When will gardaí be able to use controversial facial recognition technology?

It is more than a year since Garda Commissioner Drew Harris contacted Minister for Justice Helen McEntee outlining his belief that Garda members needed to be able to use facial recognition technology (FRT) to help them investigate serious crimes.

Plans to introduce FRT were publicly flagged by Ms McEntee as far back as the Garda Representative Association (GRA) conference in May 2022.

She outlined how it would make the job of gardaí trawling through thousands of hours of CCTV footage much easier while insisting “this is not about mass surveillance” and there would be safeguards to address privacy and data protection concerns.

Speaking ahead of the same conference Commissioner Harris said the legislation to allow for FRT was “absolutely essential”.

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At that point there had been an expectation that the legislation would come into force by the end of the year but that was before the political row over the controversial technology.

The plan was for FRT to be introduced in the form of an amendment to the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill 2022 – the existing proposed legislation to allow the use of body-worn cameras by gardaí.

Proposals to allow for the use of FRT set alarm bells ringing among civil liberties campaigners. There were questions over the accuracy of FRT and fears of inbuilt ethnic, racial and gender biases. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has been at the forefront of raising such concerns but politicians were also expressing reservations.

Fianna Fáil TD James Lawless, chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, last year, warned of problems with facial recognition, citing a 2019 report from the London Met that said in up to 80 per cent of cases the wrong person was identified.

However, perhaps the most strident resistance to the plans for FRT came from the Green Party.

In recent months Simon Harris – who had assumed Ms McEntee’s justice portfolio while she was on maternity leave – brought forward compromise proposals for FRT to be used in limited circumstances with the intention to add them to the body-cam legislation.

The Green Party publicly came out against this in April with a spokesman saying it believes the issue of facial recognition technology is “far too complex to be dealt with by way of an amendment to an existing Bill”.

[ Green Party urges scrapping of fast-track plan for Garda to use facial recognition technology ]

On her first day back as Minister for Justice Ms McEntee at the start of June defended the FRT proposals reiterating that it was not about “mass surveillance” and adding that it would not be “live” FRT. However, she did not indicate if she would continue the attempt to include FRT in the body-cam legislation.

Ms McEntee is now abandoning the bid to attach it to the body-cam law under proposals due to go to Cabinet on Tuesday.

She is to seek approval to draft separate legislation, the Garda Síochána (Digital Management and Facial Recognition Technology) Bill 2023, with a view to bringing an outline of the law to Government in the autumn.

It will face pre-legislative scrutiny and further drafting before the final legislation is published, let alone enacted – a process that is likely to take months.

The law providing for the use of body-cams is to be prioritised in the coming weeks and Gardaí will be able to use them when it is enacted, albeit not any accompanying FRT software.

Exactly when gardaí will be able to use FRT – whether in body-cam or CCTV footage – is an open question.