Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been granted permission to use face recognition technology to scan millions of Maryland driver’s licenses without needing approval from the courts, it has been reported.
ICE is mining the database of Maryland drivers to see if the person photographed on the license matches photos of any undocumented immigrants in the federal agency’s system, according to The Washington Post.
In 2013, Maryland became the first East Coast state to allow migrants who are here illegally to obtain a driver license without having to provide proof of legal status.
Since that time, more than 275,000 driver licenses have been issued by the state.
An ICE spokesperson told the Post that the agency does not discuss specific law enforcement tactics.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses facial recognition technology to scan driver’s license photos from the Maryland DMV database, according to The Washington Post. The above image shows an ICE agent detain a suspect in October 2015
The spokesperson said ICE’s investigative activities are in compliance with federal law.
The face recognition searches are ‘routinely’ used to enforce immigration law while other agencies use it to solve cybercrimes like possession of child pornography, according to ICE.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 15 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.
Washington State was the first to do so in 1993. Its law allowed driver’s license applicants who did not have Social Security numbers to provide alternate proof of residence like home utility bills or tax identification numbers.
‘It’s a betrayal of immigrants’ trust for the [state] to turn around and let ICE run warrantless searches on their faces,’ said Harrison Rudolph of Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology.
‘It’s a bait-and-switch. … ICE is using biometric information in the shadows, without government notice or public approval, to hunt down the most vulnerable people.’
Last year, researchers at Georgetown Law learned that ICE was also employing face recognition technology to mine state driver’s license databases in Utah, Vermont, and Washington State.
The thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years indicate that investigators are using state DMV records to create ‘the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure’, The Washington Post reported.
But in those cases, ICE agents had to ask a state official to run the search.
There are an estimated 275,000 undocumented immigrants living in Maryland, which became the first East Coast state in 2013 to allow them to obtain a driver license. The above is a stock photo of a Maryland driver license
ICE officials anywhere in the country can search Maryland’s database without letting state officials know, according to the Post.
‘They have a wide-open door to be able to search through anything in this database,’ said Maryland State Senator Clarence K. Lam, a Democrat.
Lam has for years tried to get state officials to reveal the extent of their cooperation with ICE.
‘They’ve not been forthcoming in their willingness to [stop it] or coming up with solutions’.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (above) said last week that his state would grant federal agencies access to its DMV database
The practice of cataloging biometric data such as fingerprints and DNA from criminal suspects has long been used by law enforcement.
The FBI is allowed to scan driver’s license photographs from DMV rolls in 20 states.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the FBI has run more than 390,000 facial recognition searches since 2011.
Maryland does not consider itself a sanctuary state – meaning its local law enforcement does cooperate with federal authorities on enforcement of immigration laws.
Several of the state’s most populous jurisdictions – including the city of Baltimore, Montgomery County, and Prince George’s County – have limited their cooperation with ICE.
According to a Pew Research Center study done last year, more than 4 per cent of Maryland residents – or 275,000 people – are undocumented.
New York became the most recent state to enact a law allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses.
The Trump administration, which has made cracking down on illegal immigrants a central pillar of its agenda, was so angered by the new law that it retaliated by blocking New York residents from the Global Entry program’s trusted traveler program.
Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was willing to grant federal agencies like ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to the state’s DMV database, but he drew the line at handing over drivers’ Social Security numbers.
‘I would give them anything but the Social Security numbers,’ Cuomo told WAMC radio.
‘The Social Security numbers are the indicator of documented or undocumented, and I will never give them the Social Security numbers in the DMV database — over my dead body will I do that.
‘Because that’s why ICE wants it … I’ll give them anything else.
‘They can have the DMV database – just not with the Social Security numbers’.
Cuomo offered to allow ICE access to the DMV database in hopes of getting the Trump administration to lift the suspension from the Trusted Traveler Programs.
‘I will give you access to a TTP enrollee on a case by case basis,’ he said on WAMC last Wednesday.
‘You want to look at our DMV database for TTP enrollees, fine, because a TTP enrollee is going to sit with the federal government anyway to do an interview’.
HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK?
Facial recognition software works by matching real time images to a previous photograph of a person.
Each face has approximately 80 unique nodal points across the eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth which distinguish one person from another.
A digital video camera measures the distance between various points on the human face, such as the width of the nose, depth of the eye sockets, distance between the eyes and shape of the jawline.
A different smart surveillance system (pictured) can scan 2 billion faces within seconds has been revealed in China. The system connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to pick out targets. The military is working on applying a similar version of this with AI to track people across the country
This produces a unique numerical code that can then be linked with a matching code gleaned from a previous photograph.
A facial recognition system used by officials in China connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to pick out targets.
Experts believe that facial recognition technology will soon overtake fingerprint technology as the most effective way to identify people.