House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, suggested Wednesday that the federal government should use facial recognition technology to track illegal immigrants.
Chaffetz was generally critical of the technology during a hearing examining the use of it by the FBI, and said it has “unintended racial, gender or age biases or deficiencies.” The Utah Republican added that the bigger the database, “the more difficult it is for the facial recognition technology to get it right.”
But making it smaller and more tailored would make the billion-dollar database worth it.
“If the database was smaller to known criminals, wanted criminals, people that are here illegally, maybe those are the types of things that we should be focused on, as opposed to everybody, and that’s one of the questions and why we have a distinguished panel today,” he explained, before introducing witnesses.
According to a General Accountability Office report released last year, more than 400 million pictures of Americans’ faces are archived in local, state and federal law enforcement facial recognition databases.
Chaffetz said that nearly 80 percent of the faces in the FBI’s facial recognition network are of non-criminals.
