The Secret Service Wants To Test Facial Recognition Around the White House

The Secret Service is planning to test facial recognition surveillance around the White House, 'with the goal of identifying 'subjects of interest' who might pose a threat to the president,' reports The Verge. The document with the plans was published by the American Civil Liberties Union, describing 'a test that would compare closed circuit video footage of public White House spaces against a database of images -- in this case, featuring employees who volunteered to be tracked.' From the report: The test was scheduled to begin on November 19th and to end on August 30th, 2019. While it's running, film footage with a facial match will be saved, then confirmed by human evaluators and eventually deleted. The document acknowledges that running facial recognition technology on unaware visitors could be invasive, but it notes that the White House complex is already a 'highly monitored area' and people can choose to avoid visiting. We don't know whether the test is actually in operation, however. 'For operational security purposes we do not comment on the means and methods of how we conduct our protective operations,' a spokesperson told The Verge.

The ACLU says that the current test seems appropriately narrow, but that it 'crosses an important line by opening the door to the mass, suspicionless scrutiny of Americans on public sidewalks' -- like the road outside the White House. (The program's technology is supposed to analyze faces up to 20 yards from the camera.) 'Face recognition is one of the most dangerous biometrics from a privacy standpoint because it can so easily be expanded and abused -- including by being deployed on a mass scale without people's knowledge or permission.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.