Brett L. Tolman is the founder of the Tolman Group and the executive director for Right on Crime.
If one considers this technology as creating the ability to find a needle in a haystack, it seems entirely reasonable to demand the police to first know which needle they are looking for, rather than search every haystack in the off chance it contains a needle. Absent an emergency or other exceptional circumstance, some manner of reasonable suspicion should likely be a prerequisite to a facial recognition search. Likewise, we should be exceedingly cautious about the deployment of real-time facial recognition, which has more disturbing Fourth Amendment implications. Finally, we need transparency on when, how, and why every law enforcement agency is using facial recognition and which databases they are drawing from, and we should have particular reticence when it comes to the collection of images from unwitting, law-abiding individuals.
Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary