Two new members have been appointed to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The PCLOB was established in the wake of 9/11, to serve as an independent watchdog organization that advises the federal government on policy matters related to civil liberties and human rights.
Unfortunately, the organization has struggled to fulfill that objective since 2017 due to membership issues. The PCLOB is supposed to have five members, but has only had three members (and has not had an acting chairperson) for the past few years.
The two new members should allow the PCLOB to operate in a full capacity once again. Sharon Bradford Franklin has been appointed as the chair of the board, while Beth Williams is signing on as a regular member of the organization. Both appointments were voted on by the Senate.
In terms of experience, Williams previously served as the assistant attorney general (and as a policy advisor) for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy between August 2017 and December 2020. Bradford Franklin, on the other hand, is returning to the PCLOB following an earlier stint as the organization’s executive director. She has also served as the policy director for New America’s Open Technology Institute, and sat on the cybersecurity subcommittee of the Homeland Security Department’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.
The PCLOB is expected to make facial recognition one of its top priorities when it eventually reconvenes. The technology has been the subject of intense debate for the past few years, due to its growing ubiquity in surveillance operations and in public-facing identity applications. For example, multiple federal agencies have been criticized for partnering with Clearview AI, while the IRS recently backed away from a policy that would have made facial recognition mandatory for everyone signing up for an online account through the ID.me identity platform.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future are some of the many civil liberties organizations that signed an open letter asking the PCLOB to push the federal government to suspend its use of facial recognition tech.
Source: FedScoop
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February 10, 2022 – by Eric Weiss
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