This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The struggle for civil liberties in the wake of that deadly attack on the U.S. capital may be less certain now.

And companies like Clearview AI are ready to help track

down perpetrators with facial recognition technology. But when should law enforcement

agencies feel free to use whatever new technology comes along.

When should they seek permission rather than forgiveness?

Cato's Matthew Feeney and Patrick Edington comment.

Clearview AI made the news last year in large part because of its controversial

deployment of facial recognition in the context of law enforcement. Clearview AI sc A Aye, Scowers social media sites, collecting photos and basically

acts as a search engine for people's faces.

And this was obviously of interest to law enforcement, which is increasingly

interested in using facial recognition technology. And after the attempted insurrection at the

Capitol Building on January 6th, there was an

uptake in the use of Clearview AI among storm enforcement. One of the more

interesting features of the Capitol Storming was how much the people involved were

live streaming what they were doing or taking photos of what they were doing and deliberately

uploading a ton of data about their activities to social media and so it's not

particularly surprising that law enforcement while investigating these crimes

are using facial recognition.

Pat how does law enforcement make use of this kind of technology and what kind of hurdles

exist for they're able to access vast databases of privately held facial data.

...