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At the end of September, Mars Fernandez-Burgos, a doctoral student in counseling psychology at the University of Miami, received a one-line email from the assistant to the school’s student dean. She and eight others were asked to attend a Zoom meeting to discuss the “September 4th incident.”
Fernandez-Burgos is a member of the University of Miami Employee Student Alliance (UMESA). A few weeks earlier, he participated in an on-campus protest around Covid protections and sickness benefits for contract workers such as canteen workers and janitors. Later, university officials ignored attempts to reunite the student group. He didn’t understand why the headmaster was approaching now.
“Is this meeting mandatory?” Fernandez-Burgos asked.
The dean himself replied.
“I believe this discussion is necessary to understand policies on the use of university space,” wrote student dean Ryan Holmes. “It shouldn’t last long, it’s not designed to dictate content, and it’s not contradictory in nature.”
“Not contradictory,” the e-mail promised. What happened in the following weeks was just that.
Fernandez-Burgos and other students accuse the University of Miami Police Department (UMPD) of using an undisclosed facial recognition system during the September 4 protest to identify the nine students invited to the meeting. University officials deny using the technology, even though documents suggest university police have had access to facial recognition databases.
“I hadn’t even thought about facial recognition,” says Fernandez-Burgos. The university “isn’t really public about this kind of thing. You have some professors who have done some courses on privacy and things like that, but it’s not too visible to me. “
At the meeting, Fernandez-Burgos says, Holmes told the students that he had asked them to meet because they hadn’t booked the campus space for the protest. The content of the protest was not an issue, but officials were concerned about accountability, safety, and making sure spaces weren’t overbooked.
Fernandez-Burgos and Esteban Wood, another UMESA member who attended the protest and meeting, both say Holmes told the students that campus police used software to analyze protest footage to identify students. .
Holmes referred WIRED to a university spokesperson. In a statement, the spokesperson said, “As part of our efforts to ensure the health and safety of our community, especially during this pandemic, the university administrators met with students who did not follow the appropriate process during the organization. of an event in person “.
None of the students present at the meeting faced disciplinary measures, but Wood says he believes the protesters were reported for criticizing the university. “The take-home message we got was basically, ‘We’re watching you,'” he says.
Elsewhere, police in Philadelphia and Columbia, South Carolina, reportedly used facial recognition to identify and arrest people who participated in the protests this summer following the killing of George Floyd. Civil rights organizations say the risk of being identified and targeted can have a chilling effect on people’s ability to protest legally.
Meanwhile, more colleges are adopting facial recognition systems, for security, as public health measures against Covid-19 and to monitor remote exams, according to Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group.
In Miami, university police may have manually analyzed camera footage of the protest or used social media to find protesters. But before the September 4 protest, the university police chief admitted that he had cameras that could recognize faces.
In 2019, the Orlando Sentinel appointed the university police department as a user of the Face Analysis Comparison & Examination System (FACES), a database of 33 million photos. The images in FACES come from the driver’s license and law enforcement photos. UMPD was also listed as a user in a 2016 Pinellas County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office PowerPoint 2016, which manages the FACES database.
As recently as October 15, UMPD chief David Rivero’s resume included references to cameras enabled with “motion detection, facial recognition, object detection and more,” according to Fight for the Future. Rivero told al Miami hurricane, the student newspaper, that the terms were “misleading”. Within a day, the terms were no longer on his published resume, which still refers to a university system with more than 1,000 cameras “and with video analytics”.
Rivero told al hurricane like the UMPD and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement use video surveillance. “Let’s say our camera system catches someone stealing your laptop and we have a pretty face of that person, I can send that facial shot to FDLE and they’ll try to match it with someone who got arrested and it looks like that photo,” He called Rivero.
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