The system was implemented by the Buenos Aires Government to identify fugitives from Justice but, among other things, it served to monitor public figures and was fed with data from people with no criminal record. It is suspended, but this Wednesday there will be a hearing to define the conditions under which it could be resumed.
The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires is faced with the unusual opportunity to establish an appropriate standard for the control of facial recognition systems on public roads. Next Wednesday a sentence execution hearing will be held in the Buenos Aires courts, from there the guidelines will emerge to control the most invasive surveillance system in the country.
The case of the Facial Recognition System in Buenos Aires gained enormous notoriety a couple of years ago, when it came to light that the system that the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires had implemented in 2019 had been used to access information from public persons, among them, journalists (Gustavo Sylvestre, Eduardo Feinmann, among others), politicians of all party colors (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Alberto Fernández, José Luis Espert, Gerardo Morales, Javier Milei, among others) as well as activists from social organizations such as Estela by Carlotto. The biometric data of members of the Supreme Court of Justice such as Carlos Rosenkrantz were also obtained irregularly. The list is long and varied, and allows us to document the fact that facial recognition systems of this type are dangerous for the privacy, security and guarantees of citizens. The city government was ordered by the courts to give explanations, which were always vague and insufficient.
None of this would have been known without the wise judicial action presented jointly by the Argentine Computer Law Observatory (ODIA) and the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS). Both organizations were established as actors to prevent the implementation of the facial recognition system in CABA. The Vía Libre Foundation joined the case as a friend of the court and presented numerous arguments to support the action of its colleagues.
The cause had its ups and downs, but finally the use of the system was suspended through a first instance ruling, confirmed by another from the Chamber, which ordered the City of Buenos Aires to comply with a series of requirements before reinstalling this form of monitoring. of public space. Among the requirements, the City Government is required to submit the system to an audit, establish the control mechanisms dictated by current regulations in the city, and carry out an impact assessment on the privacy of the system. This last measure was one of the requirements made during his visit to Buenos Aires by the UN Rapporteur for Privacy, who considered that a system of this nature cannot and should not be implemented without a detailed and demanding evaluation of its impact on human rights.
Who watches the watchman?
The facial recognition system for identifying fugitives in CABA was promoted by who then held the dual role of Minister of Security and Deputy Head of Government, Diego Santilli. Presented with great fanfare and without prior consultation with the Legislature, the City Government directly contracted the services of a company called Danaide, provider of facial recognition software that was installed in some 300 cameras in the city’s surveillance park. .
At the time it generated various problems, including several false positives that led to arbitrary arrests. Another serious problem was that an implementation was carried out without debate or any control regulation of a technology that by that date was already prohibited in large cities in the world such as Boston or San Francisco.
In this context, ODIA and CELS appeared in court to complain against the system. In parallel, the Legislature sanctioned a rule that was proposed by Representative Claudia Neira (from the Frente de Todos) and that was voted against by her own party to give the green light to implementation. The legislature thus resolved that two bodies be in charge of control: a special commission of the Legislature and the Ombudsman’s Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
The facial recognition system works based on large volumes of data. Like any artificial intelligence system, it is trained with a large number of images to probabilistically identify a person among the thousands of faces that pass in front of the cameras in public spaces. In theory, the system should identify the people wanted by Justice. This is how it was presented in the first instance, as an automated system to find fugitives.
However, the raids and the investigation carried out by Justice determined that the system had been used irregularly, that millions of data had been obtained from the RENAPER database of people without criminal records who had been incorporated into the system.
The order now is to audit that system as a fundamental condition for authorizing its use. To date, the system is suspended.
The organizations that follow this cause have insisted that these systems should not be used due to their high risk and the serious impact they generate on society. Now we have to discuss what the conditions would be for an eventual evaluation of them. Auditing a system of this type is costly, but much more costly is depriving citizens of fundamental rights, especially in times of high social conflict in which social protest is being criminalized and people who mobilize in defense of rights are threatened. Your rights.
You can opt for a compromise solution that involves a light, decorative, harmless audit for the company and the City Government. An audit that audits nothing.
Next Wednesday, at the hearing, we are going to demand an appropriate control system for these technologies, so that we can know how the system works, with what datasets it was trained, its architecture and all the essential information to properly control a system of this nature. . Auditing artificial intelligence systems is complex but not impossible, and in Argentina the scientific and technological conditions exist to do so.
If the company does not provide all the information for a good audit and the City Government does not present all the security protocols, facial recognition should not return to the City of Buenos Aires.
On another occasion we could advance the opacity of the direct purchasing process of a system that not even the Buenos Aires Government itself knows exactly how it works. That is also one of the demands that we will bring to the hearing next Wednesday.
The author is president of the Vía Libre Foundation.