COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have used facial recognition technology to solve homicides and bust human traffickers, but concern about its accuracy and the growing pervasiveness of video surveillance is leading some state lawmakers to hit the pause button.

At least seven states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of the technology amid fears over civil rights violations, racial bias and invasion of privacy. Debate over additional bans, limits and reporting requirements has been underway in about 20 state capitals this legislative session, according to data compiled by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Lawmakers say they want to give themselves time to evaluate how and why the technology is being used.

“I think people are just freaked out, and rightfully so, about this technology,” said Freddy Martinez, director of Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago nonprofit that specializes in citizens’ digital rights. “It’s one of those rare issues that’s seen bipartisan support, in that nobody wants to be tracked everywhere they go, especially when you don’t have a choice.”

The issue caught fire in statehouses after law enforcement applied facial recognition technology to images taken from street cameras during last year’s racial justice demonstrations — and in some cases used those to make arrests.

Complaints about false identifications prompted Amazon, Microsoft and IBM to pause sales of their software to police, though most departments hire lesser-known firms that specialize in police contracts. Wrongful arrests of Black men have gained attention in Detroit and New Jersey after the technology was blamed for mistaking their images for those of others.

The American Civil Liberties Union began raising questions about the technology years ago, citing studies that found higher error rates for facial recognition software used to identify people of color. Concerns also have grown because of increasing awareness of the Chinese government’s extensive video surveillance system, especially as it’s been employed in a region home to one of China’s largely Muslim ethnic minority populations.

In March, the ACLU sued Clearview AI, a company that provides facial recognition services to law enforcement and private companies, contending it illegally stockpiled images of 3 billion people scraped from internet sites without their knowledge or permission.

For many, news of that stockpile, first reported by The New York Times, raised concerns that the type of surveillance seen in China could happen in the U.S. and other countries. Cities that passed bans — including Boston; Minneapolis; San Francisco; Oakland, California; and Portland, Oregon — listed concerns about police using the technology secretly among their reasons.

Hoan Ton-That, CEO of Clearview AI, said his company collects only publicly available photos from the open internet that are accessible “from any computer anywhere in the world.” He said its database cannot be used for surveillance.

Ton-That said that, as a person of mixed race, it is important to him that the technology is not biased.

“Unlike other facial recognition technologies that have misidentified people of color, an independent study has indicated that Clearview AI has no racial bias,” he said in a statement. “We know of no instance where Clearview AI’s technology has resulted in a wrongful arrest.”

But the pushback against the technology has continued.

Last year, New York imposed a two-year moratorium on use of the technology in schools after an upstate district adopted facial recognition as part of its security plans and was sued. A state ACLU executive called it “flawed and racially-biased” technology that didn’t belong in schools.

That came on the heels of the nation’s first ban on government use of the technology, in San Francisco in 2019, and a statewide three-year moratorium on police departments using facial recognition from videos shot with body cameras that California imposed later that year.

No such restrictions exist at the federal level. Variants of facial recognition technology were used, including by ordinary people, to help identify those who took part in the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Police also used it at some protests last year staged against coronavirus-related mask mandates, and some activists have used it to identify police officers engaged in misconduct.

This February, Virginia lawmakers passed one of the most restrictive bans of them all. It prohibits local law enforcement agencies and campus police departments — though not state police — from purchasing or using facial recognition technology unless expressly authorized by the state legislature.

Police groups are pushing for the prohibitions to be revisited.

“It’s fear-mongering politics at its worst,” said Jonathan Thompson, CEO and executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association.

He said facial recognition technology is just one tool used by police agencies — and not to the extent politicians suggest.

“I’ve never heard of anybody sitting around a computer monitor searching for people all day, every day. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Agencies have rules. They have governance of how and who has access to these databases. They have to have a legitimate, rational reason for doing it.”

Thompson’s association produced a report detailing example after example of the technology being used for good to snag drug dealers, to solve murders and missing persons cases, and to identify and rescue human trafficking victims. Most often, a face is compared against a database of known subjects. The vast majority of images are criminal mugshots, he said, not driver’s license photos or random pictures of individuals.

A new Massachusetts law tries to strike a balance between civilian and police concerns. It allows police to benefit from the technology while adding protections that could prevent false arrests.

In Ohio, Republican Attorney General Dave Yost headed off a restrictive law on facial recognition data — at least so far — by conducting his own investigation into the state’s images database in response to a Georgetown University Law Center report that found immigration officials were applying the technology to driver’s license photos in some states.

Yost’s review found local, state and federal authorities didn’t use driver’s license or other photos “to conduct mass surveillance, broad dragnets, political targeting or other illegitimate uses.”

Martinez, of the Lucy Parsons Lab, said he’s not reassured.

“I really do think this is one of these tools, let’s say, science shouldn’t be using. It’s uniquely bad in ways other technologies are not,” he said. “People nationally want police to do their jobs, but there are certain lines we don’t let them cross. This crosses that line.”

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Hackers aiming to call attention to the dangers of mass surveillance said they were able to peer into hospitals, schools, factories, jails and corporate offices after they broke into the systems of a security-camera startup.

That California startup, Verkada, said Wednesday it is investigating the scope of the breach, first reported by Bloomberg, and has notified law enforcement and its customers.

Swiss hacker Tillie Kottmann, a member of the group that calls itself APT-69420 Arson Cats, described it in an online chat with The Associated Press as a small collective of “primarily queer hackers, not backed by any nations or capital but instead backed by the desire for fun, being gay and a better world.”

They were able to gain access to a Verkada “super” administrator account using valid credentials found online, Kottmann said. Verkada said in a statement that it has since disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access.

But for two days, the hackers said, they were able to peer unhindered into live feeds from potentially tens of thousands of cameras, including many that were watching sensitive locations such as hospitals and schools. Kottmann said that included outdoor and indoor cameras at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 first-grade students and six educators were killed in 2012 by a gunman in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

The school district’s superintendent didn’t return calls or emailed requests for comment Wednesday.

One of Verkada‘s affected customers, the San Francisco web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare, said the compromised Verkada cameras were watching entrances and main thoroughfares to some of its offices that have been closed for nearly a year due to the pandemic.

“As soon as we became aware of the compromise, we disabled the cameras and disconnected them from office networks,” said spokesperson Laurel Toney. “No customer data or processes have been impacted by this incident.”

Another San Francisco tech company, Okta, said five cameras it placed at office entrances were compromised, though there’s no evidence anyone viewed the live streams.

Twitter said it permanently suspended Kottmann’s account, which posted materials gathered in the hack, for violating its rules against ban evasion, which typically happens when users start a new account to circumvent an earlier suspension. Kottmann had earlier received a message from Twitter suspending the account for violating its rules against the distribution of hacked material, the hacker said.

The Verkada footage captured and shared by hackers included a Tesla facility in China and the Madison County Jail in Huntsville, Alabama. Madison County Sheriff Kevin Turner said in a statement Wednesday the jail has taken the cameras offline, adding “we are confident that this unauthorized release did not and will not impact the safety of staff or inmates.” Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Verkada, based in San Mateo, California, has pitched its cloud-based surveillance service as part of the next generation of workplace security. Its software detects when people are in the camera’s view, and a “Person History” feature enables customers to recognize and track individual faces and other attributes, such as clothing color and likely gender. Not all customers use the facial recognition feature.

The company attracted negative attention last year when video surveillance industry news site IPVM reported that Verkada employees had passed around photos of female coworkers collected by the company’s own in-office cameras and made sexually explicit comments about them.

Cybersecurity expert Elisa Costante said it’s worrisome that this week’s hack wasn’t sophisticated and simply involved using valid credentials to access a huge trove of data stored on a cloud server.

“What is disturbing is to see how much real-life data can go into the wrong hands and how easy it can be,” said Costante, vice president of research at Forescout. “It’s a wake up call to make sure that whenever you are collecting this much data we need to have basic security hygiene.”

Kottmann said the hacker collective, active since 2020, doesn’t set out after specific targets. Instead, it scans organizations on the internet for known vulnerabilities and then works to “just narrow down and dig in on interesting targets.”

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Security cameras can be a powerful tool in crime deterrence. Your participation in this program will help expand our investigative abilities and help identify potential witnesses or criminals. Registering your camera in this program does not give us free or unrestricted access to your cameras or recorded video. Your registration will allow our investigators to create a readily accessible database to aid them in locating crucial evidence to help solve crimes.

When a crime is committed, we will refer to the “Security Camera Registration” list to identify any possible cameras that may have captured something of interest. We will then contact the camera’s owner and request they provide security video from the date and time of the crime. This process greatly expedites and enhances the investigation and may lead to the quick apprehension of the criminal.

Participation in the program does not alter your rights to privacy in any way and it is completely voluntary. We will not have access to your security camera footage unless you provide it. Registration information is kept confidential and the registrant can withdraw from the program any time.

There is no fee to participate in the Security Camera Registration and participation in the program does not alter your rights to privacy in any way.

To enroll in the program please visit our Camera Registration Webpage.

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