Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

We are in the midst of a manufactured moral panic. To divert attention from away from its failures on housing, health, disability and climate, the Government prefers to have endless statements on policing and to pass more laws that erode our civil liberties. The programme for Government contains a frightening litany of attacks on civil liberties, all under the guise of getting tough on crime. Of course, it is never white-collar crime that they mean, not when they negotiated the programme for Government with Ireland's best known white-collar criminal.

I will address one of the worst attacks on civil liberties in the programme for Government, which is the promise to enable the Garda to use AI and facial recognition technology. The Government is committed to legislate to provide for retrospective searching of images, using facial recognition technology before the end of this Dáil term. It goes even further, by promising to introduce live facial recognition technology supposedly only in cases of terrorism, national security - whatever that means - and missing persons. It also pledges to increase funding for CCTV and to ban the wearing of masks at protests.

This is dystopian surveillance state stuff. It is also a direct attack on the right of disabled people to protest. Many disabled people need to wear masks for medical reasons and would not be able to take part in protests if banned from wearing them. I have no doubt that this would suit this Government very well. The previous Government faced effective protests of overwhelmingly masked disabled people against the so-called Green Paper. The Government knows its record on disability is disgraceful and it is under great pressure from the disability rights movement.

I have spoken before about how facial recognition technology is universally opposed by human rights groups. According to the American Civil Liberties Union:

Face recognition massively expands the government’s power to track our movements and target people based on their race, religion, political affiliation, or speech - and while everyone’s rights are at stake, Black and Brown people are harmed the most when this racist technology collides with our racist systems.

There is very significant racial bias within FRT. Error rates are 60 times higher for west African women than they are for white men. AI reflects, regurgitates and accelerates the racial biases that exist in our society, which come from the top. Together with FRT, this will be used to accelerate racist profiling. The claim by the Garda that it is 99% accurate is terrifying. If the Garda really believes that, we are entering dangerous territory. Instead of going in this direction, we should be joining those many parts of the world that have banned the use of facial recognition technology. We should also ban the use of AI in policing.

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