“It’s not an easy matter to find out which police forces are using what surveillance tools and that’s a fundamental flaw of accountability that we keep seeing in policing,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the privacy, technology and surveillance program on the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
In 2020, The Latest York Times published an investigation of Clearview AI, a tech start-up that claimed to have scraped 3 billion images of individuals from the web and sold access to law enforcement agencies. In Canada, after initially denying it had used the software, the RCMP in February 2020 publicly acknowledged having used Clearview AI in 15 child sexual exploitation cases, and said other units were using it on a “trial basis” to “determine its utility to boost criminal investigations.”
Clearview AI stopped offering its services in Canada and suspended its contract with the RCMP in July 2020, in response to a joint federal-provincial privacy investigation. In February 2021, Canada’s federal privacy watchdog declared that “what Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegitimate.”
Nevertheless, the RCMP seems to have used a minimum of two other facial recognition tools along with Clearview AI in its efforts to fight child sexual exploitation and human trafficking, in keeping with the documents, which were provided in answer to an issue from a Conservative member of Parliament.
The primary, Traffic Jam, was developed by an American tech entrepreneur, Emily Kennedy, to assist police stop human trafficking and find missing people. The second, Highlight, was developed by the nonprofit Thorn, co-founded by actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and is made available to law enforcement freed from charge. Each use Amazon’s facial recognition tool, Rekognition. The RCMP says it has been using each programs since 2016.
Where Clearview AI imposes no real limits on how law enforcement and government agencies can use its database of images, each Traffic Jam and Highlight are marketed as tools to fight human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation particularly. Police can use them to match a photograph of a toddler’s face to online sex trafficking advertisements.
Within the documents, the RCMP says it uses Traffic Jam and Highlight “to locate and discover exploited children who’re publicly advertised on the web for the aim of a human trafficking investigation and child rescue.”
It adds that, in each cases, “Divisions reporting use have been advised to stop using facial recognition capability until a full assessment by the RCMP through the National Technology Onboarding Program is complete.” That program was created in March 2021, in direct response to the Clearview AI debacle. The RCMP says it’s meant to “bring more transparency to the processes that govern how the RCMP … approves using recent and emerging technologies.”
But Kate Robertson, a criminal lawyer and research fellow on the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said an internal review is “not sufficient… to be certain that human rights are protected.” She said police forces must be transparent concerning the novel surveillance tools at their disposal, and Canada should establish “clear and proportionate limits on using those technologies.”
A parliamentary ethics committee has been studying using facial recognition technology since 2021, and has met twice this month to think about a draft report, which is predicted to land very soon. Last spring, federal and provincial privacy watchdogs told the committee that Canadian law must “explicitly define” when law enforcement can use facial recognition to avoid “generalized surveillance.”
Matthew Green, ethics critic for Canada’s left-leaning Latest Democratic Party, said what became clear throughout the committee hearings “is that the technology has absolutely eclipsed any variety of appropriate laws.”
In a response to questions from POLITICO, a spokesperson for the office of the federal privacy commissioner said the RCMP raised using Traffic Jam and Highlight this past summer, but has not submitted privacy impact assessments regarding those tools.
“When used responsibly, facial recognition technology can offer significant advantages corresponding to helping solve serious crimes, locating missing individuals and supporting national security objectives,” said spokesperson Vito Pilieci. “Nevertheless, it may possibly even be extremely intrusive, enable widespread surveillance, provide biased results and erode human rights.”
McPhail is pushing for a moratorium on all use of facial recognition “until we now have legal reform that puts in place the suitable guardrails for using the technology.”
Proponents of facial recognition will often use human trafficking and child sexual exploitation as examples of why the technology is needed, because “surely every right-thinking person would agree,” McPhail said. But she worries about what she calls “function creep.”
“What happens once we determine that, ‘Yes, there’s a tool that’s useful for locating missing individuals. Due to this fact, we should always be using it to search out shoplifters because they’re missing from us,’” she said. “That’s the acute, obviously.”
Susan Davis, a sex employee and the director of the B.C. Coalition of Experiential Communities, said she worries sex employees can be caught up in this kind of surveillance. “We’re an afterthought. Our safety and privacy is an affordable casualty of their view,” she said. “That is justified to save lots of children.”
In actual fact, the RCMP is considering other uses for the technology.
Within the documents, the police force says it was awarded research and development funding in October 2021 to check a biometric livescan kiosk that will perform criminal record checks for prospective government employees. Facial recognition can be used to match an individual’s face to their government-issued photo ID. The agency hasn’t yet tested this function.
The RCMP will not be the one Canadian police force to have used facial recognition technology. Law enforcement officials across the country tested Clearview AI’s software. And police services in Alberta use a program called NeoFace Reveal, which the RCMP also tested in 2014.
The documents tabled within the House of Commons list other tools the RCMP has utilized in a limited capability. The force says it uses a program called BriefCam and a tool from Canadian software shop BlueBear, called LACE, which are equipped with facial recognition technologies the RCMP says it doesn’t use.
The B.C. RCMP had a contract with IntelCenter, which focuses on facial recognition targeting potential terrorists. However the subscription led to 2018 without getting used “in an operational capability,” the force says, partially as a consequence of privacy concerns.
