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- Thousands of NYPD records secured by the rights groups detail expansive and unlawful surveillance of protesters, and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour communities.
Records obtained by Amnesty International and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based privacy and civil rights group, after a five-year long lawsuit against the New York Police Department (NYPD) reveal concerning surveillance abuses against protesters and communities of colour, including the frequent use of rights-violating facial recognition technology.
Analysis by Amnesty International and the S.T.O.P. of the over 2,700 documents to date reveals that facial recognition technologies (FRT) were used on several occasions by the NYPD, subjecting New Yorkers to invasive, flawed, and deeply discriminatory surveillance technologies.
The documents further revealed that the technology had been used to identify individuals based on unsolicited reports by the public that deemed certain individuals suspicious on the basis of speaking a different language or wearing culturally distinctive attire.
“New York promises to be a sanctuary city, but we’ve created nothing short of a surveillance state,
Michelle Dahl, Executive Director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
“These costly, error-prone, and biased technologies are wasting billions of dollars. NYPD surveillance puts our neighbors at risk of false arrest, deportation, or even worse. It’s long past time that New Yorkers should see the dystopian ways that the NYPD watches all of us. Now is the moment for lawmakers to take action and hold the NYPD accountable, outlawing facial recognition and imposing true civilian oversight.”
Facial recognition violates the right to privacy through mass image data scraping without knowledge and consent. It’s plagued by racial bias, disproportionately targeting Black and Brown communities, and suppresses peaceful protest and free expression through its chilling effect. For these reasons, hundreds of organizations consider the technology unlawful. Amnesty International and S.T.O.P. have long called for a ban on the use, development, production, and sale, of facial recognition technology for identification and mass surveillance by law enforcement and other government agencies.
In its analysis of the disclosures, the groups found that NYPD surveillance frequently puts marginalized communities at risk. NYPD records also documented the profiling of New Yorkers based on language, ethnicity, and other protected characteristics.
Initial findings from the disclosures of more than 2,700 NYPD documents show that:
- By 17 April 2020, the NYPD had already spent more than $5 million on facial recognition technology between 2019 and 2020, and is spending at least $100,000 more every year.
- The NYPD stopped tracking facial recognition accuracy in 2015 after finding the error rate was too high.
- NYPD Officers conspired with the US Marshalls Service to illicitly contract a controversial facial recognition firm to surveil a private Instagram account, in violation of the Department’s facial recognition policy.
- On 31 December 2019, facial recognition was used by the NYPD to target New Yorkers who were using slang to describe Times Square on social media, including: “NYE in Times Square is da BOMB,” in a clear overly broad and dangerous violation of the right to freedom of expression, and in a manner that ignores cultural and linguistic context.
- The NYPD has used facial recognition and selective enforcement against certain NYPD critics, such as on 1 February 2020 when they seemingly identified and arrested one person for “FTP” graffiti art, a common abbreviation for “fuck the police,” against the backdrop of heightened protest and dissent against police brutality.
- New Yorkers were racially profiled by the NYPD, and two men were wrongly targeted by facial recognition at the New Year’s Eve celebration in Time Square on 31 December 2019, for not dancing and speaking a Middle Eastern language. The report prompting the facial recognition query stated: “They had no females with them, were not dancing like everyone else and they gave everyone an uneasy feeling… At one point one went in the bathroom and was yelling on his phone in a Middle Eastern language.”
- On 3 June 2020, the NYPD targeted a “controversial protestor on twitter” for political speech, even though they acknowledged the lack of exigent circumstance or any threats and resolved to continue monitoring all of their social media accounts, regardless.
- On 5 June 2020, the NYPD deployed facial recognition to identify a Black Lives Matter protester for hyperbolically writing “cops should die” in a social media post.
- On 22 April 2020, the NYPD used facial recognition to identify two singers purely because of content in their music video, effectively subjecting artists to a virtual line-up and violating their free expression.
“The disclosures demonstrate multiple instances of discrimination and abuse, using facial recognition, which reinforce what our previous research has consistently shown to be a disregard for the safety of Black and Brown communities in New York City,
Matt Mahmoudi, Researcher & Advisor on AI and Human Rights at Amnesty International.
“The NYPD has avoided scrutiny for too long and has benefited from a lack of transparency to unlawfully invest in and use facial recognition to curb people’s rights to privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly.”
Background
In September 2020, Amnesty International filed a freedom of information request for NYPD records on its surveillance of the historic Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of the same year. In 2021, the NYPD rejected Amnesty International’s request and administrative appeal. S.T.O.P and the leading litigation law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP then sued the NYPD on Amnesty International’s behalf, seeking a court order compelling release of the requested documents. In 2022, the New York Supreme Court for New York County ordered the NYPD to disclose more than 2,700 records about BLM surveillance.
In 2022, Amnesty International, S.T.O.P., and partners in the New York ‘Ban the Scan’ coalition revealed that New Yorkers living in areas at greater risk of stop-and-frisk by police are subjected to greater facial recognition. The groups also showed non-white residents in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens face higher concentration of NYPD cameras.
Currently, Amnesty International, S.T.O.P., and the ‘Ban the Scan’ coalition are calling on city council members to enact bans on facial recognition. This includes two measures that have already secured sponsorship by a majority of council members. Additionally, the organizations call on the NYPD and New York City mayor to commit to immediately ending use of the discriminatory, invasive, and error-prone technology.
The post USA: Amnesty International, S.T.O.P. Lawsuit Reveals NYPD Surveillance Abuses appeared first on Amnesty International.
