A Manhattan judge has ordered academics researching the NYPD’s facial recognition technology to return documents the cops accidentally turned over.
Justice Shlomo Hagler said the NYPD “should be more diligent” but that it was clear the 20 pages of confidential information were shared with the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology due to an “inadvertent error.”
The ruling last week is the latest development in a two-year legal effort to force the department to release information on the powerful technology. The lawsuit has already revealed that anyone arrested by the NYPD is potentially subject to face recognition searches.
The order puts Clare Garvie, an attorney with the Center, in an unusual predicament. The city didn’t alert her to the inadvertently disclosed documents for 20 days, well after she’d reviewed them in December. Under Hagler’s order Garvie may speak about the information — but she can’t specifically reference the documents that must be returned.
“I rely on the information I learn through reviewing these records to write academic papers, raise awareness about the use of face recognition, and train public defenders. But I’m now faced with being able to speak about the information I’ve learned but I can’t back up my assertions. the information has essentially become useless,” Garvie said.
City attorney Jeffrey Dantowitz conceded that the disclosure was a fiasco.
“That a few documents were inadvertently produced without the intended redactions, while careless, was neither an intelligent nor voluntary disclosure,” he wrote in court papers.
The city has turned over 3,700 pages of documents through the lawsuit. The NYPD initially said they couldn’t find records relevant to the Center’s request.
An NYPD spokeswoman said it unintentionally released the documents in an effort to provide “as much information as possible in a timely manner.”
“Our request to retrieve certain information was in large measure to protect the privacy rights of individuals and entities who’s information and records were released in error,” the spokeswoman said.
Garvie declined to describe the secret papers but said she was unsure what the NYPD wanted to keep confidential in the first place.
“It is completely mystifying what information the NYPD is trying to keep from the public,” she said.
“The NYPD has followed a pattern of inconsistently and selectively disclosing information.”
For example, a heavily redacted user guide for a facial recognition program by Dataworks Plus was turned over to the Center. But the NYPD handed over an unredacted copy of the same document explaining the Photoshop-style program to attorneys in a different lawsuit.
The NYPD delivered a Powerpoint presentation on the department’s Facial Identification Section to people who paid $1,695 to attend a conference in Sept. 2018 — but then claimed the same information was too sensitive to disclose through the lawsuit, Garvie said.
The presentation showed that when the NYPD runs a photo through its facial recognition tool, it typically produces more than 200 potential matches. The NYPD scans over 9 million mugshots and pistol license photos among other images, when doing a search.
“The NYPD has been deliberate and responsible in its use of facial recognition technology. We compare facial images picked up by cameras at crime scenes to mugshots in law enforcement records. We do not engage in mass or random collection of facial records from NYPD camera systems, the internet, or social media,” the NYPD spokeswoman said.
“No one has ever been arrested on the basis of a facial recognition match alone.”
