Paul Murphy warns of facial recognition and AI in policing

Thanks. We are in the midst of a manufactured moral panic. To divert attention away from its failures on housing, on health, on disability and on climate, the Government prefers to have endless statements on policing and to pass more laws that erode our civil liberties. The programme for Government contains a frightening litany of attacks on civil liberties, all under the guise of getting tough on crime. Of course it is never white-collar crime that they mean, not when they negotiated the programme for Government with Ireland's best known white-collar criminal. I want to address one of the worst attacks on civil liberties in the programme for Government, which is the promise to enable the Gardaí to use AI and facial recognition technology. The Government is committed to legislate, quote, to provide for retrospective searching of images using facial recognition technology before the end of this dull term. It goes even further, promising to introduce live facial recognition technology, supposedly only in cases of terrorism, national security, whatever that means, and missing persons. It also pledges to increase funding for CCTV and to ban the wearing of masks at protests. This is dystopian surveillance state stuff. It is also a direct attack on the rights of disabled people to protest. Many disabled people need to wear masks for medical reasons and would not be able to take part in protests if they are banned from wearing masks at them. No doubt that would suit this Government very well. The last Government faced the effective, overwhelmingly masked protests of disabled people against the so-called Green Paper. The Government knows its record and disability is disgraceful and is under huge pressure from the disability rights movement. I have spoken before about how universally opposed facial recognition technology is by human rights groups. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, face recognition massively expands the Government's power to track our movements and target people based on their race, religion, political affiliation or speech. And while everyone's rights are at stake, black and brown people are harmed the most when this racist technology collides with our racist systems. There is a massive racial bias within FRT. Error rights are 60 times higher for West African women than they are for white men. Like with AI, which reflects and then regurgitates and accelerates the racial biases that exist in our society and come from the top, together with FRT it will be used to accelerate racist profiling. The claim by the Gardaí that it is 99% accurate is terrifying. If they really believe that, we are entering into dangerous territory. Instead of going in this direction, we should be joining those many parts of the world that have banned the use of facial recognition technology and we should also ban the use of AI in policing.