And now, for some positive developments on the privacy issue, courtesy of the Montana Legislature.
As the Tenth Amendment Center's Mike Maharrey reports, lawmakers have approved a bill that would restrict when and how law enforcement uses facial recognition technology. And yes, it also requires police to get a warrant if they want to use this sort of surveillance tool:
…[the bill] would ban warrantless facial recognition surveillance in Montana in most situations, and would place general limits on the use of facial recognition technology by government agencies.
SB397 includes an outright ban on “continuous facial surveillance” defined as “the monitoring of public places or third party image sets using facial recognition technology for facial identification to match faces with a prepopulated list of face images. The term includes but is not limited to scanning stored video footage to identify faces in the stored data, real-time scanning of video surveillance to identify faces passing by the cameras, and passively monitoring video footage using facial recognition technology for general surveillance purposes without a particularized suspicion of a specific target.”
In other words, no fishing expeditions would be allowed.
The bill has been sent to Gov. Greg Gianforte.
Law enforcement generally approves of facial recognition technology, saying it helps them track down bad guys. But the tech is notoriously unreliable, particularly for minorities. This can and has led to wrongful arrests.
Unsurprisingly, facial recognition is a favorite tool of authoritarian governments such as China, which has used surveillance technology like facial recognition to suppress and imprison the Uyghurs and others it finds…inconvenient.
As with any technology of tool law enforcement wants to use…if facial recognition is the best tool for the job, fine. Get a warrant, then use it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Good we have to set limits to many mistakes, there is no good reason to spy 24/7 on Americans, we know who some bad guys are antifa,blm, aclu, and others but these are paid for by soros other billionaires millionaires that is who need arrested all assets ceased but nothing is being done even to Treasonous Traitor’s biden his administration family members all are criminals and are known High Treasonous
Hooray need this nationwide
Thank you Montana Republicans
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