Bill Stalls that Would Prohibit Law Enforcement Agencies in Illinois from Using Controversial Technology
A proposed bill, the Illinois Biometric Surveillance Act, which would have prohibited law enforcement agencies from using or accessing facial recognition tools, stalled in the state House earlier this year and backers of the bill have said they will not further pursue the legislation in this session, effectively killing the bill from becoming law in the immediate future. Had it passed, the bill would have made Illinois the most restrictive state in the country when it comes to law enforcement using the tool in their investigations. The bill was significantly derailed after a highly publicized case of the March 19 shooting of Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman in Rogers Park by a suspect who authorities say they were able to identify and arrest due to the use of the exact facial recognition software the bill would have banned.
Illinois actually has some of the country’s oldest and strongest biometric privacy laws for the private sector, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, which passed unanimously in 2008. But that law has never covered government agencies, meaning law enforcement effectively had a loophole to the law which severely curtails the use of biometric data. As a result, Illinois law enforcement agencies’ use of facial recognition technology operates in a largely unregulated space, a fact that the ACLU and privacy advocates have argued makes the current situation especially precarious as the legal system works to catch up with the rapid growth, proliferation, and advancement in sophistication of the technology with used of artificial intelligence. This can be particularly worrisome in Chicago, where the ACLU says that the Chicago Police Department (“CPD”) already has access to roughly 30,000 public and private surveillance cameras throughout the city already, describing it as one of the most “extensive and integrated” systems in the country. However, Illinois State Police Chief Public Information Officer Melaney Arnold stressed that the agency only uses these tools for limited purposes as part of criminal investigations, with other law enforcement advocates such as Illinois state representative Patrick Sheehan denouncing the bill, arguing that the bill would have, “literally [taken] us back to the stone age in fighting crime, making our communities less safe.” Northwestern Law professor Matthew Kugler, who researches public attitudes toward biometric technology provided a somewhat middle ground answer, saying that the technology, “Used well, it’s a lead that can be used in conjunction with other evidence to break open a case. Used badly, it is overly trusting of an artificial intelligence system and just outsourcing one’s thinking to it entirely.” The fight over the use of the emerging and somewhat controversial technology will undoubtedly continue both at the state and federal levels, with privacy advocates pushing for reform if not outright bans, while those in law enforcement will fight for the investigatory tools continued existence.
Wrongful Arrests Are Not an Isolated Problem with Facial Recognition Technology
As we have previously covered, from the beginning of its implementation, this technology has lead to false arrests and subsequent lawsuits by those who have been the victims of wrongful arrests based on faulty or erroneous facial recognition results. Just last month, the ACLU highlighted at least 14 people who have been arrested in the United States based on false matches, including one grandmother in Oklahoma who had been arrested on a Maryland-based arrest warrant despite a plethora of evidence she had nothing to do with the alleged crimes and had never been to Maryland in her life.
If you or someone you know was arrested or detained based on what you believe to be an erroneous charge, and particularly one that you believe involved the use of facial recognition technology, you should make sure to immediately hire an experienced criminal defense attorney who can fight for you in a variety of ways. From obtaining or probing any available discovery to determine whether faulty facial recognition was used at any stage of an investigation, how any match was obtained, what databases were utilized and searched, and whether independent corroborating evidence actually existed before an arrest was made, could prove the difference in securing you or your loved ones immediate release and crucially, preserving any key evidence for a potential civil lawsuit. Though the bill stalled at the state level, there are still procedural safeguards for aggrieved parties. We have personally represented people who have had their lives severely disrupted by the actions of others who overly-relied on facial recognition technology without proper oversight or appropriate independent investigations and have secured their freedom through the dismissal of felony criminal charges, in addition to civil monetary compensation.
