Share facial recognition, so that criminals in front of Sir No hiding!

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A private technology company is changing the law enforcement system as we know it, new emails reveal.

According to public documents, many California law enforcement agencies have the authority to use facial recognition software to identify suspects seen on crime scene video. California’s three counties even have the right to conduct facial-recognition searches using their own police databases of mug shots of criminals; Other public agencies can join if they choose to connect to a private law enforcement software company’s network.

The network, called California Facial Recognition Interconnect, is offered by DataWorks Plus, based in Greenville, S.C. The company has law enforcement contracts in Los Angeles, SAN Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Samarto and Santa Barbara.

Currently, the three counties that border Los Angeles, Riverside and SAN Bernardino can run facial recognition on mug shots in a shared database. That means police departments in those areas have access to about 11.7 million mug shots of people they’ve ever arrested, most of them from the Los Angeles system.

An email from Todd Pastorini, executive vice president of DataWorks Plus, revealed the use of the company’s facial recognition products in California cities. The contact information has been reprocessed with OneZero.

Sacramento, Santa Barbara and San Francisco are also using DataWorks Plus’s facial recognition service to increase the number of criminal mugshots on DataWorks Plus to 15 million, DataWorks Plus executive vice president and general manager Todd Pastorini said in an email to the SAN Bernardino Sheriff’s Department. While the emails from the open Documents request suggest that the three cities be included in the shared network, DataWorks Plus is now telling OneZero that the three cities are not connected to the network, meaning that other cities don’t have access to their photos, and vice versa.

Another email from Pastorini confirmed that the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department had joined the company’s facial recognition service network. The relevant contact information has been processed by OneZero.

The DataWorks Plus Internet gives the company a strong position in the nation’s largest state. If police or sheriff’s departments shop around and invest in DataWorks Plus’s facial recognition system, they can access data from other cities around the state. Each contract is worth several hundred thousand dollars: SAN Bernardino first introduced DataWorks Plus’s technology in 2012, and it made the purchase through a $332,520 government grant from the Justice Department. In July 2018, the city spent another $222,300 on a technology update.

But DataWorks Plus also operates outside California. In 2017, it filed a motion with the Detroit police that listed 27 local, state and federal agencies using the company’s facial recognition services, and many company representatives called DataWorks Plus “the No. 1 facial recognition provider on the West Coast.” Detroit’s proposal also cites the introduction of the technology in Los Angeles, which has by far the largest use of facial recognition in California. Detroit’s proposal also boasts that the Los Angeles police department can retrieve 7m facial samples in 15 seconds.

The proposal details the capabilities of the DataWorks Plus Internet system and Outlines how the shared database works with the Michigan State Police (MSP).

“The report says (with emphasis in bold) that if DataWorks Plus were approved by the MSP, we could (sic) provide two-way search capabilities — the analyst could select a range and use only one application to search Detroit and THE MSP’s databases,” This means that within a single app, analysts can not only run facial recognition in their own databases, but also from other organizations’ databases.

Detroit police signed up with DataWorks Plus to get access to a variety of archival records, including mug shots of criminals elsewhere.

DataWorks Plus also offers “mutually beneficial resource access opportunities” for Pennsylvania, New York, northern New Jersey, Virginia, and Columbus, Ohio. In other words, by signing up with DataWorks Plus, Detroit police will be able to access criminal records, including frontal photos, from other locations mentioned. Pastorini said California law enforcement did not support the feature, but did not specify why.

Facial recognition is a controversial topic, especially in California. Both San Francisco and Oakland have banned facial recognition from public institutions. San Francisco banned the technology due to privacy concerns, while Oakland cited studies that suggested facial recognition technology sold by big tech companies such as Amazon was racially biased.

Pastorini told OneZero that the media’s definition of facial recognition is often unfair because it pits forensic tools against consumer-grade technology. He said the automated biometric identification technology his company sells does not rely on machine learning or deep neural networks, unlike products from technology companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Instead, he insists that the facial recognition features sold by DataWorks Plus were specifically developed for forensic use.

“I can compare these engines [algorithms] one by one, and at the end of the day Amazon’s search is not going to be the best forensic search,” he said. With no evidence of misuse of facial recognition technology in the San Francisco area, Pastorini said the recent trend to ban facial recognition was unfortunate.

NEC, the Japanese technology distributor that supplied the facial recognition algorithms for DataWorks Plus, said the facial recognition technology it supplied relies in part on neural networks — the kind used by Silicon Valley companies for tasks ranging from Facebook face recognition to virtual voice generation for Google Assistant. The same algorithm is used to analyze multiple images for face matching. One of NEC’s technologies is the ability to estimate its 3D models from 2D images and then match faces from different angles, which could be useful for matching faces captured from different angles.

DataWorks Plus doesn’t make its own facial recognition software; It actually develops custom tools for law enforcement and provides access to tools that can be used to analyze police data, such as facial recognition and fingerprint matching. The company sells access to three different algorithms or engines, from NEC, Rank One and Cognitec. None of these engines is perfect. In reviewing a possible update to the new engine, an analyst from the SAN Bernardino Sheriff’s Department wrote that the new version is “more eyeglass compatible and face angle-friendly (eyes don’t need to be flush).”

The mail on the public records request shows that performance varies widely due to engine ups and downs.

“I’ve never personally liked the Cognitec engine, so it’s going to have to improve a lot if it’s going to be better than NEC or Rank One.” Another analyst said in the same update.

The overall accuracy of The DataWorks Plus facial recognition system is also unknown, even after reviewing the technical overview of the proposal to Detroit police. A graph in the proposal measures the performance of one of these algorithms on Labelled Faces in the Wild, but this facial-recognition dataset is research specific and does not provide an accuracy test for facial recognition products, one of the creators of the dataset recently told OneZero.

California’s Facial Recognition Interconnect isn’t the only system helping state agencies share biometric data. In 1986 California set up the Cal-ID system, which helps counties share and analyse the fingerprints of the more than 1.5 million people who live in the state. The state also operates Cal-Photo, a database of 32m driver’s license photos created in 2002 to help law enforcement agencies share facial images. The images can be downloaded and used for related facial recognition retrieval activities, Pastorini said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights nonprofit, has opposed the use of facial recognition in the Cal-Photo database and expanded access to driver photos. EFF found that the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) told the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that current state law does not support facial recognition and photo sharing.

Although his department has the right to download Cal-Photo images and upload them to DataWorks Plus, Army Lieutenant Scott Landen, who leads cal-ID operations for SAN Bernardino County and facial recognition and other biometric searches overseas, told OneZero, DataWorks Plus didn’t do that.

“We never use this software as a safeguard.”

He also notes that the technology can only be used as an investigative tool, not as evidence.

“It can screen and narrow down possible suspects in criminal investigations; That’s useful, “Landen said.” The software can only give us one possible suspect. Our officers also need to corroborate leads through in-depth investigations, such as interviews and follow-up investigations. Software results can never be used as a guarantee that a suspect committed a crime.

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