CATCH: The facial recognition system of the Dutch police
If the aim of the ban is to prevent a further erosion of human rights in our public spaces, one cannot focus on the technology only. Rather, we need to consider the entire ecosystem that remote biometric identification systems are deployed in.
I'd like to give you an example from the Netherlands, where the police launched a facial recognition database named CATCH in 2016. The most recent numbers concerning the size of the database are from December 2021. At the time, the faces of over 1,5 million people could be found in this criminal law database, in addition to the 6,5 million pictures in the police's migrant database.
And it is not just the database that is massive. The existing surveillance infrastructure it can connect to, is massive as well. Our cities are full of camera's, both privately and state owned. Allowing 'post' remote biometric identification, is saying yes to every one of those camera's becoming potential biometric identifiers. Does it provide citizens navigating their towns and cities with more protection when the software that can link all that data together, does so with a delay?
No, it obfuscates what kind of surveillance they are subjected to and allows for historical searches, revealing a lot more information: At how many other demonstrations was this arrested protester in the past month? With what other sources did this journalist speak?
Of course, the interests of citizens need to be weighed against the interests of law enforcement. And databases, infrastructure and systems like CATCH help law enforcement catch criminals, right? Well, actually: we don't know. Every year the Dutch police conducts around 1.000 searches using this technology. In about 10% of the cases, there's a match. And that's where our insights into the usefulness of this technology ends. Not only is the police unable to show to what extent CATCH is of help in criminal investigations, they are also not able to say if these people could have been identified in other, less infringing ways. A textbook example of disproportionality.