Judging Freedom - Facial Recognition Technology - Is it Lawful?

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

NYC Mayor Adams eyes expansion of highly controversial police surveillance technology#crime #NYCSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with another pop-up on Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, February 8, 2022. It's about 1.45 in the afternoon here on the East coast. Let me remind you, and let me ask you to subscribe to these pop-ups, describe, subscribe to judging freedom. Just go to judging freedom on YouTube and you'll see the box to subscribe. And then of course you can also, if you go even deeper, get the notification.

So, you know, when I'm doing these pop-ups my team and I look at these numbers every day and nothing makes us happier than to see them going up and up and up. They are going up and up and up. They could go faster and you can make that happen. and a former captain in the NYPD has announced a very controversial mechanism to help fight crime, and it's called facial recognition. Now, facial recognition has been around for a long time. It was developed by police in Great Britain, where it's used 24-7 and for all sorts of valid as well as nefarious purposes. But what Mayor Adams wants to do with it here is allow the police to engage in fishing expeditions through their body of

facial recognition achieved by public cameras. So you're walking down 6th Avenue, right in the middle of New York City. If you're in the neighborhood of where the Fox News building is, 6th Avenue, between 47th and 48th, there are two or three dozen cameras that will pick you up. No matter where you are and no matter what you're doing, you're picked up by police cameras and they store that. And that enables them to take your face and break it down into a couple of hundred smaller pieces, which they then can reconstruct by way of facial recognition. So they take your face and then run it through all the faces that they have,

just to see if there's a warrant out for you, just to see if they've ever interrogated you, to see what organizations you belong to, to see how frequently you traverse Sixth Avenue, to see where else they may have picked you up. This is none of the government's business. The government cannot commence an investigation of you without what's called articulable suspicion. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently on this since the World War II era. Articulable suspicion is a statement that can be stated, that can be articulated, as to why it is a criminal investigation should be commenced of you. Without articulable suspicion, the government cannot go through fishing expeditions.

Let's just throw out the facial recognition of Judge Napolitano and see what comes back. That's absolutely prohibited by the Supreme Court in New York City and New York State and everywhere in the United States of America. And Mayor Adams, a former NYPD captain, knows that. So he's either bluffing to give people a false sense of security as if this facial recognition software use would somehow make us safer, or he's trying to get the law changed by using something in a manner that he knows is unconstitutional. So look, if the government wants a search warrant of your property, they have to go to a judge and present evidence of probable cause. If they want a subpoena from a grand jury, they have to go to a grand jury of 23 people

and present evidence of probable cause. Evidence of probable cause, which must be presented under oath, is evidence which demonstrates that it is more likely than not that the place to be searched will produce evidence of crime. But if they want to start an investigation of you and they don't have evidence of probable cause, there has to be a reason for the investigation of you, of the person they're investigating. Stated differently, phishing expeditions, whether done the old-fashioned way looking through index cards or whether done through the modern way of facial recognition, are unconstitutional and there's no exception to that. Mayor Adams and the NYPD take note. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom. Thanks for watching!