Last week, a Washington lawmaker demanded that the embattled Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives explain why it utilized facial recognition technology without proper oversight or even simple training.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, penned a letter ripping the controversial method to identify and track gun owners.
He wrote, “The subcommittee has concerns about ATF’s use of facial recognition and AI programs and the effects that its use has upon American citizens’ Second Amendment rights and rights to privacy.”
The agency was already on the hot seat for compiling almost one billion records of firearm data at the National Tracing Center.
And the General Accountability Office (GAO) sounded the alarm back in 2021.
The independent, nonpartisan watchdog agency warned that the ATF did not enact safeguards or have training protocols when implementing the technology.
Instead, it pieced together scraps from public images and social media to run a person’s face against. This was done despite the lack of a court order or a warrant.
The ATF did not even have a written policy on the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
Instead, it allegedly freely used systems, including Clearview AI, Vigilant Solutions, and others, to track Americans. The GAO described the Clearview AI database as a “web-based facial recognition service using 30+ billion facial images sourced from publicly available websites, including news media, mugshot, and social media websites, among others.”
Critics charge that this system is ripe for abuse. Second Amendment advocates worry that the ATF may use this expansive technology to go after individuals simply for exercising their gun rights or even posting their beliefs on social media.
And a GAO spokesperson cautioned that the ATF’s use of such databases created a national gun registry by another name.
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