Activists from Fight for the Future prowled the halls of Congress in “jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance” to “show why this tech should be banned.”
They worked their way through the Rayburn building (which houses offices for the House of Reps), livestreaming thousands of face scans to Scancongress.com. You can send Scancongress an image of your face and it will tell you if you’re among those whose faces were captured.
Eventually they were ordered to leave on pain of arrest — for blocking the hallways, not for scanning faces, which remains legal.
We did this to prove a point and to pressure Congress to pass laws to ban facial recognition surveillance, so we’re going to delete all the footage and all the biometric data when we’re done. We also chose our location carefully: inside the capitol where everyone is already under video surveillance. But anyone else could easily do what we did, and right now it’s perfectly legal. A government agency can do this to monitor a marginalized population. A corporation can do it to harvest our biometric data and sell it for profit. A creepy stalker could do it to find their target in a crowd of people.
We scanned thousands of faces in DC today to show why facial recognition surveillance should be banned [Fight for the Future]
(via Beyond the Beyond)
