Cops Have a Database of 117M Faces

This is the idea behind the nascent "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment: that by aggregating together many individual observations that each in themselves aren't a "search," you arrive at a result that gives you so much information about a person and their activities that the aggregate program would be a search that required a warrant. Put another way, each individual "tile" of a search program might not be so controversial, like police being able to take your photo in public, but a mosaic formed by aggregating photos of you automatically taken every block and matching them to your drivers' license photo becomes far more problematic, privacy-wise: the whole is more invasive than the sum of its parts.

The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case: U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass" to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside.

It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate, but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.

> Corporations so often insist they are "people", when such claim is to their legal and economic advantage. Well then, treat them like such. Capable of "stalking" and subject to punishment for same.

This is a misconception. Legally, corporations are people (this is not disputed), but not natural people (humans are natural people).

And it's up to date, and is augmented by much, much more data.

> I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights.

It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them through natural social introductions.

But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20 people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that.

Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches, they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.

>But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety

public safety will soon be crushing dissent further

then we will wish they did not have records of what we looked like

* Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information.*

And this could be an misconception you have learned. Naturally everyone who wants to have control over you wants you to believe it. Still it does not follow that you have to share this belief.

The question is where to draw the line. Naturally the ones who want to have control over every single person, what to push this line far away and make it look natural. Our duty is to question the motivation to do so.

I stand corrected.

I definitely skimmed the article too fast. State ID photos makes a lot more sense.