The Aaron Swartz Police Surveillance Project and Open the Government teamed up to file suit against the Long Beach Police Department for withholding requested records. In response to the lawsuit, a number of records have been released about the Long Beach Police Department’s use of facial recognition and cell site simulators.
The entire cache of documents is available for review here.
In this blog, we’ll highlight a couple of specific documents.
Proposal for Acquisition of Clearview AI
Morphological Comparison Sheet for Facial Recognition Searches
Slide About the FBI Iris Captures Program – LA County – 5 cameras, 9 locations, 64,726 “enrollments. Nationwide: 111 cameras at 56 locations in 18 states/territories, 917,000 “enrollments”.
Celebrity Practice Training – In this LACRIS training manual (full training manual can be found at the general link above), Long Beach cops are trained in facial recognition processing on images of celebrities including Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Leonardio Di Caprio, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Elvis Presley and the Queen of England.
Feature Matching Sets – In this LACRIS training manual (full training manual can be found at the general link above), these slides show multiple sets of matching/not matching feature sets including eye, ear, nose and lip matches.
HIV Positive – Interesting training slide on entering a reason for putting someone on a watch list. One of the reasons provided as an example under “Reason on Watch List” is “Suspect is HIV Pos”.
Vigilant Solutions Invoices 2015, 2016, 2017 – In 2015 and 2016, the $25,000 invoices provide for access to “private data”. In 2017, the language has been modified to say Tier 4, which includes all LPR data including fusion center data and all commercially acquired vehicle location data.
Cell Site Simulator (Stingray) Logs 2016-2019 – The stingray logs show that 101 or 44% of the 230 uses of the cell site simulator between 2016 and 2019, were by federal agencies, the vast majority of them (94/101) by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). With 41% of all Long Beach PD use being loans to one federal agency, it opens the question of who the true owner of the equipment is, and why DEA is not using their own equipment.