But the move no doubt while underlines the utter inability of Delhi Police in identifying and nabbing the real culprits, it simply blows on the face of Shah who did not feel hesitant on the floor of Lok Sabha on March 11 to eulogise the Delhi Police for its yeoman’s job in containing the pogrom. Strange enough none else but only Amit Shah could do it. He has embarked on his mission and felt proud in announcing that at least 1,100 people have already been identified using the technology. Their arrest is simply a mere formality.

To allay public apprehension that the government was using the technology against any particular community, the Muslims, Shah was generous enough to emphasise that the facial recognition does not discriminate when it comes to community and religion. This was not for first time that the technology was used in the case of Delhi riots that shook the conscience of the country. Shah in fact revealed that similar technology was used during earlier anti-CAA protests.

This revelation has indeed come as a shock. The movement against CAA, NRC and NPR has still been going on across the country. And it is an open secret that the protesters were resorting to a Gandhi-type satyagrah. They have not been indulging in any kind of violence. Even then the Modi government resorted to this mechanism to keep a tab on them. This action of government no doubt falls in the category of violating the privacy of the individual and the crime more heinous than what was committed during the Emergency by the Indira government.

Though Narendra Modi claims of utmost transparency in his decisions and action, this incident clearly underscores that he has been hideous in his act and refrained from maintaining transparency in the public life. Shah’s revelation explicitly underlines that the police acted in secretive manner to curb and did not do anything to stop mayhem and arrest the culprits. If Shah is to be believed this is for the first time in Independent India that this technology was used for the task which could have been performed by the police in normal course.

Shah boasts of importance and relevance of this technology when this is being dumped and discarded across the world. Shah’s remarks are pervasive. This is purely a mechanism to conceal his real intentions. He is resorting to this nature of phrase only to keep the people confused of his real design.

Honestly, Modi and Shah should have held consultations with the concerned people and not merely with his party colleagues and then formulate a law before deploying facial recognition technology for law enforcement. In fact the Modi government had used this mechanism in the month of February in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh against people protesting against CAA and NRC.

The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), an Indian organisation which advocates for the protection of digital rights and liberties, has said that police should outline clear rules on the facial recognition technology. It also demanded that the police should provide a disclosure of the software’s audits and algorithms. The IFF has also said; “The use of Aadhaar for this purpose without any judicial authorisation violates the judgement of the Supreme Court in KS Puttaswamy v. UoI(2019).”

Though the protagonists, even Shah, have denied the charges of misuse it is an open secret how the Aadhaar information was made public in some cases endangering the privacy of the concerned persons, it is really a matter of shame that greed for some financial and political gain has made the companies and politicians to indulge in such nasty game.

According to a TechSci report, the facial recognition technology business is expected to grow from $700 Mn in 2018 to over $4 Bn by 2024 thanks to India’s national-level surveillance plans. It simply revives the old memories; Be careful uncle Sam is watching. The central government has already started the process to build a centralised facial recognition surveillance system across India.

Facial recognition is a flawed system. In 2018, the Delhi police had informed the Delhi High Court that the accuracy of facial recognition software used by police to trace individuals was only 2 per cent. In 2019, however, according to another report, the accuracy had gone from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. If the reports are to be relied the Delhi High Court has been informed some time back that the software was so poor that it sometimes matched pictures of boys with that of girls. London's Metropolitan Police's trial of the technology failed 80 per cent of the time, according to a report.

Though Shah clarifies that the government has no ulterior intentions behind the move, how could he explain that the Delhi police did not use the software just to find missing people, but also, as per its annual report, intended to use it at public gatherings. Through this way Shah will link government data to track those involved in the riots. This will be one of the more sweeping applications of biometric state surveillance.

It is interesting that in his ebullience to assert that he was using this technology Shah admitted that the basics of privacy as envisaged under Aadhaar was also being violated. “The use of Aadhaar for this purpose without any judicial authorisation violates the judgement of the Supreme Court,” said the IFF, citing a 2017 lawsuit that guaranteed people’s fundamental right to privacy.

For years, face recognition was being used by the international police to capture of wanted criminals but this is for the first time Modi government was using to suppress dissent. A question obviously arises: are civil protest and satyagrah worse than a crime like theft?

It is really sad that while the global fraternity was discarding the facial identification system, Modi government was ready to invest huge money to broad base it.

Microsoft president Brad Smith has revealed that the company turned down an order from California cops for its facial recognition technology over human rights concerns. Smith said Microsoft had concluded that its technology would probably lead to innocent women and minorities being held by the police thanks to inherent biases in the cops' artificial intelligence dataset. The USA Democratic presidential candidates have articulated against it. Sen. Bernie Sanders became the first candidate to call for a total ban on the use of facial recognition software for policing.

The anti-surveillance ordinance signed by San Francisco's Board of Supervisors bars city agencies, including San Francisco PD, from using the technology as of June 2019. Even the Somerville City Council (Massachusetts) voted to ban the use of facial recognition, making the city the second community to take such a decision.

On July 16, California took the same decision and became the third US city to ban the use of face recognition technology. It is interesting to note that the Oakland Police department is not using this technology and was not planning to use it. San Diego took the same decision at the end of December 2019 in advance of the new Californian law.

Since the San Francisco, Sommerville, Oakland, and now San Diego rulings, the debate gets louder in many cities and not only in the U.S. The new European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen wants “a time-limited ban on the use of facial recognition by private or public actors in public spaces.” In July, 2018, Newsweek reported that Amazon’s facial recognition technology falsely identified 28 members of US Congress as people arrested for crimes. (IPA Service)