SALT LAKE CITY — State officials are disputing a bombshell report that suggests the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mined the photos of every Utahn with a driver’s license or state ID card using facial recognition software.
The report is based on research by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, which obtained logs from Utah under a public records request. The university researchers shared those logs with FOX 13 Monday, which show a very long list of queries from federal authorities and other law enforcement agencies.
The info, first reported by the Washington Post, led to a wave of criticism and concerns about privacy from Republicans and Democrats on Utah’s Capitol Hill.
“The governor and I are both very concerned about what we read, and we are in the process of investigating what kind of access they have had and how frequent and how broad that was,” Lt. Governor Spencer Cox said in a brief interview with reporters.
But Utah’s Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Driver License Division, insisted that no one had widespread access to anyone’s info or pictures. The agency said that from January 2010 to present, ICE made only seven requests for basic info through the Driver License Division system and another 49 facial recognition requests through the Statewide Information and Analysis Center.
Read the full story here: Fox13Now.com.
Written by BEN WINSLOW, Fox13Now.com.
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