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It is ironic that, in her defence of the Government’s now-abandoned scheme to equip every Garda in the country with body-mounted facial recognition cameras, the Minister for Justice provided one of the strongest arguments against her own idea:
She had argued that it would speed up the work of Gardái who currently have to spend thousands of hours trawling CCTV footage for faces of criminal suspects in some investigations.
McEntee said that in one murder investigation, 42,000 hours of CCTV from 150 locations had to be manually analysed by a team of gardaí.
“I firmly believe that bodycams and facial recognition technology are required to ensure that An Garda Síochána is a fully equipped, modern police service operating in a digital age, but I also acknowledge that some people hold legitimate concerns around the use of such technology,” she said.
There is a practical benefit to having human beings, rather than artificial intelligence, go through 42,000 hours of CCTV in a murder investigation: Artificial intelligence will scan the footage only for what it is told to seek – the face of a suspect. Human beings, by contrast, may be on the lookout for a face, but in the process see something else entirely that puts the case in a totally different light. AI, for example, might find footage of a suspect getting into his car, if the suspect is what it has been told to look for. It is unlikely to find the footage of somebody else emerging from the scene covered in blood, because it has not been told to seek that person, or to recognise blood spatter patterns on clothing.
Giving the Gardai shortcuts in murder investigations is the kind of idea that sounds, on the face of it, appealing. But in the end, human nature is human nature: Give people an excuse not to do the work, and they will not do it. A murder investigation, with somebody’s liberty on the line, should be both painstaking and exhaustive. Handing it over to a computer to scan people’s faces serves only to prematurely narrow enquiries that should properly be broad.
There are other reasons to oppose facial recognition technology: At the most basic level, it sets a terrible precedent: Facial recognition in the hands of the gardai would immediately be used as a justification to widen the use of the technology into things like public, street facing CCTV cameras to identify those guilty of anti-social behaviour – but this could easily be harnessed into gathering data about the political activities of the public, such as identifying those at a protest or demonstration.
At a human rights level, it would be an abandonment of the idea that a free citizen has the right to move around their own country freely. At present, the state uses electronic tagging for some prisoners released early from prison to monitor their movements – facial recognition technology amounts in practice to electronic tagging of the entire population. It amounts to passive monitoring of your movements, and the state knowing where you are at all times when you are in public. Though there is no suggestion that this is the intent, it could also evolve in time into the kind of technology used in China to enforce things like social credit scores – for example, some Chinese cities monitor how regularly people do things like visiting their elderly relatives, and award points for that. That kind of big brother state is only possible with the use of facial recognition technology.
This is, in short, not a road that a free society should go down. The Green Party, having killed the proposal for now, should have the thanks of a grateful nation.
That said, it should be concerning that public awareness of this proposal, and opposition to it, was so mooted. Ireland is, sadly, not a country with a big civil liberties lobby, or where there is much support for the idea of individual freedom in the population. That a proposal like this made it to the brink of being enacted without really a murmur of public protest confirms that.
And, in other cases of Government encroach on civil liberties, like the hate speech bill, we are not so fortunate as to have a Green Party that recognises the importance of liberties on a consistent basis. This proposal will likely return. We’d better hope that when it does, Sinn Fein are in power.
There are, after all, plenty of Sinn Fein members of the old school who might have their own reasons to oppose the Gardai having facial recognition technology.
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