Despite publicly expressed concerns about the use of facial recognition technology in Guyana, and the publication of data on its deployment in other countries, Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan remains quite unmoved. “It has absolutely not any risks involved,” he told Stabroek News; “I don’t see how facial recognition could … I have not bought into the argument.” If that were not enough, he also added that he saw no risk of the system being abused. One can only wonder whether he is living in the same country as the rest of us.
As we had earlier reported, the government had launched the Safe City project last month with the intention of monitoring central Georgetown and the East Bank via 102 video surveillance sites, each consisting of three to four cameras with facial recognition and tracking components. It operates 24 hours a day, and the objective is eventually to extend the system to the entire country. It has been trumpeted as giving a major fillip to law enforcement, since, in Mr Ramjattan’s words, “we can literally track vehicles, track suspects to the extent [of] knowing where they are and what time they would have been there …” That may sound superficially appealing, but it has to be asked who else will it be tracking, and that apart, as Mr Sherwood Lowe asked in a letter to this newspaper, who exactly qualifies as a criminal suspect anyway?
It is perhaps not surprising that the system has been designed and built by Huawei of China, which is using it as a tool of oppression against its Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang province. But it also transpires that Huawei has been busy installing the system in other countries too, including in Uganda, where it is costing some US$126 million. According to the police there, it will dramatically reduce violent crime.
Uganda’s opposition is not so sure. Reuters recently reported their leaders as expressing concern that the police would use the cameras to violently suppress demonstrators in the run-up to the 2021 elections. “The CCTV project is just a tool to track us, hunt us and persecute us,” one of them was quoted as saying. The news agency went on to cite the Wall Street Journal as reporting the results of an investigation which found that Huawei technicians had already assisted intelligence officials in Uganda and at least one other African country to spy on their political opponents.
In the case of Uganda the Journal said, they helped to crack the encrypted communications of a popular musician who had turned to politics, and arrested both him and some of his supporters during one of his concerts, where opposition speakers were to make a surprise appearance. There was also the case of Zambia where Huawei employees were said to have assisted the government in gaining access to the phones and Facebook pages of bloggers critical of the President so they could be tracked and arrested. Inevitably Huawei denied the Journal’s report as unfounded.
As was mentioned in an earlier editorial, the system is also in private hands in the UK, and last week Britain’s data protection watchdog began an investigation into the use of facial recognition by a property developer in London’s King’s Cross area. The Thompson Reuters
Foundation quoted the Information Commissioner as saying she was “deeply concerned” about the use of the technology in public spaces. “We will assess any reports and intelligence we receive about uses of the technology and will consider regulatory action,” a spokeswoman was reported to have said. Silkie Carlo, the Director of the civil liberties group, Big Brother Watch, was quoted as commenting that “Facial recognition is the perfect tool of oppression and the widespread use we’ve found indicates we’re facing a privacy emergency.”
The real problem is that for practically all countries there is no legislation governing this new technology, which in the hands of government agencies in particular, could be so subject to abuse. Huawei, whatever its connections or otherwise to the Chinese government really doesn’t care, and on the evidence unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, appears more than prepared to assist authoritarian inclined regimes in the suppression of democracy. Not so, Microsoft, which Mr Darshanand Khusial has written has refused to sell its facial recognition technology to the police in California. He quoted a Microsoft executive as stating, “…if we move too fast with facial recognition, we may find that people’s fundamental rights are being broken.”
We had reported the Financial Times in an earlier commentary as saying that countries across the globe – by implication, common law countries – were waiting on the outcome of a case against the South Wales police, who had been taken to court challenging their right to use facial recognition technology because it constituted a breach of the Human Rights Act. If the police lose that case, then it could provide a guide for critics in other common law jurisdictions to argue against the use of the system on human rights grounds.
The issue is not the threat to privacy; that is clearly grasped by civil rights groups in every nation where the technology is being used, or is about to be used. The issue is what kind of regulatory framework should be instituted before law enforcement or other government agencies should be allowed to introduce it, and whether private businesses should have access to it at all, and if so, under what conditions.
SN reported computer engineer Heather Chin as agreeing that since Guyana has no laws on such technology, how facial recognition is used “is really up to the person employing that technology.” She described its use as “arbitrary at this time,” and whether the city had the right to employ it for crime-fighting or their “arsenal” was something which should be defined in the law.
It is worth repeating that in a country such as this, the temptation for any administration to utilise the system for political purposes will be overwhelming. While opposition attention is centred on what they see as the possibility of fraudulent elections, the longer-term potential threat to democracy and freedom of speech by giving a government the power to track any citizen it chooses on a 24-hour basis, appears to pass them by. That information could be used, for example, to silence opponents, discourage ordinary people from going out on the street to object to parking meters, provide data on the private lives of critics, and so on. Perhaps it is that they are anticipating coming into power in the not-too-distant future, and they would be happy to make use of the system themselves against their opponents.
It is nothing short of incomprehensible that Mr Ramjattan is not prepared to even attempt to answer the questions which have been raised, and which go to the heart of what are supposed to be our democratic rights, more especially in relation to privacy. How can he deny that there are risks involved in the use of the technology and there is no possibility for abuse? Aside from Messrs Khusial and Lowe and Ms Chin, there are any number of civil rights activists all over the world who have raised very similar concerns. Those who have defended the system are aligned to despots or autocracies. The worst of it is that the Public Security Minister does not even make a feeble effort to put forward arguments to defend the indefensible; authoritarian style, he just resorts to a blanket denial.
Furthermore, he has just ignored some very specific queries put by Mr Khusial about whether the government sent data relating to its citizens to another state, and if parts of the system exist offshore. Furthermore, since the system, he wrote, would probably need regular tuning this would involve “a continuous stream of images of Guyanese being sent offshore without their consent.” Will Mr Ramjattan and Minister Cathy Hughes stop dancing around the press and answer these questions directly?
Lastly, will the government please put the system on hold until there is some serious discussion about what kind of legislative framework and regulations are necessary to protect the freedoms of the citizens of this country, and such legislation is actually passed. After all, Huawei is not the model in terms of respecting human rights.
