[Borealid]

> Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people.

Could you cite a source for this?

If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is.

If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.

If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.

You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about?

Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.

[oyashirochama]

The only arguement I can see, is that the police should also not expect any privacy and have their names and faces visable, but thats the only relatively modern issue I've had.

And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.

[lelandfe]

> They just cannot search you

If instead of looking up your name in a name list, I look up your face in a face list, ain’t that searching?

I feel like what you’re ultimately asking hinges on when, legally, a photo turns into biometrics.

[Borealid]

No, looking up your face in a list of faces is searching FOR you, not searching you.

Searching you means taking an inventory of the items on your person. It does not mean looking at you. In some cases, imaging you can be a "search" even where there is no physical contact (for example: a millimeter-wave scanner), but a photograph in a public place has never qualified as a "search" in the USA.

I understand your feelings, but so far as I know things like gait recognition, facial recognition, or even an iris scan derived from an ordinary photograph have never qualified as a "search" under U.S. law. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this: it's quite difficult to prove something has _not_ happened.

I think the legal line is not when it "becomes biometrics" or becomes identification. The legal line is when you are revealing a private property about an individual (for example, their blood type, or the contents of their pockets). Nothing visible to the naked eye in public is considered private, so nothing that derives identity from that public information is a "search".

As a nice easy example... an officer smelling alchohol on the breath of a person in the course of a conversation is not a "search". An officer compelling that same person to breathe into a breathalyzer machine is. Applying the same standard to faces, you cannot make an individual put their eye to a scanner without reasonable suspicion, but if you can get a biometric scan from the invidual as they happen to walk about their day, doing that isn't searching them...

[simoncion]

> Applying the same standard to faces, you cannot make an individual put their eye to a scanner without reasonable suspicion, but if you can get a biometric scan from the invidual as they happen to walk about their day, doing that isn't searching them...

There's a different standard that could apply with just a small amount of tweaking.

Many people's homes happen to leak IR out of their poorly-insulated windows, walls, and roofs. Anyone (police included) can get an IR camera and determine facts about what's going on in such a house. However, police must obtain a search warrant before doing so... despite the fact that the design of such a house means that it broadcasts all that information indiscriminately while one goes about one's day and the twin facts that IR cameras aren't dreadfully expensive and are available to anyone with the funds to get one.

The Supreme Court case that determined this hinges in part on things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion". This logic could be tweaked to cover things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical detention". The core problem with searches has never been the inconvenience involved in the search... it has always been the fact that you're being searched. New tech that removes the physical imposition of a type of search does not solve this problem. A long while back [0] NYPD was deploying mobile microwave scanners that they used to perform indiscriminate under-clothes searches of people who were committing the "crime" of being in public going about their day. IIRC, they wrapped this in «We're just looking for weapons, and it's only a pilot program, anyway!» language, but that doesn't change the fact that they were performing "stop and frisk" searches at scale.

[0] And maybe they're still doing this... I've not paid much attention to NYC's law enforcement insanity in quite a while.

[Borealid]

The interior of the house is a private space. Things under your clothes are too. Revealing either of these things through whatever technology is a search.

The standard is whether something expected to be private is revealed. What your eyes look like (even in detail) is not that. There isn't a point on some line where the photograph becoming higher-quality applies a different standard than a low-resolution photo would.

[simoncion]

> Could you cite a source for this?

Many states (something like half) in the US don't require people to respond to police requests to identify themselves.

While the courts might end up claiming that being grabbed by several cops and having an iris scanner forced onto one's face is "not testimonial" and therefor not covered by existing laws that permit one to not have to identify oneself, I would argue that such an outcome is -heh- rules lawyering and intensely unjust. IMNSHO the justice system should actively avoid producing unjust outcomes.