Conservative Home – The Conservatives forget civil liberties in their call to mandate facial recognition checks

Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary “Willie” Whitelaw recognised that the powers we give to the police must be balanced with safeguards to protect individual liberty. He told the House of Commons that “it is possible to achieve order at too high a price in terms of freedom.”

His is an instinct that seems to have been forgotten by today’s Shadow Cabinet.

Earlier this week, Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, called for new Ministerial powers to “make the police do basic work.” He proclaimed that, were he in charge, police forces would be mandated to run a suspect’s image through facial recognition databases.

Nobody would dispute that the police need the right resources to solve crimes. However, Philp’s suggestion would not only waste these resources, but is a reckless blanket endorsement of a technology that carries dangerous implications for our freedoms.

Retrospective facial recognition – the software that Philp is describing – is a biometric technology most analogous to taking fingerprints. We know that the police don’t always test the fingerprints that they retrieve from the scene of a crime. It would be similarly nonsensical to compel officers to run facial recognition checks in every case.

In many cases, requiring facial recognition checks would be a fool’s errand. Testing fingerprint samples allows the police to establish the identity of a suspect, link a suspect with a scene and corroborate witness accounts. However, if the police already have a picture from the crime scene, it may be possible to identify the suspect visually. They may even have a record of what took place. These circumstances would make facial recognition redundant. We should not encourage the police to reach for AI tools to do their thinking for them when they are patently unnecessary.

Of course, facial images are different from prints – even if the underlying biometric technology is performing a similar function. Whereas fingerprinting might require a forensic investigator to comb through a crime scene, neighbours, bystanders and shopkeepers might provide the footage sample which the police check against their databases. This capability means we need to be even more careful about how we use retrospective facial recognition.

Just because retrospective facial recognition technology can be used more cheaply and with less specialist knowledge than fingerprint sampling, doesn’t mean we would want it to become routine. Doing so would have devastating impacts for our ability to move around public spaces with privacy and anonymity.

The father of forensic science, Dr Edmond Locard, established the central principle of forensic science: “Every contact leaves a trace.” When that trace is a fingerprint, DNA, fibres or footprints, it can be a helpful tool for police to link the suspect to a scene of a crime. But consider what it means if every record of our face captured in the physical world has the potential to become a crime scene sample. In this reality, facial recognition would turn our streets into digital checkpoints and our fellow citizens into digital watchmen. Given the UK’s extensive CCTV coverage and the proliferation of privately-operated cameras, almost no public space would be immune.

The range of photos against which forces can conduct facial recognition searches is also relatively boundless. Not everyone will have their fingerprints stored in police databases, however most people will have a photo stored with state agencies. This means officers could search against almost population-wide databases. Indeed, during his time as Home Secretary, Philp oversaw secret facial recognition searches against the passport database, drawing millions of law-abiding citizens into forensic checks, previously reserved for criminal suspects.

With millions of innocent people being searched, the risk of misidentifications and wrongful arrests skyrockets. Already, a young man was arrested and detained for almost ten hours in relation to a burglary committed in a city he had never visited. A former roofer was put on trial for stealing £300 of IKEA furniture after a separate facial recognition error.

Willie Whitelaw’s comments defending the importance of individual liberty were made during debates on the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE). That law reset the balance between the citizen and the police and has been the template for policing ever since. In the digital age, as facial recognition is rolled out across the country, we need new protections to safeguard our rights and freedoms. Without a legal framework, we risk becoming a nation of suspects, whose movements become a digital forensic record that can be retrieved at any time. A Labour Government would not need to mandate ID cards. Our faces will do it for them.

After a decade of facial recognition being deployed without any specific law governing its use, the Government is set to finally introduce legislation this Autumn. We have a precious opportunity to guard our freedoms, before we embed a surveillance infrastructure that we can’t undo.

Thatcher famously declared, “Every prime minister needs a Willie.” With the upcoming Police Reform Bill about to set the rules for this potent technology, it seems she might be right.

– Jasleen Chaggar

Conservative Home – The Conservatives forget civil liberties in their call to mandate facial recognition checks

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