Tell your Assemblymember: Stop the Surveillance Bill AB 642
Call ONE of the Assemblymembers. Note: only one of these Assemblymembers represents you. Find out which one here.
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Call Script
If you’re in AD 17 (east side of the City):
My name is ____ and I’m a member of Indivisible SF and a resident of AD 17. I’m asking Assemblymember Haney to oppose AB 642, the surveillance bill authored by his colleague Assemblymember Ting. Legislatively normalizing the use of facial surveillance by the police is the opposite of what the state Legislature should be doing.
If you’re in AD 19 (west side of the City):
My name is ____ and I’m a member of Indivisible SF and a resident of AD 19. I’m asking Assemblymember Ting to withdraw AB 642, his surveillance bill that legislatively normalizes the use of facial surveillance by the police in the guise of creating “standards.” This is the opposite of what the state Legislature should be doing.
Background
Facial recognition technology is a tool of mass surveillance that our police departments have tried repeatedly to deploy, using our tax dollars.
The least of the problems with facial recognition technology is how poorly it works: With flawed suspect descriptions, poor specimen photos, uneven camera-feed quality, and wildly varying lighting conditions, the best imaginable facial recognition software will do no better than a human (which is to say, still quite terribly) at picking faces out of a crowd. It is a fundamentally hard problem, and the risks of both false negatives (failure to recognize someone wanted) and false positives (incorrectly fingering someone innocent) are tremendous, and the costs of those errors are even worse.
Much more serious is the threat to our freedoms. We have the right to pass in public without being harassed by the police except in very narrow circumstances, theoretically only those that give police a solid basis to stop someone and investigate a previously reported or directly witnessed crime. In practice, police often stop people for the flimsiest of reasons, or even no reason at all. We cannot trust police with any technology that threatens to give them even more excuses to stop and harass innocent people.
It would be bad enough if facial recognition technology had an unacceptable false negative rate that failed to recognize persons of interest. It would be bad enough if it had an unacceptable false positive rate that infringed on the liberties of innocent people.
But the error rates are almost beside the point: Surveillance technology should never be used on innocent people, period. Mass surveillance is inherently wrong. Facial recognition technology is a waste of public money and police time on fool’s errands, and an infringement on our right to pass in public without being harassed by agents of the state.
Resources
Coalition letter from ACLU of Northern California, Indivisible California StateStrong, and others, 04/06/2023