ST. PAUL, Minn. (Feb. 17, 2025) – A bill filed in the Minnesota Senate would place some limits on government use of facial recognition surveillance.
Sen. Eric Lucero filed Senate Bill 1242 (SF1242). While the proposed law would not end government use of facial recognition in Minnesota, it would take a first step and set the foundation by placing limits on the technology and preventing ongoing surveillance using facial recognition.
The legislation would prohibit government agencies, including state and local law enforcement, from engaging in “ongoing surveillance” using facial recognition technology without a court order in most situations. Ongoing surveillance is defined as “the use of facial recognition technology to engage in a sustained effort to track the physical movements of an identified individual through one or more public places where the movements occur over a period of time greater than 72 hours, whether in real time or through application of the technology to historical records.”
The law would allow police to engage in ongoing surveillance without a court order if “exigent circumstances and compelling law enforcement needs make it impractical to obtain a covered court order,” but agencies would still be required to obtain a court order within 48 hours of initiating surveillance.
The proposed law would require court-authorized facial recognition to be “conducted in a way to minimize the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about the individuals other than those for whom there was probable cause to seek the covered court order.” It would also require a trained officer to review the facial recognition data before any law enforcement agency acted on the results.
IMPACT ON FEDERAL PROGRAMS
With facial recognition technology, police and other government officials can track individuals in real time. These systems allow law enforcement agents to use video cameras and continually scan everybody who walks by. According to the report, several major police departments have expressed an interest in this type of real-time tracking. Documents revealed agencies in at least five major cities, including Los Angeles, either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology with the capability, or expressed written interest in buying it.
A 2019 report revealed that the federal government has turned state driver’s license photos into a giant facial recognition database, putting virtually every driver in America in a perpetual electronic police lineup. The revelations generated widespread outrage, but the story wasn’t new. The federal government has been developing a massive facial recognition system for years.
The FBI rolled out a nationwide facial recognition program in the fall of 2014, intending to build a giant biometric database with pictures provided by the states and corporate friends.
In 2016, the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law released “The Perpetual Lineup,” a massive report on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in the U.S. You can read the complete report at perpetuallineup.org. The organization conducted a year-long investigation and collected more than 15,000 pages of documents through more than 100 public records requests. The report paints a disturbing picture of intense cooperation between the federal government, and state and local law enforcement to develop a massive facial recognition database.
“Face recognition is a powerful technology that requires strict oversight. But those controls, by and large, don’t exist today,” report co-author Clare Garvie said. “With only a few exceptions, there are no laws governing police use of the technology, no standards ensuring its accuracy, and no systems checking for bias. It’s a wild west.”
In all likelihood, the federal government heavily involves itself in helping state and local agencies obtain this technology. The feds provide grant money to local law enforcement agencies for a vast array of surveillance gear, including ALPRs, stingray devices, and drones. The federal government essentially encourages and funds a giant nationwide surveillance net and then taps into the information via the Information Sharing Environment (ISE).
Fusion centers operate within the broader ISE. In effect, the network serves as a conduit for the sharing of information gathered by multiple agencies across the country, generally without a warrant. Known ISE partners include the Office of Director of National Intelligence which oversees 17 federal agencies and organizations, including the NSA.
By funding state and local surveillance programs, the feds can obtain warrantless data without having to expend the resources to collect it themselves. By restricting the collection of data at the state and local levels, legislation such as SF1242 simultaneously limits the information available for the feds to access.
In a nutshell, without state and local cooperation, the feds have a much more difficult time gathering information. The passage of state laws and local ordinances banning and limiting facial recognition eliminates one avenue for gathering facial recognition data. Simply put, data that doesn’t exist cannot be entered into federal databases.
WHAT’S NEXT
SF1242 was referred to the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee where it must get a hearing and pass by a majority vote before moving forward in the legislative process.
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