Protests in the age of facial recognition: No legal oversight in implementation could lead to illegal surveillance

Indians are protesting and there is nothing new in it, but they are facing new forms of adversarial tactics from the State. Amid all the protests in Jamia Millia Islamia and across the north-eastern states, there are reports of the police and national security agencies using facial recognition and CCTVs videos to identify people who are protesting. While the capabilities of all police departments are unknown, certain police agencies like Delhi Police, Hyderabad Police, Surat Police are among the few departments which have facial recognition units. The current usage of facial recognition is primarily to identify people in criminal databases of all police databases using Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS). Technically, the police in India do not yet have photos of everyone in the country to identify people using facial recognition. But such a system is being envisioned by the National Crime Records Bureau. The NCRB issued a tender for National Automated Facial Recognition System which will be a part of CCTNS. The NCRB plans to gather information from various government departments to build a larger database of people to monitor. It already intends to track all sexual offenders using facial recognition with data from national sexual offenders registry.

Wow! Delhi police is working with NIA now to use facial recognition tech and match it with AADHAR database to identify those responsible for the violence in Delhi. These thugs should face the most serious punishment per law.

— Rohit (@TweetByRKV) December 15, 2019

While the police departments do not yet have these databases. There are indeed agencies like NATGRID which have large scale information about all Indians integrated from various government databases. The Aadhaar database too has photos of most Indians, but the quality of it for facial recognition and the number of people without photos in the database are unknown. Can the national agencies use facial recognition to track who is protesting? Quite possibly, but they certainly do not yet have information of all Indians and that infrastructure is just being built with no legal safeguards. Just like the controversial Aadhaar database was built without a law, all other surveillance infrastructure is being built **without a law on surveillance.** With protests across the country, the State is doing what it knows best by clamping down on the people part of the protests. From brutally killing teens in the north-east, shutting down the internet  to entering and **tear-gassing students in universities** , Indian police are acting beyond their operating procedures. [caption id=“attachment_5525931” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] A man walks past a poster simulating facial recognition software at the Security China 2018 exhibition on public safety and security in Beijing.[/caption] Article 19(1)(b) of the Constitution guarantees the right to peaceful assembly and procession. Protests are a sign of democracy, it allows people to express their agency with the State compelling various arms of the State to act on things. While we did subscribe to the idea of peaceful protests, mischievous elements do indeed cause violence at times and police must act on it. Probably facial recognition can indeed help with this, but the cops do not have a right to use facial recognition without a law on surveillance as ordered by the supreme court in Puttuswmay Vs Union of India case. What was once a right is becoming a taboo and anyone who protests in the country is accused of being many things **including being an anti-national.** The State and its agents cannot brand someone or make a scapegoat when the identity of the protesters is unknown. In Bhima Koregaon, it was the human rights activists **who faced the brunt of the State** with false cases of plotting to kill the prime minister. The State went to large extents to **even subject the people involved with extreme surveillance using the Pegasus spyware.** Usage of facial recognition for all general purposes like protests will make it hard for people to assemble and way easier for the State to clamp down any form of dissent. [caption id=“attachment_7781011” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Students of Jamia Millia Islamia University clash with the police during a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act. PTI[/caption] Across the world, there are people who are against facial recognition and there are technologists who are campaigning for it. There are cities which are banning it and there are **cities which are allowing its limited usage** . In India, we are neither banning it nor regulating it causing widespread of misinformation on this aspect. One could easily say that Indian Police is way far away from doing this or they are already doing it everywhere. But the truth is somewhere in the middle, where experiments are being carried out across the country about this and we must watch how it will affect us. If one looks at the implementation of Facial Recognition System in Hyderabad Police, you will find that they are stopping innocent people in the middle of the road and taking their face photographs. Anyone who questions it is being replied with a non-answer or told we are looking for criminals without stating under which law or code of procedure they are carrying these searches out. A drunk man shouting in Hyderabad metro was caught within 24 hours using facial recognition by Hyderabad Police. One could say this proves the systems working great, but I need to question where all will you use it to police our behaviour? Behaviour which is in contradiction to the majority but in no way unconstitutional. If you support facial recognition and CCTVs, you must at the same time demand body cameras for police to stop their brutal actions against innocent protestors. The author is an independent researcher working on data, governance and internet.