congress to support this movement and act aggressively to stop the government’s use of face recognition and other biometric surveillance systems.

People and communities from coast to coast are being harmed by face recognition surveillance. Police and other government agencies are using these systems to intimidate activists, target immigrants, wrongfully accuse people of crimes, and impede access to needed public resources such as unemployment relief and housing. Face recognition supercharges the government’s power to surveil people of color and other marginalized groups and impacts our core constitutional rights – we cannot freely organize, seek reproductive health care, or attend a place of worship if we fear that our identities and locations will automatically be recorded and placed on a watchlist.

Face recognition surveillance expands the reach of our society’s most violent and unjust systems that activists and allies have been fighting to dismantle for decades. All across the country, people are banding together to stop their governments from using these harmful systems.

In just two years, local coalitions and ACLU affiliates have successfully pushed for bans on government face recognition in 20 cities and counties, starting in San Francisco and leading up to this month’s unanimous approval of a ban in King County, Washington — right in the backyard of Amazon and Microsoft. Grassroots coalitions have also secured important state laws stopping the use of dangerous face recognition technologies: Vermont and Virginia have banned government and police face surveillance, New York has barred it in schools, and California, New Hampshire, and Oregon have all stopped any use of face and biometric surveillance with police body cameras.

Grassroots groups are also powering important corporate change. Direct activism has forced companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to stop or pause face recognition sales to law enforcement. In 2019, ACLU affiliates and a coalition of more than 80 civil rights groups demanded that these companies stop selling face recognition to police. At the same time, MediaJustice and Athena coalition have led the #EyesonAmazon campaign, a nationwide mobilization of activists pressuring the company to end face recognition sales to governments. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have now all announced they will not sell these systems to police for the foreseeable future.

These legislative and corporate changes are the direct result of people organizing, showing up, and harnessing their collective power to write their own future and reject a reality where face recognition surveillance is used to accelerate violence and oppression. Communities are speaking up loud and clear that they do not want dangerous and discriminatory face and biometric surveillance. It’s time for Congress to take note.

This letter to Congress comes at a critical moment in the fight against face recognition. Earlier this week, Senators Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley reintroduced a bicameral bill — the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act — that would stop federal agencies from using face and biometric recognition surveillance technologies while effectively stripping federal support for purchases of such systems by state and local governments.

But at the same time, a surveillance lobby composed of police and Big Tech is pushing for weaker federal and state bills that would legitimize the use of face recognition in our communities and “preempt” local and state bans, effectively wiping civil rights laws and local democratic progress off the books. We also know that government agencies at the federal and local levels are still rushing to deploy face recognition systems. We recently sued with immigrants’ rights advocates to learn more about the role of immigration and border agencies in this expansion.

We are already seeing the life-threatening consequences of this harmful technology in government hands. For Robert Williams, a Black man in Michigan, a false match meant being wrongly arrested at home in front of his family and jailed for 30 hours. Robert Williams is just one of the several Black men that we know have already been arrested following police misuse of this technology. The accuracy and bias issues in these systems were exposed by Joy Buolamwini’s groundbreaking academic research, and further illustrated through our own test of Amazon’s Rekognition service — which falsely identified members of Congress including the late Rep. John Lewis.

But as our letter explains, this is not just a software or algorithmic problem. More accurate (or less biased) face recognition will not solve the larger, systemic problems. Facial recognition is racist, from how it was built to how it is used. It expands the police’s ability to sabotage activists, stalk people of color, and target other marginalized groups.

The spread of harmful face recognition surveillance is not an inevitability. Working together, we have the power to change the law and our relationship with technology, and the bans that community-based coalitions have enacted across the United States prove it. Now it is time for Congress to stand in full support of this coast-to-coast progress. We urge Congress to take immediate action to halt the government’s acquisition and use of face recognition. Join us by adding your voice.