Security and Policing: Facial Recognition Technology

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, on securing this debate, although I wish we had more time to discuss this important subject. In addition to drawing your Lordships’ attention to my interests in police technology as set out in the register, I should mention that, from 1983 to 1996, I was responsible as a Home Office official for the provision of scientific and technological support to the police forces of England and Wales. My remit extended to biometric technologies such as automatic fingerprint identification systems and the forensic application of DNA technology.

It is worth noting in the context of today’s debate that the original and most important work on the application to the criminal justice system of both these technologies, fingerprints and DNA, was done in this country, more particularly in the laboratories of the Home Office, which, sadly, have since almost disappeared.

The role that both these technologies play in the criminal justice system is not simply to support the prosecution. Of course, they help the police to identify suspects and secure convictions, but they also prevent miscarriages of justice by identifying the innocent and thus eliminating them from further investigation—that was the certainly the case with the first use of DNA in Leicester, when someone who had confessed to a double murder was shown to be innocent and released. In the United States, DNA testing has saved the lives of hundreds of wrongly convicted people sitting on death row—this is thanks to the Innocence Project, started in 1972 by two young New York lawyers when they heard about the use of DNA technology in this country.

The same will be true, of course, for facial recognition technology. Although it is still at a very early stage of development as far as its use in the criminal justice system is concerned, I have no doubt that it will eventually be accepted by the police and the courts as a quick and reliable method for eliminating the innocent from suspicion as much as for identifying and convicting the guilty. We are still a long way from that position.

Unlike both fingerprint technology and DNA, there are no international or even national standards for the application of facial recognition technology to the criminal justice system. These standards for international co-operation, which took years to develop for both fingerprints and DNA, allow data relating to these technologies to be transmitted across national borders easily and without loss of integrity, so that someone arrested in California can be identified as wanted in Catalonia immediately—police would know immediately in California without any great effort. In addition to these technical standards, a whole set of other standards has been developed in order to enable the courts to feel confident about accepting an identification based on the use of fingerprints or DNA.

None of this infrastructure of standards is yet in place in relation to facial recognition. This does not mean that facial recognition technology is not yet useful in fighting crime and preventing terrorism today. It simply means that much more work needs to be done urgently to enable it to realise its full potential in the criminal justice system—for example, so that the courts accept facial recognition evidence as confirming identity. One of the tasks which has to be tackled urgently is to improve the quality of the main source of raw material for facial recognition; namely, the millions of private CCTV cameras all over this country. Too many of these cameras are poorly maintained, if maintained at all, badly sited and capture images at a very low resolution. This work should be taken forward with determination and speed. One way of doing this might be by building on the important work done by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, established under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.

This is a matter for the Government. The simple message I would like my noble friend the Minister to take away from today’s debate is that, without national and eventually international standards and guidelines, the use of facial recognition technology will fail to realise its full potential in the criminal justice system. More significantly, without such standards, this technology could lead to miscarriages of justice, which in turn could lead to a loss of confidence in the technology and a loss of trust in the criminal justice system as a whole.