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Seeing Silicon | A mugshot of surveillance technology

Jan 26, 2025 10:54 AM IST

From taking mugshots to creating virtual borders for rich countries, surveillance technology has come of age thanks to AI.

It was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that I found a 100-year-old story of a biometrics researcher who helped the French police deal with repeat offenders. In the 1890s, the French police had a sea of photographs of arrestees but no organised way to track the history of an offender. Alphonse Bertillon brought in a unique solution as a clerk in the police: organised datasets of human biometrics.

There is a huge privacy and data protection concern about these technologies.(Pixabay) PREMIUM
There is a huge privacy and data protection concern about these technologies.(Pixabay)

Bertillon transformed the body into a set of measurable data points, which when paired with standardised photographs and notes on distinguishing physical features could match individuals with previous arrests. (This was a time when cameras were expensive and only trained experts could use one). The Bertillonage, as the system was called, consisted of 11 different anthropometric measurements with instruments including rulers, gauges, and callipers. By 1893, the skylit attics of the Palace of Justice in Paris housed what became the world’s first judicial identification department. This was the birth of the mugshot, which quickly became the norm in the police systems across the world.

In the 1960s, it was the Bertillonage that was the base of an initial 21-biometrics database to create a way for computers to recognise human faces. They failed as they needed copious amounts of data for facial recognition as a technology to work. Faces. Images. Photographs. It was finally with social media, when we all started uploading our photographs, collectively, online, that companies had enough data to turn it into useful facial tracking software. In 2010 when Facebook launched a face recognition feature using the database of uploaded photos on its platform, it was criticised for using personal photographs without consent. Within a few years, Apple launched facial recognition to unlock iPhone X and Google had made it easy to organise your digital photos by human faces.

We’re used to this now. Companies and governments around the world are mugshot-ing us and we’re okay with it. There is something deeply personal and pleasurable in the fact that my iPhone takes one look at me and opens up quickly and easily. For the convenience of not putting in a PIN or a password to open our phones or social media, we happily shared our biometrics and our consent.

This has led to an exponential increase in the biometric-driven global surveillance technology market, which includes facial recognition, video surveillance, monitoring behavioural activities, managing information, and crunching through big data using AI. In 2023, this market was at a whopping $148 billion globally and is set to grow to $234 billion by 2027. That’s two years from now.

Creating virtual borders with biometrics

Ironically, as these AI-infused systems become increasingly sophisticated, so does our fear. This is evident in the recent increase in surveillance technology on country borders. Illegal immigration was one of the key agendas for the recent US election.

Homeland Security in the US has already announced a collaboration with Tel Aviv-based startup RealEye, whose software aggregates information from millions of online sources to build a database of human faces. RealEye has two AI-loaded platforms Masad and Fortress that provide real-time vetting of immigrants entering a country with a history of illegal or suspicious behaviour, drawing on criminal records (even traffic violations) and social media footprints.

Globally, countries like the US are ramping up their virtual borders by adding systems similar to what RealEye offers. Cheaper, smarter, smaller drones are manning borders to identify and track unauthorised border crossers. They send out data to systems that integrate information from advanced cameras, sensors, and biometric identification devices like fingerprint sensors and iris scanners and build digital passports for all of us. AI agents crawl these databases to look for potential flags – it could be a terrorist threat, but it could also be an angry tweet you made, or your membership of an organisation that’s a red flag in that country as you stand on a border, holding out your passport.

In the same vein, a few months ago, the city of San Francisco piloted a new AI-driven mobile camera that tracks individuals' movements and warns the police of suspicious behaviour. The camera contraption also issues voice warnings to would-be criminals. A cash-strapped police department has increasingly embraced these freebies doled out by startups, including other devices like automatic license plate readers and drones plying the city to track its notorious homeless population.

There is a huge privacy and data protection concern about these technologies. These systems flag not only illegal crossers but also activists. Already, climate activists are talking about how they need to go through extra layers of security in countries because of their activities in their home country.

It’s our fear of others, foreigners or aliens, that’s fuelling this industry. We’re all agreeing to be constantly surveilled in exchange for a semblance of that security. But since the technologies are so new, it’s yet to be seen if Sauron’s all-seeing eye will make our streets and countries safer. Or will it only increase our paranoia?

Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science is reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.

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