The Threat of Facial Recognition

WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) filed an amicus brief in Anthropic’s lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the company’s designation as a “supply-chain risk” by the Department of Defense. The designation purports to prohibit anyone from using Anthropic’s tools in connection with Defense Department work. Anthropic’s lawsuit argues that this designation was in retaliation for the company’s First Amendment-protected advocacy related to AI safety, including the urgent need for artificial intelligence (AI) guardrails that prohibit the U.S. military from using these powerful new tools for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. “AI-powered surveillance poses immense dangers to our democracy. Anthropic’s public advocacy for AI guardrails is laudable and protected by the First Amendment — not something the Pentagon should be punishing,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Our privacy laws are lagging decades behind the government’s ability to capture and exploit our data using AI tools, which can easily reveal the most intimate details of our lives. Anthropic has been right to speak out, but Congress also must step up to protect us from mass spying.” The brief explains why Anthropic’s advocacy for AI guardrails is vitally important and describes the dangers posed by AI tools when applied to immense datasets containing sensitive information — including how these tools can invade privacy, chill speech, and facilitate discriminatory profiling. The groups also explain how existing U.S. privacy laws are inadequate to protect people in the United States, especially in light of loopholes the government has long exploited to justify sweeping surveillance. And it emphasizes why, as a result, Anthropic’s advocacy for strict limitations on the government’s use of AI is critical to protecting the public’s privacy interests. “AI can enable surveillance that is unprecedented in its detail, scope, and scale, and that poses a profound threat to the freedoms our democracy depends on. The right to privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are fundamental to our country and to our Constitution,” said Samir Jain, vice president of policy at CDT. “By exploiting the data broker loophole, the government has access to unprecedented data on our lives, our routines, and our relationships. Combining that data with the power of AI would expand the Pentagon’s surveillance powers exponentially, and companies like Anthropic are well within their rights to push back on that outcome.” As the amicus brief shows, while Anthropic has rightly advocated for AI guardrails, people in the U.S. deserve a lasting legislative solution to protect their privacy. The ACLU and CDT have been vocal supporters of the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a commonsense reform bill that would ban the government from buying data it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law filed an amicus brief today in Chatrie v. U.S., the first geofence search case to reach the Supreme Court and the first major case addressing how the court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States applies to other kinds of location-tracking technologies. In the brief, the groups assert that police should not be able to conduct searches using geofence warrants, a novel and invasive surveillance technique that enables law enforcement to search for and locate unknown numbers of people in a large geographical area without reason to believe they were engaged in criminal conduct. Geofence warrants direct Google or other companies to hand over users’ location data from every cell phone or other device the company estimates was in a certain area during a certain time frame. These warrants are increasingly common, but they raise serious questions under the Fourth Amendment because they are dragnets, typically issued without police demonstrating reason to believe all the people who own those devices were involved in any crime. For example, a high-level analysis conducted by ACLU of Northern California of the types of places captured by law enforcement in geofence warrants across San Francisco revealed a troubling violation of our right to be secure in our homes and to be free from unreasonable search without probable cause. “A search that ensnares any number of innocent people just because they are nearby when a crime occurs is an unconstitutional fishing expedition that violates the Constitution. There are too many examples of these overbroad searches invading peoples’ privacy, including in homes, doctors’ offices, and churches. Courts should not allow them,” said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. This appeal comes after a federal judge in Virginia held that the geofence warrant in Mr. Chatrie’s case was overbroad and that investigators lacked probable cause for much of the data they obtained. The warrant tracked all Google location history users who were estimated to be within a 150-meter radius of a bank robbery in Virginia — an area as big as several football fields that encompassed residential buildings, businesses, and a church. The warrant also allowed police to obtain additional location information about individuals that were ensnared in the initial dragnet. The district court held that the government’s search warrant unconstitutionally left it to the officers and Google, and not to a judge, to decide what location and identifying information the company ultimately revealed, a clear departure from the neutral magistrate’s prescribed role under the Fourth Amendment. However, the court refused to suppress the illegally-obtained evidence on the grounds that the “good-faith exception” to the exclusionary rule — which allows evidence to be admitted when police reasonably rely on a facially valid warrant — applied. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit was divided but ultimately allowed prosecutors to use the evidence it had gathered through the geofence search. Now, at the Supreme Court, the ACLU’s amicus brief argues that geofence warrants are never a permissible investigatory method under the Fourth Amendment. Geofence searches are unconstitutional general warrants that courts should categorically reject. “Allowing police to access your private search history just because you happen to be three football fields away from where they say a crime was committed is both absurd and dangerous. And most importantly, it’s unconstitutional: Virginians do not lose their right to privacy because they happen to be within an arbitrary radius set by police,” said Matthew Callahan, senior supervising attorney with the ACLU of Virginia. The amicus brief in Chatrie v. United States is part of the ACLU’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Supreme Court Docket.

Such readings shouldn’t generally be retained at all, but if they are at least privacy needs to be protected

Think twice about sending video from your home to companies, and possibly police and hackers