ICE Used Facial Recognition to Scan Millions of Driver’s License Photos
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been criticized in recent years for its heavy-handed approach to undocumented immigration. According to a new report, ICE has sought access to millions of driver’s license photos in order to search for undocumented immigrants with facial recognition technology. At least three states complied with this futuristic dragnet.
We only know about this facial recognition sweep thanks to Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. Researchers there filed public records requests in states known to provide driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. Two states, Utah and Vermont, allowed ICE to search driver’s license data for undocumented individuals. Washington state apparently authorized administrative subpoenas of the Department of Licensing, but it’s unclear if ICE ever got around to searching the records.
This is the first known instance of ICE using facial recognition technology to search state motorist databases. The search included not only undocumented immigrants but also citizens and legal residents. The researchers say this constitutes a massive privacy violation.
Researchers from Georgetown Law call this a “huge bait and switch.” People applying for driver’s licenses are never told their photos will be scrutinized by ICE as it hunts for immigrants. States that provide licenses to undocumented people have done so on the premise that it’s in the public interest to have all drivers on the books, but ICE’s actions could scare these populations away from their local DMV.
While facial recognition technology can be effective, it’s far from perfect. A 3D scanning system pointed right at your face, like the one built into the iPhone, can be extremely accurate. However, cameras mounted at a distance are less accurate, and research shows they are sometimes biased against women and people of color. The situation is even worse when you’re relying on the poor-quality 2D photos taken for driver’s licenses.
The Georgetown researchers’ data covers ICE requests from 2014 to 2017. They cannot confirm if any of the states cited in the report still provide ICE access to motorist photos. In Vermont, the Agency of Transportation says it discontinued its cooperation with ICE in 2017 at the direction of Governor Phil Scott. Meanwhile, Washington has stopped turning over some license data to ICE, but that’s a separate issue from the facial recognition scanning.
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