RCMP's use of facial recognition extends well beyond Clearview AI – POLITICO

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OTTAWA — Canada's national police force, which was heavily criticized for using Clearview AI software, has signed contracts to use multiple facial recognition tools.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) revealed these details in documents recently tabled in Parliament, though it says it has stopped using facial recognition technology pending an internal review sparked by public outcry in 2020.

The RCMP has been open about wanting to resume using facial recognition, despite privacy concerns, but it has divulged little about the programs at its disposal.

“It's not a simple matter to determine which police forces are using what surveillance tools and that's a fundamental flaw of accountability that we keep seeing in policing,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the privacy, technology and surveillance program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

In 2020, The New York Times published an investigation of Clearview AI, a tech start-up that claimed to have scraped 3 billion images of people from the internet and sold access to law enforcement agencies. In Canada, after initially denying it had used the software, the RCMP in February 2020 publicly acknowledged having used Clearview AI in 15 child sexual exploitation cases, and said other units were using it on a “trial basis” to “determine its utility to enhance criminal investigations.”

Clearview AI stopped offering its services in Canada and suspended its contract with the RCMP in July 2020, in response to a joint federal-provincial privacy investigation. In February 2021, Canada's federal privacy watchdog declared that “what Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal.”

However, the RCMP seems to have used at least two other facial recognition tools in addition to Clearview AI in its efforts to fight child sexual exploitation and human trafficking, according to the documents, which were provided in answer to a question from a Conservative member of Parliament.

The first, Traffic Jam, was developed by an American tech entrepreneur, Emily Kennedy, to help police stop human trafficking and find missing people. The second, Spotlight, was developed by the nonprofit Thorn, co-founded by actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and is made available to law enforcement free of charge. Both use Amazon's facial recognition tool, Rekognition. The RCMP says it has been using both programs since 2016.

Where Clearview AI imposes no real limits on how its technology can be used, both Traffic Jam and Spotlight are marketed as tools to fight human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation in particular. Police can use them to match a photo of a child's face to online sex trafficking advertisements.

In the documents, the RCMP says it uses Traffic Jam and Spotlight “to locate and identify exploited children who are publicly advertised on the internet for the purpose of a human trafficking investigation and child rescue.”

It adds that, in both cases, “Divisions reporting use have been advised to cease using facial recognition capacity until a full assessment by the RCMP through the National Technology Onboarding Program is complete.” That program was created in March 2021, in direct response to the Clearview AI debacle. The RCMP says it's meant to “bring more transparency to the processes that govern how the RCMP … approves the use of new and emerging technologies.”

But Kate Robertson, a criminal lawyer and research fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, said an internal review is “not sufficient… to ensure that human rights are protected.” She said police forces should be transparent about the novel surveillance tools at their disposal, and Canada should establish “clear and proportionate limits on the use of those technologies.”

A parliamentary ethics committee has been studying the use of facial recognition technology since 2021, and has met twice this month to consider a draft report, which is expected to land very soon. Last spring, federal and provincial privacy watchdogs told the committee that Canadian law needs to “explicitly define” when law enforcement can use facial recognition to avoid “generalized surveillance.”

Matthew Green, ethics critic for Canada's left-leaning New Democratic Party, said what became clear during the committee hearings “is that the technology has absolutely eclipsed any type of appropriate legislation.”

In a response to questions from POLITICO, a spokesperson for the office of the federal privacy commissioner said the RCMP raised the use of Traffic Jam and Spotlight this past summer, but has not submitted privacy impact assessments regarding those tools.

“When used responsibly, facial recognition technology can offer significant benefits such as helping solve serious crimes, locating missing persons and supporting national security objectives,” said spokesperson Vito Pilieci. “However, it can also be extremely intrusive, enable widespread surveillance, provide biased results and erode human rights.”

McPhail is pushing for a moratorium on all use of facial recognition “until we have legal reform that puts in place the appropriate guardrails for the use of the technology.”

Proponents of facial recognition will often use human trafficking and child sexual exploitation as examples of why the technology is necessary, because “surely every right-thinking person would agree,” McPhail said. But she worries about what she calls “function creep.”

“What happens when we decide that, ‘Yes, there's a tool that's useful for finding missing persons. Therefore, we should be using it to find shoplifters because they're missing from us,'” she said. “That's the extreme, obviously.”

Susan Davis, a sex worker and the director of the B.C. Coalition of Experiential Communities, said she worries sex workers will be caught up in this type of surveillance. “We are an afterthought. Our safety and privacy is a reasonable casualty in their view,” she said. “This is justified to save children.”

In fact, the RCMP is considering other uses for the technology.

In the documents, the police force says it was awarded research and development funding in October 2021 to study a biometric livescan kiosk that would perform criminal record checks for prospective government employees. Facial recognition would be used to compare a person's face to their government-issued photo ID. The agency hasn't yet tested this function.

The RCMP is not the only Canadian police force to have used facial recognition technology. Police officers across the country tested Clearview AI's software. And police services in Alberta use a program called NeoFace Reveal, which the RCMP also tested in 2014.

The documents tabled in the House of Commons list other tools the RCMP has used in a limited capacity. The force says it uses a program called BriefCam and a tool from Canadian software shop BlueBear, called LACE, that are equipped with facial recognition technologies the RCMP says it does not use.

The B.C. RCMP had a contract with IntelCenter, which specializes in facial recognition targeting potential terrorists. But the subscription ended in 2018 without being used “in an operational capacity,” the force says, in part due to privacy concerns.