Jennifer A. Lynch

Lynch is surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she challenges government abuse of search and seizure technologies through the courts. She focuses on important issues at the intersection of technology and privacy.

“I think I have an opportunity to make a difference,” she said. “EFF has a footprint here and around the world. If governments acquire these technologies, we will be living in a surveillance state.”

A current concern is face recognition and biometrics. “It’s a pretty big threat to privacy, and it’s on the cusp of becoming a large part of our lives.” Lynch said it’s not too late to reverse course, but time is short.

“The technology is being built into the back end of surveillance and police body cameras, but law enforcement hasn’t widely purchased it—although it’s getting considerably less expensive.”

In March 2019 Lynch urged the Florida Supreme Court to review a closely-watched lawsuit to clarify the due process rights of defendants identified by facial recognition algorithms used by law enforcement. Her amicus brief on behalf of EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union and others argued that when facial recognition is secretly used on people later charged with a crime, those people have a right to obtain information about how the technology functions and whether it produced other matches. Lynch v. State of Florida, SC2019-0298 (Fla. S. Ct., brief filed March 11, 2019).

The plaintiff, Willie Allen Lynch, who is no relation to Jennifer Lynch, was convicted of selling crack and sentenced to eight years in prison. The case turned on a facial recognition program that compared a photo officers took of a crack seller to a photo of Lynch and found a potential match. Lynch denied that it was he.

Jennifer Lynch said this is the first state supreme court review in the U.S. of the technology and its implications. But the technology is unreliable in the many ways that human witnesses are and defendants should be able to test such identifications in the same way, she argued. “This is a tipping point, and we’re trying to staunch it,” she said.

Her other projects involve Fourth Amendment protections for location data generated by cell phones and public records and government transparency issues. Following a 2017 win at the state Supreme Court over the right to data collected by police, Lynch obtained millions of license plate camera results scanned by the LAPD.

“We’re working with a data mapping company to plot the geolocation data to see if law enforcement surveillance is concentrated in certain communities of Los Angeles,” Lynch said. “Can the police track where people go?”

— John Roemer