A Senate panel has backed a bill to allow law enforcement to use facial recognition technology to help solve a backlog of child exploitation cases.
The bill, H.195, would create an exception to a state-issued moratorium on police use of facial recognition software. The ban took effect last year as part of a larger law enforcement reform initiative.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 5-0 Friday to recommend the exception so authorities can more easily search through data stored on seized electronic devices when investigating child sex abuse cases.
The bill has already passed the House and now moves to the full Senate for consideration.
Currently, investigators have to search manually through any seized electronic devices, which can include millions of images to review, according to Detective Matthew Raymond, commander of Vermont’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
By using facial recognition technology to conduct those searches, Raymond told the Senate panel Friday, law enforcement could more quickly scan through images, and help deal with a backlog of cases.
“It’s just a way to speed it up,” Raymond told the panel.
The backlog of cases is about six to nine months, according to Charity Clark, chief of staff for Attorney General T.J. Donovan.
“These are prioritized based on all available information, including the best interest of public safety,” Clark said in an email after the hearing Friday, “and are not necessarily undertaken in the order in which they are received.”
She said several factors led to the backlog, including a large increase in the number of CyberTips that come in each year. There was also a spike in cases at the beginning of the pandemic.
Assistant Attorney General David Scherr told the committee Friday that allowing use of facial recognition technology in this circumstance does not give law enforcement any more authority than it already has. It can already conduct the searches manually. The technology would just speed up the searches, and thus the investigations.
“We don’t approach these things with eagerness. We approach them with skepticism,” he told lawmakers. “That is how we designed the bill. We were happy to redraft it to ensure it stayed narrow and these uses did not spill over in ways that were unintended or not desired.”
He said the use of facial recognition technology will be limited.
“This is not searching databases to try to find people,” Scherr said.
Specifically, the bill states that facial recognition software would be used “only where law enforcement is in possession of an image of an individual they believe to be a victim, potential victim, or identified suspect” and the search is “solely confined to locating images, including videos, of that individual within electronic media legally seized” in a specific investigation.
As for the backlog, “there’s been a dramatic rise in referrals under these crimes,” Scherr said, “and the inability to use this technology to do these searches, it has exacerbated that backlog, which is the genesis of this request.”
Falko Schilling, advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, and Marshall Pahl, deputy defender general and chief juvenile defender, both testified Friday that they do not oppose the legislation because of the safeguards included in it.
Sen. Alice Nitka, D-Windsor, a committee member, questioned what happens to the images of victims once the cases go to court and how they are shielded from public view.
Chief Superior Court Judge Brian Grearson said those images are kept under seal.
Committee members agreed to support the legislation Friday with little debate.
“It’s a simple little bill,” said committee Chair Dick Sears, D-Bennington, later adding, “It’s rare that we have agreement on all sides.”
