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Beach approves face-matching software
By Agnes Blum VIRGINIA BEACH - The City Council on Tuesday night approved the installation of facial-recognition software at the Oceanfront, making Virginia Beach the second city in the nation to use the technology. When she heard the proposal this summer, Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf had expressed skepticism both about the software's ability to work and whether it might invade people's privacy. But at Tuesday's meeting, the mayor said the events of Sept. 11, and the news that two of the hijackers had been in the area made her change her mind. ``It may be a false sense of security,'' Oberndorf said. She added that ``many people have stepped forward and said they want to give police an extra tool.'' The Virginia Beach Police Department received a $150,000 grant from the state's Department of Criminal Justice Services to install facial-recognition software at the Oceanfront. The department needed the council's blessing and $50,000 more to activate the grant. While the software is used in England, Tampa, Fla., is the only other U.S. city to have installed it. The software works by matching photos of passers-by against a database of pictures. The Virginia Beach police have agreed to enter only pictures of runaways, wanted felons and people suffering from dementia into the database. Police have said that the software would just be another tool in their crime-fighting arsenal, a sort of high-tech officer on the beat. Critics have likened the program to Big Brother and said it could potentially be used for racial profiling or could accidentally drag innocent people into police custody. The City Council stipulated that the program would have to be reviewed in one year, and that a citizen's advisory board would be established to run spot checks to help prevent abuse. The lone dissenting vote on Tuesday night belonged to Councilwoman Reba S. McClanan of the Rose Hall district. She said she pored over literature about the software and was not convinced it was worth giving up a sense of liberty for a sense of safety. She said she was even more uneasy because the software has caught no one in Tampa.
``I understand the concern after what has happened,'' McClanan said of the
terrorist attacks. ``But I feel the people's rights are very precious, and
that's what makes this country great.'' |
