I write to urge you to oppose SB 5376, which allows an invasive face surveillance infrastructure to be built without meaningful controls. Of particular concern are sections of the bill that legitimize law enforcement use of the technology and preempt local jurisdictions from enacting stronger protections on face surveillance. Instead of this deeply problematic bill, I urge you to support a strong approach that rejects the proliferation of face surveillance technology, given its demonstrated bias.
Section 16 of the bill sets up a permissive regime that will encourage face surveillance to be acquired by law enforcement without any meaningful discussion of the proper place for this technology in our democracy. This provision allows use of face surveillance by law enforcement with a warrant, and allows warrantless use under some circumstances as well. But with or without a warrant, face surveillance is a uniquely powerful technology that gives the government unprecedented power to track, surveil, and impact the lives of anyone moving about in a public place. This pervasive surveillance changes the nature of our democracy by putting people under government scrutiny, like suspects, at all times. Our Supreme Court recognized in the recent Carpenter decision that people retain their expectation of privacy even in public places, but Section 16 significantly undermines that expectation.
Green-lighting face surveillance technology will also hit vulnerable communities hardest. Growing evidence from multiple studies shows that the technology is biased against people of color, women, and others, on both identification and affect recognition. Other studies demonstrate that the databases used for facial recognition comparison contain disproportionately more people of color. And a long history of previous surveillance technologies shows that they have often been used against people of color, from Japanese Americans, to Black civil rights leaders, to Muslims after 9/11, to protest groups such as Black Lives Matter. The Legislature should not simply greenlight this problematic technology.
Compounding these problems, Section 17 of the bill preempts local jurisdictions from enacting their own stronger protections around face surveillance, making everyone in our state subject to this invasive technology. Local jurisdictions should be allowed to make their own choice to reject the proliferation of a technology, or at least to impose rules that limit its impact on our democracy.
Section 16 is premature—it presumes that use of face surveillance by law enforcement is legitimate, when the reality is that face surveillance is a technology that has the power to change our democracy permanently. We cannot simply skip over having a discussion of the proper role of this powerful technology in a meaningful way, rather than in the context of a bill in which it does not belong. We should have that discussion, this interim, with the most impacted communities. Yet SB 5376 is being championed by technology companies, who want to be free to sell this invasive technology with few meaningful restrictions.
I urge you to oppose SB 5376 in its entirety, or at least to strip out Sections 16 and 17 from the bill. We need a moratorium, not a green light to create a face surveillance infrastructure as this bill provides. Please reject the flawed approach of SB 5376 on face surveillance.
