To prohibit use of remote biometric surveillance technology on any data acquired by body-worn cameras of law enforcement officers, and for other purposes.
This bill prohibits the use of facial recognition and other remote biometric surveillance technology on video, images, or audio collected by police body cameras at both the federal and state level. The legislation defines biometric surveillance broadly to include facial recognition, gait recognition, iris scanning, voice recognition, and similar technologies that can identify or track individuals from a distance. Federal law enforcement agencies are directly banned from using these technologies on body camera footage, while states and local governments must adopt similar prohibitions to remain eligible for federal grant funding under the Byrne grant program. The bill makes exceptions for using biometric technology solely to blur or hide faces for privacy protection and allows officers to use these systems to unlock their own devices. Congress argues in the bill that facial recognition technology on body cameras violates civil rights, disproportionately harms communities of color and other vulnerable groups through misidentification errors, transforms accountability tools into roving surveillance systems, and discourages crime victims and witnesses from cooperating with police.
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