If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Police organizations across Illinois are fighting to preserve their access to facial recognition databases and other biometric surveillance tools. House Bill 5521, introduced by state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, would ban state and local law enforcement from using biometric identification technology, and 227 opponents have formally registered against the bill through the Illinois General Assembly’s witness slip system, compared with a single proponent. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The lopsided opposition count tells a familiar story. When biometric surveillance faces legislative limits anywhere in the country, police agencies and their allies flood the process. What it doesn’t tell you is why Illinois residents might want these protections, or what happens to the millions of people whose biometric data sits in government databases with no meaningful restrictions on how it gets used. HB 5521 would bar law enforcement from obtaining, retaining, possessing, accessing, or using biometric identification systems. That includes facial recognition, iris scanners, voiceprints, and fingerprint-matching software. The bill also closes a workaround that agencies currently exploit, prohibiting them from contracting with third parties, other government agencies, or federal agencies to access biometric data on their behalf. Fingerprints remain part of the bill’s definition of biometric identifiers, but the ban carves out specific exceptions: police can still fingerprint someone after an arrest or conviction, collect forensic evidence at crime scenes, run employment background checks, and verify their own identity on work devices. What they can’t do is trawl fingerprint databases as a general investigative tool, searching for matches against the biometric data of people who haven’t been arrested or charged with anything. The bill would also shut down one of the most significant surveillance pipelines in the state. The Secretary of State’s facial recognition database has long been a go-to resource for police agencies across Illinois. Every person who gets a driver’s license or state ID has their photograph fed into that system, which law enforcement can currently search without the knowledge or consent of the person being identified. Under HB 5521, the Secretary of State could only use facial recognition for verifying someone’s identity when issuing a mobile driver’s license or ID card. That means millions of Illinoisans would no longer have their license photos treated as entries in a police surveillance database simply because they wanted to drive legally. More: Angela Lipps Spent 108 Days in Jail Because a Facial Recognition Algorithm Was Wrong Illinois already has one of the strongest biometric privacy laws in the country, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which regulates private-sector use of biometric data but does not restrict government or police agencies. The state told corporations they couldn’t harvest your face scan without consent, then left a gap wide enough for every police department in Illinois to scan that same face through a government database with zero oversight. HB 5521 closes that gap. It grants individuals a private right of action to sue for violations, allowing for damages and the deletion of their biometric data, and empowers the Attorney General to enforce the provisions. Cassidy also pushed back on the argument that facial recognition is reliable enough to justify mass biometric surveillance. “Rather than look at anecdotes, we should know that facial recognition technology is demonstrably inaccurate. It is curious that in discussing this issue, we hear about particularly heinous and troubling crimes, but nothing about people being misidentified by facial recognition technology and held for hours (if not days) based on system errors. House Bill 5521 does not limit state and local police from investigating crimes. It simply protects the privacy of millions of Illinois residents simply because they have an Illinois driver’s license.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Illinois Police Fight Bill to Ban Facial Recognition Use appeared first on Reclaim The Net.