American Civil Liberties Union

The FTC on Monday released a staff report on Face Recognition, offering “best practices for common uses of facial recognition technologies.” The report resulted from a workshop the agency held on the issue last year. Face recognition is in some ways the ultimate biometric identifier, and its potential to finally and decisively put an end to the possibility of anonymity in public is very real.

During the Cold War, as I argued last week, the totalitarian governments of the Soviet bloc functioned as a standing warning to Americans of the dangers of unchecked surveillance—lessons that we would do well to remember despite the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Sometimes the constant news on the surveillance front makes me wonder: would it be easier to fight new surveillance programs if the Soviet Union were still around?

On the one hand the Cold War was a bonanza for the military and for our three-letter security agencies, which were invested with a mission of world-historical importance at a time when the nation was truly facing an existential threat (nuclear war). These agencies saw their budgets and powers expand dramatically in ways that were unprecedented in a country that had always held a deep suspicion of government power in general and “standing armies” in particular. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these institutions faced an existential crisis of their own.

For the past year, the ACLU has been gathering information on local law enforcement agencies’ use of cell phone location tracking. (We’ve written about what we’ve learned here, here, here, here, and here.) In addition to everything we’ve discovered about location tracking itself, we’ve also learned about a number of other techniques law enforcement and the telcos can use when they work together. Sometimes the information came to light because, as with this telecom data retention chart, the information on the other techniques was mingled with the information on cell phone location tracking. Sometimes it was because law enforcement agencies misunderstood our public records requests and sent us everything they had related to telephones.