Last Updated on July 11, 2019 by CCAR Staff
Driver’s licenses serve a practical, uncontroversial and non-partisan purpose for drivers, residents and state governments.
In exchange for giving some personal information over to the government, meeting some basic requirements and passing some tests, people are granted licenses to operate a vehicle.
But apparently, federal law enforcement agencies have decided to trample over the liberty of drivers.
As groundbreaking reporting by the Washington Post reveals, “Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.”
In other words, the DMV databases have become a font of information for the surveillance state.
Police have long culled fingerprints and DNA for their records — from criminal suspects, that is.
The DMV is entirely different. It keeps records on almost all of us, the vast majority of whom have never been charged with a crime.
Thanks to the Post’s investigative work, we now know these agencies have been accessing our records entirely without the approval of Congress or legislature, and it’s good to see politicians of both major parties responding with equal outrage.
“Law enforcement’s access of state databases,” particularly DMV databases, is “often done in the shadows with no consent,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings, D-Maryland, said.
A livid Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said drivers “didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh, it’s OK to turn my information, my photo, over to the FBI.’”
The over-reliance on facial recognition software itself is a wildly slippery Orwellian slope, and we have lauded cities that ban it for their police.
It’s also mistake-prone, especially for people with darker skin.
Life is not a prime-time cop show. And just because law enforcement wants easy access to information doesn’t mean they should get it.
Freedom-loving Americans must work together to fight this outrageous trespass by federal agencies.
