The end of winter means the start of disc golf season. So, dutifully, my friends and I headed to Token Creek Park last weekend to play 27 holes. It was the start of the season, and the course was busy.
While waiting to tee off on hole seven, I managed to overhear the conversation between the two men in front of me. “Yeah man, I can’t run guns down to Chicago anymore,” one told his friend. “They got my license plate all over that I-PASS system. The Feds brought me in and told me if they caught me again, I’d be facing serious time. So I can’t do that anymore.”
The I-PASS system (praise be unto it) is a distant cousin of facial-recognition software and a controversial new technology being deployed at public sites around the country. While the I-PASS scans license plates to determine which cars have been driving to and from places, face-recognition technologies scan faces and perform real-time identity checks against an image database to determine if an individual seen on surveillance footage is a wanted criminal or a suspected terrorist.
Much has been made in the past week about the failure of these high-tech security systems. Facial recognition software, for example, did not help law enforcement officials capture the Boston Marathon suspects. According to the Washington Post, “The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver’s license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation.”
If you think the moral of this story is not to trust fancy, expensive technologies, I’ll forgive you. After all, this sort of track record makes you doubtful that the software could differentiate former Republican presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s regular face from his brown one (anyone else remember that?), much less identify attackers based on shifting or concealed physical characteristics. It also raises concerns that our government is racially profiling those who have not committed crimes (albeit ineffectively). I hear you. I too, am bothered by how little we seem to get out of our technologies compared to what we put in.
The important thing to remember in this case is that technology improves. In 10 or 20 years, law enforcement will hopefully be able to take a grainy photograph and match it with a high-definition database. Maybe security cameras will get better. The wrong thing to do would be to declare the project a failure and resort to using “good, old-fashioned” policing to solve problems. Old-fashioned police work is irreplaceable and important, but goddamn if a new tool doesn’t make it easier sometimes.
I don’t usually go out of my way to find Fourth Amendment violations. If the government is interested in constantly watching your activities, they probably have a good reason. When I heard the guys at Token Creek, I didn’t get the American Civil Liberties Union on speed dial. I thought to myself, “Less guns in Chicago is a good thing, and I’m glad a piece of technology has effectively barred you from plying that trade.”
Our generation is extraordinarily open to and trusting of technology. Very few of us grew up in a home without an internet connection; a large number of us are constantly connected to the internet, and we all trust Wikipedia more than our grandmothers. Technology is becoming a daily reality for every U.S. citizen, no matter what end of the socioeconomic ladder you’re on.
Given these realities, I’m surprised more does not exist support for surveillance technology that assists domestic law enforcement. As Natasha Lennard put it on Salon.com, these devices in their current form “[sweep] millions of individuals into a constant surveillance dragnet, while failing to pinpoint genuine suspects.” I’d like to see a surveillance technology that can stop injury without adding this undue insult. It’s ideologically possible. The technology just has to get here.
Nathaniel Olson ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science, history and psychology.
