A Super Bowl crowd’s faces checked against a database
From 21 to 28 January 2001 in Tampa, at the stadium before Super Bowl XXXV and in the Ybor City district, cameras captured people’s faces and compared them with a database of criminals. The FaceTrac system, built on Viisage FaceFINDER, was supplied to the police by Graphco, Viisage, Raytheon and VelTek. 100,000 fans and workers passed through the turnstiles; according to the AP, 19 faces of petty offenders were flagged, and police said there were no arrests.
Why it matters
Automatic face recognition came out to a crowd of people who did not know of it and could not opt out. Privacy advocates, as retold by the ACLU in March 2001, called the game the first massive example of biometrics abuse, and the press the "Snooper Bowl". When Tampa police put a different face recognition system on the street that summer, the ACLU obtained its logs and published a measurement: not a single correct identification.
According to Graphco’s release of 29 January, standard cameras at the stadium entrances captured the faces, and FaceTrac continuously compared them with a database of "known felons, terrorists, and con artists" from local, state and federal agencies; a joint law enforcement task force monitored the matches. In Ybor City, Raytheon cameras with night vision covered the celebrations before and after the game. The St. Petersburg Times was first to report the scanning, on 31 January 2001: cameras stood only at the turnstiles, the crowd inside the stadium was not filmed, but visitors to the NFL Experience next door were. Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin told the paper that the system matched no known con artist or terrorist and that there were no arrests; company executives said it did match a few faces with the database. In Ybor City, the paper wrote, 22 police cameras had been tied to the department’s mug shots in the weeks before the game, and the system went on working there. The paper gives 100,000 as fans and workers, the AP in an ABC News article of 13 February 2001 as fans. The figure 19 comes from the AP: in a newspaper article of 7 March that Viisage reprinted on its own site, noting that all those flagged were left alone. No police or city document with a count of faces scanned was found, and Viisage’s SEC filings of 2001-2002 contain neither "Super Bowl" nor "Tampa". From 29 June to 11 August 2001 Tampa police ran Visionics Face-IT with several dozen cameras on Seventh Avenue in Ybor City. The ACLU obtained the operators’ logs under Florida’s open-records law and on 3 January 2002 published a report: on 12, 13, 14 and 20 July, 14 alarms, all false, two of them on a person of the other sex; no correct identification and no arrest; the system switched off on 11 August. The record does not take up Viisage’s verdict that the deployment was a success: that is the maker’s own description.