House Oversight grills law enforcement on facial recognition tech

Lawmakers grilled law enforcement officials in a tense hearing March 22 over their use of facial recognition programs. Democrats and Republicans raised concerns about the FBI’s use of facial recognition technology during a House Oversight Committee hearing, pressing a bureau official about the ability to access photos of hundreds of millions of citizens and the technology’s accuracy.

“This is really Nazi Germany here that we’re talking about,” Rep Stephen Lynch (D-MA), said of the facial recognition databases. “They had meticulous files on individuals, most of them of Jewish faith and that’s how they tracked their people. I see little difference in the way people are being tracked under this.” Over 117 million American adults can be found in a law enforcement facial recognition database, which draws in part from drivers license data, according to an October report from the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.