IT IS something of an American tourist tradition to gaze through the iron fences around the White House lawn, but citizens think little about how government might be gazing back. A pilot program by the Secret Service to test the use of facial recognition in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. should prompt everyone, and especially Congress, to start paying attention.
The Department of Homeland Security published details recently on its plans to scan feeds from existing cameras in the executive complex and run them through recognition software. This is slightly less scary than it sounds: The cameras will capture people in adjacent public spaces, but only consenting Secret Service employees will be in the program database — so, barring false positives, faces of passersby that do not match participants’ photos will not be stored.
More concerning is the potential for future misuse of the technology. The Secret Service hopes eventually to identify “subjects of interest,” but who qualifies is anyone’s guess. In any case, to carry out its goal, the agency would have to search the public’s faces and run them against whatever collection of pictures the government chooses — perhaps mug shots, perhaps social media posts — most likely without their knowledge.
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