Niagara Gazette: State Senate to Vote on Facial Recognition Moratorium Bill

On July 21, 2020, Connor Hoffman of the Niagara Gazette published a story about Senator Kavanagh's bill banning schools from using facial recognition technology for at least the next two years. The Assembly has already passed the bill, sponsored in that house by Assemblymember Monica Wallace. The full text of the story is below; the original version is available via the link above.
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State Senate to Vote on Facial Recognition Moratorium Bill
By Connor Hoffman
June 21, 2020

State Senator Brian Kavanagh says he has the votes to pass his bill imposing a moratorium on facial recognition in schools, with a vote on his legislation scheduled for Wednesday.

The bill would impose a moratorium on facial recognition in schools to allow the New York State Education Department to study the issue and craft regulations.

On Tuesday, Assembly Member Monica Wallace, the sponsor of the companion bill in the assembly, had her legislation pass overwhelmingly. Her bill had passed last year, but Kavanagh's bill did not get out of committee. Kavanagh's bill passed in the State Senate Education Committee on Monday and then it passed in the State Senate Rules Committee.

A representative for Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins confirmed that Kavanagh's bill was scheduled for a floor vote during the Wednesday senate session.

The final step would be for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to sign the bill.

“We will review any bill that passes both houses of the legislature," Jason Conwall, a Cuomo spokesperson said.

After being asked earlier this year by Lockport Superintendent Michelle Bradley, Wallace said she was not inclined to grant an exemption for Lockport, which would be required to turn off its system if the legislation passes.

Kavanagh, who has not communicated with any Lockport district officials, expressed a similar sentiment.

"School districts should not be permitted to do this unless the (state) department of education finds it as appropriate and sets standards that should apply in all school districts including in Lockport," Kavanagh said.

Lockport administrators had announced their intentions to begin testing the Aegis system in late May 2019 and were told by the state education department to not use the system while privacy concerns lingered. After months of back and forth with the state, the Lockport school board changed its system use policy and removed students from the list of persons eligible for inclusion in the Aegis database of individuals whose presence on school property would trigger an alert.

NYSED approved of the policy revision and signed off on the district’s use of the system in November. The district activated the system on Jan. 2.

The school district used $1.4 million of the $4.2 million allocated to it through New York’s Smart Schools Bond Act to acquire and install one of the first facial and object recognition security systems in an American school. The system relies on the Aegis software suite created by Canadian-based SN Technologies. The facial recognition software works by using a database of flagged individuals and sending an alert to district personnel when a flagged person is detected on school property. The object recognition feature would reportedly detect 10 types of guns and alert certain district personnel, as well as law enforcement, if a weapon is detected.