Amitai Etzioni si schiera a favore del riconoscimento facciale: "se avessimo avuto le attuali tecnologie di riconoscimento facciale, avremmo potuto arrestare i terroristi della Boston marathon". Ammesso e non concesso, una delle molte domande da porsi sarebbe piuttosto: "se le attuali tecnologie di riconoscimento facciale fossero state implementate da allora, dato il tasso di falsi positivi, quanti arresti e uccisioni di cittadini erroneamente sospettati di essere terroristi avrebbero comportato?" E la garanzia di impiego rispettoso della legge è difficile da ottenere. <https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/454584-dont-ban-facial-recognition> At approximately 2:50 p.m. on April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding another 250. The authorities were able to gain images of the terrorists, but were frantically seeking to establish their identities, to catch them before they planted more bombs, which turned out not to be an idle fear. Unable to identify the terrorists over three days, the FBI released their photographs, asking the public to help. Using current versions of facial recognition (FR), law enforcement could have identified them within three minutes. This astonishing number is not a rhetorical flourish; it is based on a six-month study by a Canadian robbery-investigation unit. In New York City, FR has been used in a variety of ways, including the arrests of a suspected rapist, a person who pushed another onto the subway tracks, the identification of a hospitalized woman suffering from Alzheimer’s and the identification of a child sex trafficker sought by the FBI. Over the course of 2018, New York City detectives requested 7,024 FR searches, resulting in 1,851 possible matches and 998 arrests. ADVERTISEMENT Like other new surveillance technologies, FR encounters a storm of concerns. Some critics sound alarms, based largely on what they fear FR will lead to not on observations of what it does. Thus Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, warns that “[t]he ultimate nightmare is that we lose all anonymity when we step outside our homes. If you know where everyone is, you know where they work, live, pray. You know the doctors they visit, political meetings they attend, their hobbies, the sexual activities they engage in and who they’re associating with.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) likened FR to George Orwell’s Big Brother from “1984.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) believes that “[w]e have a technology that was created and designed by one demographic, that is mostly effective on one demographic, and they’re trying to sell it and impose it on the entirety of the country.” In response, some localities, namely San Francisco, California, and Somerville, Massachusetts, have already banned the use of FR by their local government agencies. In the nation’s capital, legislators on both sides of the aisle are calling on Congress to ban FR or at least introduce a moratorium on its use. Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) advocates “a timeout.” Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is weighing both options. [...]