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"How Governments Use Facial Recognition for Protest Surveillance."
webrestofworld.org·restofworld.org/2024/facial-recognition-government-protes...
Relevant to AI governance and deployment risks, illustrating real-world harms from unregulated facial recognition; useful for discussions on state misuse of AI, civil liberties, and the need for deployment safeguards.
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Importance: 52/100news articlenews
Summary
This investigative piece documents how governments worldwide deploy facial recognition technology to surveil and identify protesters, chilling free assembly and enabling targeted repression. It examines specific cases across authoritarian and democratic states, highlighting the growing normalization of AI-powered crowd surveillance. The report raises urgent concerns about civil liberties, accountability gaps, and the absence of legal safeguards.
Key Points
- •Governments in multiple countries use facial recognition at protests to identify, track, and prosecute participants, often without legal authorization or oversight.
- •The technology enables post-hoc identification from footage, meaning attendees face surveillance risks long after an event ends.
- •Both authoritarian regimes and ostensibly democratic governments have adopted these tools, blurring distinctions between political contexts.
- •Facial recognition surveillance has a documented chilling effect on protest participation and free expression.
- •Lack of transparency, accountability, and redress mechanisms makes it difficult for affected individuals to challenge misidentification or wrongful targeting.
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| AI Surveillance and Regime Durability Model | Analysis | 64.0 |
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How governments use facial recognition for protest surveillance - Rest of World
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By Darren Loucaides
27 March 2024
Intro
An end to privacy
On March 13, 2022, 34-year-old English teacher Yulia Zhivtsova left her Moscow apartment to meet her friends at the mall. Bundled up against the freezing cold, she entered the metro at the CSKA station on the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line, passing through station barriers that let travelers pay by scanning their faces.
But when she went down to the platform, two police officers plucked her out of the crowd.
“Hey!” said one, and then addressed her by her full name, including the Russian patronymic. “Yulia Maksimovna. Come with us.”
The officers looked back and forth between Zhivtsova and an image on their smartphones. They seemed unsure if they had the right person. Catching a glimpse of the screen, Zhivtsova recognized a photo of herself taken the month before, when she was detained for protesting Russia’s war in Ukraine. Her hair looked different: In the photo it was faded blue, but that day it was back to a gleaming teal. “I do tend to change my hair color a lot,” Zhivtsova told Rest of World .
After a while, the officers decided to trust the image on their smartphones. Another anti-war demonstration was taking place in Moscow that day, and even though Zhivtsova didn’t plan to attend, they detained her preventively, holding her for a few hours.
The changing face of protest
Mass protests used to offer a degree of safety in numbers. Facial recognition technology changes the equation.
This story explores how thanks to new facial recognition technology, protesters’ safety in numbers is becoming a thing of the past. We take a look at three case studies — in Russia, India, and Iran — to show the proliferation of facial recognition as a tool to control and curtail protest.
Written by Darren Loucaides. Narrated by Jane Seidel.
Original story: https://restofworld.org/2024/facial-recognition-government-protest-surveillance/
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Over the past decade, there has been a steep rise globally in law enforcement using facial recognition technology. Data gathered by Steven Feldstein, a researcher with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, found that government agencies in 78 countries now use public facial recognition systems.
The public is often supportive of the use of such tech: 59% of U.K. adults told a survey they “somewhat” or “strongly” support police use of facial recognition technology in public spaces, and a Pew Research study found 46% of U.S. adults said they th
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