FRT cannot continue being the alibi for the NYPD’s gross violations of New Yorkers’ human rights and must be banned ✊🏽

The dept. Additionally stopped tracking FRT accuracy in 2015 after finding the error rate was too high.

This technology has been demonstrated by legal scholars and rights orgs to be incompatible with human rights law. That it’s discriminatory, and corrosive to the safety of our communities.

NYPD Officers, furthermore, conspired with the US Marshalls Service to illicitly contract a controversial facial recognition firm to surveil a private Instagram account, in violation of the Department’s facial recognition policy.

In another, the NYPD targeted a “controversial protestor on twitter” for political speech, even though they acknowledged the lack of exigent circumstance or any threats and resolved to continue monitoring all of their social media accounts, regardless.

In one example, New Yorkers were racially profiled by the NYPD, and two men were wrongly targeted by facial recognition at the New Year’s Eve celebration in Time Square on 31 December 2019, for not dancing and speaking a “Middle Eastern language”.

The NYPD has avoided scrutiny for too long and has benefited from a lack of transparency to unlawfully invest in and use FRT to curb people’s rights to privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly.

🛑Lawmakers must now move to urgently prohibit FRT! 🛑

Initial findings show NY’ers were profiled based on language, ethnicity, attire + speech, fuelling racial injustice by the police.

These findings reinforce what our previous research has consistently shown to be a disregard for the safety of Black and Brown communities by the NYPD.

To surmount the possibility of a crossing, these digital efforts make border regimes and the defence of collective identity elastic, seeking to foreclose any evasion long before an individual arrives at a material frontier – or perhaps even decides they want to.

We argue that the making and use of digital identification is about identifying and policing suspect populations before they are biometrically known and that this effort is rescaling the project of knowing individuals and their social relations

if biometrics are about knowing individual bodies, digital identity is about placing those bodies within a web that reveals a larger arena of surplus, digitalization, the creation of digital social relations and, ultimately, of global inequality

Digital ID is a means to conjecture about what could be because of who someone knows, what they do, where they have been, and what choices they have made with others. Unlike biometrics, digital identity is future-oriented and offers inference about intent and trajectory.