this is bbc news, the headlines. president biden declares a major emergency in the us state of mississippi after a powerful tornado kills at least 26 people. hundreds have been left homeless, whilst search and rescue efforts continue. two boats carrying migrants have sunk off the coast of tunisia, causing 29 people to die. it comes as italian media report that a record two thousand migrants arrived at the island of lampedusa is the last 2a hours. a major incident has been declared due to an oil leak in dorset in southwest england. the incident happened at wytch farm, which is an oilfield. early projections suggest that

people in berlin have voted against making the german capital climate neutral by 2030, after a referendum. at ten o'clock we will be here with a full round up of the days news. first, our world. facial recognition, fighting crime. across america, police are increasingly using facial recognition technology to fight crime. speaks spanish. can you open the door? we want law enforcement to have more tools at our disposal, not less. images can be fed into a database to search for matches and track people down. but critics argue the use of this technology is opaque and could be inaccurate. if law enforcement knows how accurate that is, how come they are fighting so hard to keep that information from us when we ask for it?

why won't they share it? i'm james clayton, and i'm investigating whether the police should be using this controversial tech. the technology itself is harmful. it is too dangerous, and that is just a massive threat to civil liberties in this nation. march 2017. andrew conlyn is driving with a friend. i think we made about 1.5 miles into a three mile trip. andrew is in the front passenger seat, his friend is driving. and he is probably hitting 80, 90. i am saying, you know, slowdown, it was falling on deaf ears, i don't think he responded at all. so i basically reached the conclusion that somebody was going to die that night.

does your fire extinguisher work? it's out? i used it all up, - i can't put the fire out. watch out. the car has hit a tree. the driver was thrown into bushes nearby. he died from his injuries. i'm very fortunate to have walked away from that wreck with as little injury as i did. you have seen pictures of the car, there was not much left of it. in the scheme of things to have walked away from that wreck is very fortunate. one of the first people on the scene pulled andrew out of the car. he also told police what has happened. did anybody see what happened? any of you guys see what happened?

that's not the driver? did you see where the driver went? oh, the driver is the person in the bushes? despite the man's testimony, the police suspect andrew was in fact the driver. there was no way that's the passenger. the passenger side of the vehicle is all smashed in, there's no way the passenger survived that, that's the driver. that guy is the driver. he's saying he's not the driver, but people are already saying that he's the driver. after telling the police what happened, the man left the scene. if this guy was involved in the vehicle, he was driving. do we know where this man is who pulled him out? because we believe he knows. andrew suffered injuries including broken bones in his hand and right hip. upon being released from hospital, not a whole lot happened.

nothing really happened until about 2.5 years later in november 2019, i was indicted for vehicular homicide. christopher 0'brien was one of the defence lawyers who took on andrew's case. the charge was a reckless driving with death. so it is called a vehicular homicide, but it is that he was driving at such speed and so recklessly that it killed the guy in his car. so it is a serious charge? quite, yes, it is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. i don't think the gravity of the situation really hit me, because obviously i knew what happened, i was there. and it never really occurred to me that they would be able to convince a jury that i was actually driving.

andrew's only hope was for his legal team to track down the man who pulled him from the car. this unknown man could prove andrew wasn't driving. we printed up pictures of him off the body cam, handed them out at every shop, every starbucks downtown, put it on social media. and no—one knew who he was. chris and his colleagues convinced a controversial facial recognition company to license their technology and help find the witness. they ran a search of this image from the police body cam footage using artificial intelligence. this ai popped him up in like 3—5 seconds. it was just... pictures just popping up, pop, pop, pop, like here he is, this is the guy. it was him, every one. it was wild, it was like hitting the lottery. 0ver four years after the crash, chris and his team finally found their key witness —

vince ramirez. were you surprised that he was being charged with vehicular homicide? oh, i was, i was really surprised. because i remember telling them what happened — it's like, wow, i can't believe this was going on, i thought it was case closed, all right, he wasn't the driver. but it was a shock to me, it really was. what do you remember about where he was in the car? i remember he was in the passenger seat, but he was mangled up where that side definitely had him crushed in with the seatbelt on, so it took me a while to take him out and get his feet and body over the centre console to get him out of the vehicle. so he was definitely in the passenger seat. yes. we knew at that point we were going to win this case. and within an hour of him giving his testimony and his deposition, the case was dropped. they called me that afternoon - and said, hey, it went as expected and they dropped the case.

how did you feel? i mean, it was a huge weight lifted. after spending years facing a potential prison sentence, andrew could finally move on with his life. i am happy that he reached out to me so we can clear his name to something he didn't do. we asked the fort myers police department in florida to comment on andrew's case, but they didn't respond. the facial recognition technology that andrew's lawyers used is new york—based clearview ai. the company has been fined over and over again for scraping billions of users' photos in countries including the uk, greece, italy and france. clearview is perhaps the most famous and controversial facial recognition

system in the world. critics say a controversial start—up poses a new and profound threat to everyone's privacy. a company called clearview ai has. the largest known facial recognition database of images in the us, larger than the fbi's. - wow. does it work? yeah, it works. i'm looking over at newjersey. plays guitar. the company is run by this man, hoan ton—that. he is the eccentric founder of clearview ai, a privately owned company that promises the most comprehensive image search solutions in the world. i haven't played that for like a few years too! i want to find out how many pictures the system could find of me. take a selfie, take

any face you want. as you scroll down there will be photos that are less similar, or if you see a plus one... this is all me. clearview scours the internet for images. a powerful algorithm compares size, shape and distance between facial features to find a potential match. i don't know where that is. it's wild how many pictures are just out there on the open web. the search finds pictures i have literally never seen before. i'm in the back of someone�*s profile picture and it still finds me. fascinating. that is once again extraordinary. i don't know where that is, and it has picked me up because i am right in the back there. it doesn't need to be a picture that you uploaded or your friends uploaded, it is just if you are in the back of a picture you can be found. it is a really accurate technology. how many images is this scraping, how many images are in the database? in the database there is about 30 billion images. i guess the debate is, some say this isjust google forfaces, and others say this will change

privacy as we know it. it's both. i mean it really is google for faces, that's exactly how it works, but i do think it is a big change in the fact that people can be identified with just a photo. and what we are trying to do is figure out what is the most compelling pro—social use case, and i think for law enforcement and government usage it is a total game changer in the ability to keep all of us safe together. clearview says they have been used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the us. but there is no official record of which police forces use this tech. 0ne police force we do know that uses it, though, is miami pd. there we go. we are on a ride along with officerjack perez. what has been reported?

it is a bailout, i don't know if it is a stolen vehicle or a robbery vehicle. i want to see how facial recognition could potentially help the cops fight crime. do you still get the adrenaline when you are going to these things? you just become smarter, because i am older and i don't wanna get into (bleep). someone has reported their car is being stolen. he went to do a traffic stop and hejumped out of the car and ran. dozens of armed police are circling the area, searching houses for the perpetrator. they believe he may be armed. so the police here think that there might be a person who is hiding in one of these houses so they are being very careful, they are going to basically take this gate apart before they go in. we'rejumping over right now. 0h, they arejumping over it right now?

speaks spanish. can you open the door? the cops didn't have a photo of the perpetrator — we didn't find him. this would be an excellent one for facial recognition. if we had those cameras up, and got a picture of the offender, they could go to the victim and show a photo lineup and say ok, here is a photo lineup, do you see the person that robbed you ? "oh yeah, this guy" — we got that off facial recognition. armando aguilar is the head of investigations at miami pd. the force pays clearview for access to their database. we investigate crimes that

are heinous in nature, we investigate crimes to where sometimes it is difficult to get support from eyewitnesses, support from the public, for many reasons. because of perhaps loyalty to the people carrying out the crimes, fear of retribution for cooperating with the police. is there any crime that you can't use this for here? that we cannot use it for? no — as long as it is a violation of a criminal statute, our detectives and our analysts are allowed to use it. so it is shoplifting all the way up to murder. correct, yes. the bbc can reveal that clearview has been by american law enforcement nearly a million times. and there are many other systems in use. but what happens when it doesn't work?

in 2018, this man walked into a shop in new york and stole some socks before appearing to wave box cutters at a member of staff. caitlinjacklin is the lawyer for the man the police believed was the perpetrator. he wants to remain anonymous, but has agreed for caitlin to speak out on his behalf. because it was a theft plus a weapon, it was charged as first degree robbery. that means if you are convicted of it it is a pretty hefty prison sentence, my client would have been looking at between 5—25 years for essentially stealing six socks. the main witness was a security guard, sometimes referred to as a loss prevention officer in the us. what we learned was shortly after the theft happened, a detective from nypd went and met with the loss prevention officer and said he wanted

to see the surveillance, and took a screen grab of the face of the person that stole the socks, and the detective told the officer we're going to put this in facial recognition software. essentially when i got was a of paper that had a screenshot from a surveillance lens and my client's mugshot that said possible match. they don't do a photo lineup, they don't do any sort of better identification procedure, theyjust shoot him a text and say is this the guy? so at this point, imagine you are the loss prevention officer, he says yes, that's the guy, but of course he did — you'd have to be telling the detective your hi—tech software does not work, that's not the person, it is such a suggestive way to do the id. shortly after my client got arrested. 0n the day of the robbery caitlin�*s client has an alibi. his son was born that day.

he was at the hospital. they both happened within a few hours, so they were not at the exact same time but in order to believe that you had the right person, you have to believe that on the way to the birth of his child, my client stopped at a big box store to steal a sixpack of socks and then immediately went to the hospital for the birth of his child. itjust wasn't him, he did not do it. caitlin�*s client was sent to jail for five months awaiting trial. he agreed to plead guilty so that he could be released. today he still maintains his innocence. the only way for him to get out and get home to his newborn baby was to take a plea and that's exactly what he ultimately did. it's also a way for the police and the prosecutors not to really have to investigate or sit with the fact that this might have got it wrong. the nypd told us they had not taken enforcement action based solely on identification of a possible

facial recognition match. it's important emphasise that clearview al's technology was not used in this case, but it does throw up a crucial question — how accurate is facial recognition technology? clearview will also say that it's almost 100% accurate, but that's on mugshot, not photos taken outside like cctv or body—cam footage. so we thought we would put it to the test. we took a range of different photos to see whether clearview could find them. we took some pictures, progressively more and more difficult. so we have like, there is one of me with glasses on,

one with a mask on looking at the camera. sometimes blurry ones work, sometimes they don't, it's tricky. the algorithm found me in some of the shots but not in others. none of me wearing a mask were found. when they are higher quality there is a higher chance of making it. it depends on the quality of the picture? that's why we have that warning when we say this is a lower quality image so we take extra care when taking a look at the results. a trained investigator would be able to see this result, and it's up to them do their research because if you look at the first photo, there is no name associated — you have to click the links and find out more. the police argued that they don't just rely on facial recognition to make an arrest. so we treat a match from anyone

about facial recognition platforms as a tip. we don't run out and make an arrest based on that tip. 0ur detectives logged a 40% positive identification rate across all of our facial recognition searches. we're talking about, we got this match, detectives investigated and then reported back to our real—time crime centre that the person that you sent me is a match, was in fact the person we established probable cause to arrest. a 40% positive identification rate is a very different figure to clea rview�*s claim of almost 100% accuracy. hoan ton—tat doesn't seem to want his technology tested in court. our view is it will be better if we don't have facial recognition used as evidence in court, because the investigators are using other methods to also verify. shouldn't it be interrogated in court, if it is being used to find people? we're happy to testify how the algorithms work, how accurate they are, what mistakes have been made

with facial recognition, and none of them made with clearview have come down to poor policing or investigative work, not checking or not having other people look at the results of the facial recognition — just basic stuff. have there been any mistakes from the police using clearview? not that we know of. in many places in the us, the police often don't have to divulge whether they even used facial recognition. we have no idea how many people have been arrested because of this technology. a few cities have pushed back. in san francisco, the police�*s use of facial recognition technology is banned. matthew guariglia works for the electronic frontier foundation, which pushed for the ban. part of the problem with facial regocnition is notjust that it is invasive, wrong, but also that the police

departments themselves are incredibly opaque about how and when it is used and how the company actually works, so whether you are in court or not and whether you are questioning how the police use it, how it works from the companies, it's often very hard for a defence attorneys for these organisations or concerned citizens to find out when and how it is being used and how it works. it's hard to know how many people have been victims of mistaken identity, but the few we do know of almost always involve african—america ns. the technology is racially biased, it has been known to misidentify black people in the united states, and also because it is these communities that are most are subject to massive amounts of police surveillance. government use of facial recognition is inaccurate, dangerous and a huge problem for civil liberties and civil rights and also needs to be changed.

——banned. hoan ton—tat accepts bias can be a problem but believes the technology needs to be regulated, not banned. we engage with lawmakers a lot, it is up to them to decide with the regulation should be. i think racial bias is a really important issue to look at — i am a person of mixed race myself, i am half asian and australian, so when we look at making the algorithm more accuate, we are thinking about all these ethnicities, southeast asians, asians, african faces to make sure the algorithm is not biased, and i think there are two parts to bias — bias in the policing world and bias in the algorithms, so we worked really hard to make sure that this algorithm works across all demographics. facial recognition technology may be controversial, but it's undoubtably part of fighting crime in the future. it's up to lawmakers to strike a balance between the battle for justice and our right to privacy.

hello. things have been turning progressively colder through the weekend. with that cold air already embedded in parts of scotland, some of the showers we saw here gave a covering of snow. there's more wintry showers overnight but the northern outcome and to scotland to northeast england, perhaps clipping parts of east anglia, increasing clear skies away from eastern coast with cloud developing through part of wells and

southwest england, maybe a few showers. also temperatures here will be a few degrees above freezing. for many at or below zeros, —5 or six in parts of northern scotland was up in ice risk where you have showers in it for us for many. a cold and dry start to the new week. it doesn't last a long, it will turn wet and windy but also very mild, particularly for the middle part of the week. this is how many shapes up under a hot high—pressure the only day of the week we see the set up, waiting in the wings is our next atlantic system. we will see card will begin at of that later in the day for the monday morning will be crisp, plenty of sunshine for many, wintry showers or eastern coast that will tend to fade. however parts of southwest england and wales could bring a few showers but kyle, rain, sleet ends though moving into the northern arrows late in the day for the a cold feeling day but will lose the a cold feeling day but will lose the wind. basically for northeast coast. a dry, cold start to monday night before the crowd starts to gather ahead of this atlantic system

that i previously mentioned. this will be extending its way north and east of the through the early hours of tuesday morning and staying with us for much of the day on tuesday. as it bumps into the cold air across scotland a potential to see snow through tuesday morning. certainly heavy rain, initially across western areas but soon extending further eastwards, protester hundred dry imported from northern island in the afternoon. temperatures rising a charge by giving the strengthening wind, the cloud and rain still going to steal on the cold side there is more atlantic systems moving as we had through wednesday, thursday and in an area of low pressure will linger through friday and saturday for the after that cold, dry start on monday it will quickly turn butter and potentially windy as well to thursday and friday. but also much milder. bye—bye.

this is bbc news. our top stories... warnings of more severe weather in mississippi after a powerful tornado kills at least 26 people. protestors take to the streets of israel — including outside the home of prime minister benjamin netanyahu after he sacks his defence minister for condemning his controversialjudicial reforms. two boats carrying migrants sink off the coast of tunisia. 29 people have died and others are still missing.

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