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Executive Summary
Facial recognition technologies have become an everyday part of life for many people in the form of Face ID on Apple iPhones, but this technology is seeing use in many other sectors. This technology’s unregulated nature has set the scene for many controversies around the world regarding facial recognition and its capacity to discriminate against certain groups of people. To help combat this, the U.S. Congress has introduced multiple bills since 2019 suggesting limits on the usage of facial recognition technologies by state and federal agencies. However, none of these have gone to the president and written into federal law. Self-regulation by tech companies have largely kept major controversies from happening, but there are still many possibilities for facial recognition to be used to discriminate, whether intentionally or unintentionally. This moratorium was introduced in June 2021 and has proposed a ban on facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technologies to be used by state and federal government authorities. This is to discourage and prevent the formation of surveillance state, not too dissimilar to what's going on in China currently.

Background
Facial recognition is a technology that uses cameras to detect a person’s face for a variety of different applications. Whether it be for Memoji on iPhones, Snapchat filters, Zoom backgrounds, or facial recognition for surveillance, this technology has become more and more abundant over the years. If you own an iPhone, you’re probably quite familiar with the ease of use of facial recognition to unlock your phone without the need of a fingerprint or passcode. Facial recognition currently has biases against people of color and woman, perpetuating the biases and discrimination of its creators. Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, published a study that found that dark-skinned females had an error rate of up to 34.7% compared to white males just at 0.8%. This discrepancy is largely due to the data used to train these algorithms: mostly light-skinned and male individuals, rather than female faces and/or those of a darker complexion. Diversity was hard to come by not just in the datasets, but in the entire field of computer science as well. This lack of diversity can be traced back all the way to the roots of computer science: almost exclusively rich, white males attending prestigious universities in the early-mid 20th century. A few other studies draw to the same conclusions, the facial recognition systems perform worse on dark-skinned faces compared to those that are lighter-skinned. Buolamwini would testify to Congress on her findings, sparking discussion for policy intervention with facial recognition.

The issue of right to privacy and surveillance is also incredibly relevant regarding the issue of policing and their related institutions. One example was when the San Diego Police Department partnered with Clearview AI in an effort to use facial data from publicly available pictures, then using that data for facial recognition to identify potential suspects. San Diego Police have secretly used their citizen’s facial data without their consent. Those citizens had no choice in whether they wanted to be a part of that or not. The lack of transparency with their citizens on something with all of this data is a clear imbalance of power, violating privacy rights and raising the question of overbearing surveillance.

In response to recent research and congressional testimonies from Buolamwini on this topic, tech companies have come to more strictly self-regulate their facial recognition technologies, and congress have introduced multiple bills regulating the use of facial recognition by state and federal agencies. Amazon just recently extended their moratorium on facial recognition until further notice. Multiple cities have also banned the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and local government: Oakland, Portland, Boston, etc. With these injustices in mind, further regulation on the use of facial recognition is needed.

Evaluative Criteria/Policy Goals
The main goal of this policy is to ensure that people are treated fair and just regarding the use of facial recognition. More specifically, protecting an individual’s civil liberties and to prevent discrimination like mentioned previously. To achieve this, the bill proposes a simple prohibition of the use and allocation of resources for the use of facial recognition technologies by state and federal agencies. There aren’t any major economic motivations for this bill, just trying to increase the social welfare of those being discriminated the most.

Appropriateness of the Policy Correction
While restricting the use of facial recognition state and federal agencies helps with the problem of discrimination and protecting civil liberties, it does nothing to protect individuals from the actions of private companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple, and Meta. With this policy in place, we are able to avoid becoming a full surveillance state as many people fear. While many big tech companies and even cities have prohibited are limited use of facial recognition, there is still the possibility for other local governments and private entities to abuse facial recognition and discriminate minorities at will. There really should be much stronger and more strict regulation in place if we were to fully protect peoples’ civil rights and to prevent discrimination. Ideally, actual legislation being passed to regulate the use of facial recognition by both government and private agencies at all levels would help with the issue.

Overview
Since this is a federal bill, it relies on passing through the Senate and the House of Representatives before being passed up to the President of the United States. Potential challengers to the bill could be legislators that are being supported by tech companies that have facial recognition or biometric surveillance technologies that would’ve liked a contract with the government to supply their technology for use. Notable companies would include those in FAANG (Facebook [Meta], Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google).

Sponsor of the Bill
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts is a Democrat and is the sponsor for this bill within the senate. On OpenSecrets, his largest supporters are the retired and law firms. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington is also a Democrat and is the sponsor for this bill within the house. Her largest supporters according to OpenSecrets are the retired and electronics manufacturing/equipment, most notably Microsoft and Valve.

Supporters
On Senator Markey’s website, it says that many groups have endorsed the bill: the  American Civil Liberties Union, Georgetown University Law Center’s Center on Privacy & Technology, and Joy Buolamwini (Algorithmic Bias Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Founder of The Algorithmic Justice League) just to name a few. This bill would also theoretically appeal to conservatives as the bill is supposed to protect the rights of the individual. In other words, bi-partisan support for policy like this is plausible.

Implementation Issues
Within the bill, there is no mention of a specific agency to carry out this policy. However, it does seem relatively easy to implement since it is a simple prohibition of the use of facial recognition and other biometric technologies. Consequences for non-compliance include the right to sue the violator and any information obtained while violating this act would not be admissible in a proceeding or investigation. If we were to expand this bill to the private sector, we could just use the existing agency of Federal Trade Commission to protect the privacy of consumers like it has currently been doing. This raises the issue of having enough resources to oversee the use of facial recognition in the private sector. Interest groups like Buolamwini's Algorithmic Justice League can help draw attention to those in violation of the bill.

Evaluation Issues
Evaluating the effectiveness of this bill is a bit more difficult since one of the only ways of doing this would be to see if any more controversies come up regarding facial recognition. If anything comes up, then the policy has failed in its goal of protecting the civil liberties of individuals and preventing discrimination by facial recognition.

Conclusion/Recommendation
This moratorium on facial recognition and biometric technology is a great start to address the problems raised in recent years; however, it is not enough and is subject to many issues. Citizens are still vulnerable to potential discrimination and civil rights violations by local governments and private agencies. This bill could be challenged by politicians who have been lobbied by facial recognition companies. Additionally, there isn’t a much of a policy window for a topic like this as nothing major has happened in terms of facial recognition recently. Despite the many controversies caused by facial recognition and the possible dangers it may pose, Congress have yet to create sweeping regulations on this powerful technology. This policy is simply not ambitious enough and does not properly address the needs of those that will be most affected by facial recognition. A policy with a focus on civil liberties in regards to facial recognition by both government and private entities would be a much more effective in achieving the goals of that this original moratorium sets out to complete.