April, 14 2021, 12:00am EDT
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First-of-its-Kind Letter Calls for Ban on Private and Corporate Use of Facial Recognition
Groups call facial recognition "too dangerous to exist," say it must be abolished.
WASHINGTON
More than 20 civil and human rights organizations are expanding the fight against facial recognition and calling for a ban not only on government and law enforcement use of the technology, but also private and corporate use.
The letter, which highlights recent abuses by corporations including Uber Eats, Amazon, and Apple, states that this technology threatens to suppress workers' rights to organize, makes frontline workers susceptible to harassment and exploitation, puts personal biometric data in danger, and exacerbates existing biases.
The letter says that "In a world where private companies are already collecting our data, analyzing it, and using it to manipulate us to make a profit, we can't afford to naively believe that private entities can be trusted with our biometric information. A technology that is inherently unjust, that has the potential to exponentially expand and automate discrimination and human rights violations, and that contributes to an ever growing and inescapable surveillance state is too dangerous to exist."
While the call to ban law enforcement and government use of facial recognition has grown, and lawmakers have banned this use in many cities (and introduced a federal bill), Portland, OR is the only city to ban private use of facial recognition thus far. The organizations point to the Portland legislation as a template for other lawmakers to address the concerns with private and corporate use of the technology, and call on "local, state, and federal elected officials, as well as corporate leaders, to ban the use of facial recognition surveillance by private entities."
"There is zero reason to believe that corporations can use this technology responsibly, especially at a time when these companies are already collecting our data and using it to manipulate us for profit," said Caitlin Seeley George (she/her), Director of Campaigns and Operations at Fight for the Future. "This technology is inherently discriminatory and dangerous, no amount of regulation can address that. In order to protect people in workplaces, stores, restaurants, hospitals, transit and beyond, we must ban it."
"Opt-in consent based regulatory frameworks will not address these harms," added Evan Greer (she/her), Deputy Director at Fight for the Future. "If employees have to agree to being under constant facial recognition surveillance in order to have a job, that's not meaningful consent. If a patient has to agree to have their biometric information collected in order to receive care at a hospital, that's not really consent. Even more innocuous uses, like getting your face scanned to buy a burrito come with significant risks. The vast majority of people have no idea what the dangers of this technology are, and putting the onus on them fails to recognize power imbalances."
"Facial recognition technology poses serious threats to personal freedom. Letting this tool of authoritarian control spread throughout the private sector has serious implications for worker organizing rights and heightens the risk of catastrophic biometric data breaches," said Tracy Rosenberg, Advocacy Director at Oakland Privacy. "You can't replace your face, The troubled record of facial recognition technology in identifying darker skinned people and youth poses severe dangers for people too often criminalized. Facial recognition technology should be put back in the bottle. We don't need it and the dangers can't be regulated away."
"Facial recognition being prone to racial bias is not its only problem. If it were 100% accurate, it would be horrifying. If you're tracked wherever you go, your movements are laid bare for any company or government to exploit. Facial recognition deployments strip away your whole right to be let alone, in the name of more efficient advertising and policing. It's not worth it," said Alex Marthews, National Chair of Restore The Fourth.
"Corporate facial recognition fuels racist policing of Black, brown, and immigrant communities," said Aly Panjwani, Policy & Advocacy Manager at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "Facial recognition is biased, broken, and dangerous to the livelihood of working-class people. This technology exists to monitor, exploit, and incarcerate and must be banned."
"The companies that develop and sell facial recognition technology need to recognize and confront its inherent dangers - and they need to stop it now," said Michael Connor, Executive Director of Open MIC, a nonprofit which has organized corporate shareholders to oppose the spread of facial recognition. Connor noted that a shareholder proposal at Amazon highlighting the human rights risks of the company's facial recognition product won more than 40 percent of the independent shareholder vote at Amazon's 2020 annual meeting, with yet another vote scheduled at this year's upcoming 2021 annual meeting. "Investors increasingly understand the dangers of facial recognition," Connor said. "Managements and boards of directors should take note."
"Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous forms of surveillance ever invented. We know that its use--both by private and government entities--puts Black and brown communities already targeted by state violence at an even higher risk of arrest and incarceration. And we know that it's already being used to target & silence protesters, deport migrant families, and control and surveil workers by their employers at Amazon warehouses and beyond. It's clear to us that the dangers this technology poses can't be "reformed" or "regulated" and we cannot trust tech companies--who are making enormous profits off of this tech--with the surveillance tools they already have. We must ban corporate & private use of facial recognition and fight for a surveillance-free future for all of us," added Laura Barrios, Campaign Manager, MPower Change.
"Corporate use of facial recognition will serve as an end-run around bans on government use of the technology and is a profound danger to the public in its own right. Face surveillance is too powerful for any entity to use because it enables widespread and surreptitious tracking of individuals on the back of cheap and omnipresent devices, cameras. The harms of facial recognition, both when it errs and when it is accurate, fall predominantly upon people of color, low-income individuals, and migrants. The use of this technology threatens to turn everyone into a suspect. FRT also permits unprecedented surveillance of workers, both on the job and off the clock. The only responsible step is for corporations to stop using facial recognition," said Jeramie Scott, Senior Counsel and Director of the Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"Let's face it, the new gold standard for corporate power is private data, and owning your face is about as personal as it gets. Furthermore, corporations using facial recognition technology further exacerbates the criminalization of Black and Brown people," said Matt Nelson, Executive Director of Presente.org, the nation's largest Latinx digital organizing group. "Profiting from a surveillance state is an unethical, dangerous racket and has no place in a future democracy that works for all of us."
The release of this letter comes after a handful of recent cases that highlight the growing problem of facial recognition being used by corporations: the hack of more than 150,000 Verkada security cameras that include facial recognition software and are used in offices, gyms, hospitals, jails, schools, police stations, and more; Disney's announcement that it will be testing facial recognition at the entrance to the Magic Kingdom, and the incidences with Uber Eats, Apple, and Amazon previously mentioned.
Organizations signed onto the letter include Action Center on Race and The Economy (ACRE), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Cryptoharlem, Daily Kos, Data for Black Lives, Demand Progress, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fight for the Future, Greenpeace USA, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, MediaJustice, MPower Change, Muslim Justice League, Oakland Privacy, Open MIC (Open Media & Information Companies Initiative), Presente.org, Privacy PDX, Public Citizen, RAICES, Restore the Fourth, RootsAction.org, Secure Justice, S.T.O.P. (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project), and United We Dream.
Fight for the Future is a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible. We fight for a future where technology liberates -- not oppresses -- us.
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US Voter Registrations Surge as Republicans Try to Limit Ballot Access
One group said it has registered over 100,000 new voters since U.S. President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
Jul 26, 2024
The group behind a popular get-out-the-vote technology platform said Friday that it's registered more than 100,000 new U.S. voters since President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, a surge that came amid mounting Republican efforts to make it harder to register and vote.
Vote.org said that 84% of voters registered in the new wave are under age 35. Nearly 1 in 5 new registrees is 18 years old. Andrea Hailey, the group's CEO, said that "since 2020, we have led the largest voter registration drive in U.S. history," with more than 7.8 million people registered.
After dropping out, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to face former Republican President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in the November election. The new presumptive Democratic candidate has already earned endorsements from many Democrats in Congress and groups advocating on issues including climate, labor, and reproductive rights.
Vote.org's success comes as Republicans at the federal level are proposing and passing legislation creating obstacles to the ballot box.
Earlier this month, U.S. House Republicans passed Rep. Chip Roy's (R-Texas)
Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of American citizenship to vote in federal elections. Republicans claim the bill is meant to fix the virtually nonexistent "problem" of noncitizen voter fraud.
However, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.)
slammed the bill as a "xenophobic attack" meant to silence "Black voices, brown voices, LBGTQIA+ voices, [and] young voices."
Lee said the SAVE Act underscores the need to pass her recently introduced Right to Vote Act, "which would establish the first-ever affirmative federal voting rights guarantee, ensuring every citizen may exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot."
Earlier this year, U.S. Senate Democrats also reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation its sponsors say will "update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act."
Meanwhile, Republican-controlled state legislatures and red-state governors are enacting laws imposing tough restrictions on voter registration, with violations punishable by stiff fines that critics say are meant to dissuade people from registration drives and similar efforts.
Again under the guise of preventing fraud, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last year signed legislation limiting voter registration drives, with fines of up to $250,000 for violators.
"These draconian laws and rules are like taking a sledgehammer to hit a flea," Cecile Scoon, an attorney and president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters,
toldThe New York Times in an article published Friday.
Three years after Kansas passed a law making "false representation" of an election official a crime, campaigners say it's become extremely difficult to sign up new voters.
"In 2020, even with the pandemic, we had registered nearly 10,000 Kansans to vote. Now, we haven't been able to register anyone," Davis Hammet, president of the youth voter mobilization group Loud Light, told the Times.
In Louisiana, Republican state lawmakers quietly passed legislation making it easier for election officials to toss out absentee ballots with missing details, limiting how people can mail in other voters' ballots, and restricting the ability to assist people with disabilities with their ballots.
"What we've found is that these measures have a disproportionate impact on voters with disabilities, both Black and white," NAACP Legal Defense Fund senior policy counsel Jared Evans
toldNola.com earlier this week.
"It's clear that their goal is to make it harder to vote, harder for specific communities to vote especially," Evans added. "What they don't realize is that these laws hurt white voters, too."
In Nebraska, Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen last week
ordered county election offices to stop registering voters with past felony convictions who have not received official pardons. The move came after the state's unicameral Legislature passed a bill granting voting eligibility to felons immediately after they have completed their sentences instead of waiting two years.
"We refuse to accept thousands of Nebraskans having their voting rights stripped away," ACLU of Nebraska legal and policy fellow Jane Seu said in a statement. "We are confident in the constitutionality of these laws, and we are exploring every option to ensure that Nebraskans who have done their time can vote."
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Critics Warn Manchin-Barrasso Permitting Bill 'Is Taken Straight From Project 2025'
"You thought Project 2025 was just a threat after the election? It's actually happening *right now,*" said one climate campaigner.
Jul 26, 2024
Climate and environmental defenders on this week implored U.S. senators to block a permitting reform bill introduced this week by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that campaigners linked to Project 2025, a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
Common Dreamsreported Monday that Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Barrasso (R-Wyo.)—respectively the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that although the proposal "includes several positive reforms for the accelerated development of transmission projects," it also advocates "limiting opportunities for communities to challenge projects, loosening oversight for drilling and mining projects, extending drilling permits and fast-tracking [liquified natural gas] permits, and several other provisions friendly to fossil fuel giants."
"This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
These are nearly identical policies to what's proposed in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. The plan, which was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, calls for "unleashing all of America's energy resources," including by ending federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands; limiting investments in renewable energy; and rolling back environmental permitting restrictions for new oil, gas, and coal projects, including power plants.
While Manchin has been trying—and failing—to pass fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform legislation for years, Brett Hartl, director of public affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that his "Frankenstein legislation is taken straight from Project 2025, and it's the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry."
Hartl said the bill "deprives communities of the power to defend themselves and gives that power to Big Oil by making it harder for communities to challenge polluting projects in court," and "prioritizes the profits of coal barons over public health."
"And it mandates oil and gas extraction in our oceans," he continued. "The insignificant crumbs thrown at renewable energy do nothing to address the climate emergency."
"Monday was the hottest day in recorded history," Hartl noted. "It's shocking that as the climate emergency continues to break records around us, the Senate continues to fast-track the fossil fuel expansion that is killing us. This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
Hartl added that "to preserve a livable planet," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "must squash this legislation now."
Manchin—who has said this will be his last term in office—has been a steadfast supporter of the fossil fuel industry, partly because his family owns a coal company. The senator says his permitting reform bill "will advance American energy once again to bring down prices, create domestic jobs, and allow us to continue in our role as a global energy leader."
However, Allie Rosenbluth, Oil Change International's U.S. manager, warned Thursday that "this bill is yet another dangerous attempt by Sen. Manchin to line the pockets of his fossil fuel donors, sacrificing communities and our climate along the way."
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else," she continued. "It would unleash more drilling on federal lands and waters, unnecessarily rush the review of proposed oil and gas export projects, and lift the Biden administration's pause on new LNG exports."
"We urge Congress to reject this proposal and commit to action that protects frontline communities from the impacts of fossil fuel development and the climate crisis," Rosenbluth added.
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else."
NRDC managing director of government affairs Alexandra Adams said Wednesday that "this bill is a giveaway for the oil and gas industry that will ramp up drilling and environmental destruction at a time when we need to be putting a hard stop to fossil fuels."
"We cannot afford to roll back so many of our bedrock environmental and community legal protections and offer a blank check to the oil and gas industry," she stressed. "We need new solutions for permitting if we are going to meet our clean energy potential and address the climate challenge. But this is not it."
"This bill would altogether be a leap backward on climate, health, and justice if passed into law," Adams added. "The Senate should reject it and look toward alternative solutions already being considered."
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'Nothing To Eat': War-Torn Sudan Faces Mass Famine as Military Delays Aid
Both parties in Sudan's civil war are to blame for a looming mass famine, experts say, and the military's blocking of U.N. aid at a border crossing with Chad exacerbates the problem.
Jul 26, 2024
Sudan's military is blocking United Nations aid trucks from entering at a key border crossing, causing severe disruptions in aid in a country that experts fear may be on the brink of one of the worst famines the world has seen in decades, The New York Timesreported Friday.
The border city of Adré in eastern Chad is the main international crossing into the Darfur region of Sudan, but the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the state's official military, which is engaged in a civil war with a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has refused to issue permits for U.N. trucks to enter there, as it's an RSF-controlled area.
U.S. and international officials have issued increasingly alarmed calls for steady aid access to help feed the millions of severely malnourished people in Darfur and other areas of Sudan.
Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., said that the SAF's obstruction of the border was "completely unacceptable."
Both warring parties in Sudan continue to perpetrate brazen atrocities, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. This piece focuses on the SAF's ongoing obstruction of essential aid. The situation is catastrophic. The policy is criminal. https://t.co/FKhqQh3EI9.
— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum) July 26, 2024
The Sudanese who've made it out of the country and into Adré reported dire and unsafe conditions in their home country.
"We had nothing to eat," Bahja Muhakar, a Sudenese mother of three, told the Times after she crossed into Chad, following a harrowing six-day journey from Al-Fashir, a major city in Darfur. She said the family often had to live off of one shared pancake per day.
Another mother, Dahabaya Ibet, said that her 20-month-old boy had to bear witness to his grandfather being shot and killed in front of his eyes when the family home in Darfur was attacked by gunmen late last year.
Now the mothers and their families are refugees in Adré, where 200,000 Sudanese are living in an overcrowded, under-resourced transit camp.
In addition to those that have made it out of the country, there are 11 million people internally displaced within Sudan, most of whom have become displaced since the civil war began in April 2023.
An unnamed senior American official told the Times that the looming famine in Sudan could be as bad as the 2011 famine in Somalia or even the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
In April, Reutersreported that people in Sudan were eating soil and leaves to survive, and The Washington Postcalled it a nation in "chaos," reporting that World Food Program trucks had been "blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted, and detained."
In late June, a coalition of U.N. agencies, aid groups, and governments warned that 755,000 people in Sudan faced famine in the coming months.
The U.S. last week announced $203 million in additional aid to Sudan—part of a $2.1 billion pledge that world leaders made in April, which some countries have not yet delivered on.
Some officials including Thomas-Greenfield, who has dubbed the situation in Sudan "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," have called for the U.N. Security Council to allow aid delivery into the country even in the absence of SAF approval; it's believed that Russia would veto such a measure.
Sudan's civil war has seen a great deal of international interference. Amnesty International on Thursday published an investigatory briefing showing that weapons from Russia, China, Serbia, Turkey, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been identified in the country. And The Guardian on Friday reported that the passports of Emirati citizens had been found among wreckage in Sudan, indicating the UAE may have troops or intelligence officers on the ground, though the UAE denied the accusation.
The International Service for Human Rights on Friday warned that both the SAF and RSF were engaged in wrongful killings and arrests, especially targeted at lawyers, doctors, and activists. The group called for an immediate cease-fire.
The SAF and Sudanese government figures have cast doubt on international experts' claims about famine in the country.
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