Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system

Documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California have shed new light on Rekognition, Amazon’s little-known facial recognition project. Rekognition is currently used by police in Orlando and Oregon’s Washington County, often using nondisclosure agreements to avoid public disclosure. The result is a powerful real-time facial recognition system that can tap into police body cameras and municipal surveillance systems.

The most significant concerns are raised by the Orlando project, which is capable of running real-time facial recognition on a network of cameras throughout the city. The project was described by Rekognition project director Ranju Das at a recent AWS conference in Seoul.

“This is an immediate response use case,” Das told the crowd. “There are cameras all over the city [of Orlando]. Authorized cameras are streaming the data to Kinesis video stream…. We analyze that data in real time and search against the collection of faces that they have. Maybe they want to know if the mayor of the city is in a place, or there are persons of interest they want to track.”

For the ACLU, that capability raises significant civil liberties concerns. “By automating mass surveillance, facial recognition systems like Rekognition threaten this freedom, posing a particular threat to communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate,” the group said in a statement. “People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government.”

Introduced in November as part of the Amazon Web Services cloud, Rekognition is also used by consumer services like Pinterest and C-SPAN for object recognition and analytics. Most recently, it provided the backend for a Sky News project that used facial recognition to identify guests at the royal wedding. Motorola Solutions, a popular supplier of police body cameras, is also a client.

The ACLU has already joined with other groups to call on Amazon to cease providing facial recognition services to law enforcement and other government agencies. “We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country,” the groups said in an open letter addressed to CEO Jeff Bezos. “Amazon should not be in the business of providing surveillance systems like Rekognition to the government.”

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.