Amnesty International's Ban the Scan — multi-jurisdiction campaign against police facial recognition (2021–ongoing)

Ban the Scan is Amnesty International's sustained multi-jurisdiction campaign demanding a ban on police and state use of facial recognition technology for mass surveillance in publicly accessible spaces. Launched on 26 January 2021 in New York City in coalition with local civil-society organisations and elected officials, the campaign combines grassroots community organising, crowdsourced public investigation, research publication, and strategic litigation to build the evidentiary and political case against a technology that — in Amnesty's framing — violates the right to privacy, threatens freedom of peaceful assembly, and amplifies racist policing. The campaign's demand is categorical: a prohibition, not a regulatory framework. The campaign has expanded across three named geographic phases — New York City (2021), Hyderabad India (November 2021), and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (2023) — and remains active as of 2025–2026.

Launch: New York City, January 2021

The campaign launched on 26 January 2021 with an online press conference convened by Amnesty International USA alongside a coalition of civil-rights organisations and elected officials, including the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Legal Aid Society, National Action Network, Warriors In The Garden, the Immigrant Defense Project, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and State Senator Brad Hoylman. The coalition demanded that the New York City Council and New York State Legislature pass legislation banning government use of facial recognition for mass surveillance — specifically citing New York State Senate Bill S79 — and that the NYPD cease current FRT use immediately. The campaign website at banthescan.amnesty.org launched with the tagline "Your face is being tracked. Find out where. Help ban facial recognition technology." and a POST Act public comment portal through which New York residents could submit formal comments on NYPD facial recognition under the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, signed into New York City law in June 2020.

The launch was anchored in two arguments. The first is the rights argument: facial recognition in public spaces violates the right to privacy and threatens rights to freedom of assembly and expression regardless of technical accuracy. The second is the racial justice argument: because facial recognition systems misidentify Black, Brown, and other minoritised people at higher rates, their deployment by law enforcement disproportionately harms communities already targeted by discriminatory policing. The campaign cited the August 2020 attempt to arrest Black Lives Matter activist Derrick "Dwreck" Ingram — when NYPD officers besieged his apartment for five hours after apparently using facial recognition to identify and locate him — as a concrete illustration of the technology's chilling effect in the context of protest.

Decode Surveillance NYC: crowdsourced mapping (May–June 2021)

In May 2021, the campaign launched Decode Surveillance NYC — a crowdsourced public investigation through Amnesty Decoders, Amnesty International's global network of digital volunteers. Participants classified publicly available street-level imagery to identify and geolocate CCTV cameras compatible with facial recognition technology across New York City traffic intersections. The project enrolled more than 7,000 volunteers from 144 countries and produced a dataset the NYPD itself had not published.

In June 2021, Amnesty published the Surveillance City report drawing on the map data: the NYPD can use more than 15,000 cameras — predominantly Argus cameras — across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn for facial recognition surveillance. The report calculated that protesters marching to and from BLM protest sites at Times Square, the Theatre District, Washington Square Park, and Barclays Center during mid-2020 would have faced up to 100% coverage by publicly-owned CCTV cameras compatible with facial recognition — making the scale of surveillance visible in a form the NYPD's own POST Act filings had not.

Racial disparities in surveillance infrastructure (February 2022)

A February 2022 research report drew on the full Decode Surveillance NYC dataset — 15,280 cameras catalogued across traffic intersections in Manhattan (3,590), Brooklyn (8,220), and the Bronx (3,470) — to demonstrate that FRT-compatible camera concentration in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens is highest in areas with the highest proportions of non-white residents and the highest historical rates of stop-and-frisk policing. The analysis reinforced the campaign's central argument: that facial recognition in public spaces does not operate as a neutral policing tool but reproduces and amplifies the spatial geography of discriminatory policing.

Strategic litigation: the S.T.O.P. lawsuit

In July 2021, Amnesty International and S.T.O.P. filed suit against the NYPD under New York's Freedom of Information Law for refusing to disclose records about its surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests. The New York Supreme Court for New York County ordered the NYPD in August 2022 to hand over more than 2,700 records documenting the surveillance programme. In November 2025, a further Amnesty International and S.T.O.P. investigation revealed new NYPD surveillance abuses from the disclosure process, establishing that the litigation track remains an active element of the campaign more than four years after launch.

India phase: Hyderabad, November 2021

In November 2021, Amnesty International extended the campaign to India in a three-organisation partnership with the Internet Freedom Foundation and ARTICLE 19, targeting the Telangana state government's Command and Control Centre in Hyderabad — designed to integrate surveillance data from up to 600,000 cameras across the state — as the Indian embodiment of the same threat. The Hyderabad phase ran under the #BanTheScan framing that IFF had already built into the Indian civil-society register through Project Panoptic. Amnesty supplied the global campaign brand and international human-rights authority; IFF supplied Indian organisational and legal infrastructure; ARTICLE 19 supplied freedom-of-expression framing. The campaign's most consequential downstream artefact was the January 2022 public-interest-litigation petition filed at the Telangana High Court by Hyderabad activist S.Q. Masood with IFF legal-counsel support — India's first major judicial challenge to police facial recognition.

Occupied Palestinian Territories phase: Automated Apartheid (2023)

In May 2023, Amnesty International published Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT — the research base for the campaign's third geographic phase. The report documented Israeli authorities' deployment of the Red Wolf facial recognition system at military checkpoints in Hebron and East Jerusalem — the only two cities in the OPT with Israeli settlements inside their bounds. Red Wolf scans Palestinians' faces without their knowledge or consent, compares their faces against databases that exclusively contain information about Palestinians, and uses the match result to determine whether individuals can pass checkpoints; the system automatically biometrically enrols any new face it processes. Red Wolf is connected to two further military-run systems: Wolf Pack, a comprehensive database of information on Palestinians in the OPT, and Blue Wolf, a smartphone-accessible app for Israeli forces to query that database in real time. Amnesty demanded an end to Israeli authorities' use of facial recognition against Palestinians and the wider dismantling of the surveillance architecture the Red Wolf system operates within.

The global petition and relation to the #BanBS coalition

The campaign carries a standing global petition calling on UN leaders to prohibit the use of facial recognition for mass surveillance by state agencies and private-sector actors worldwide — translating the city-level legislative demands into a UN-level human-rights instrument demand. The petition sits alongside the Access Now-led global #BanBS open letter (launched June 2021 with 175+ signatories from 55 countries, co-drafted by Amnesty International) as the two international-level expressions of the same prohibition demand. The two operate at different registers: the #BanBS coalition open letter functions as a standing international civil-society commitment across 200+ organisations; the Ban the Scan petition and campaign hub function as Amnesty's own branded vehicle for mobilising individual public commitment and anchoring the three-jurisdiction research-and-advocacy arc.

Significance

Ban the Scan is structurally distinctive in the corpus on three counts. First, it is the corpus's clearest example of a single civil-society organisation deploying a multi-pronged research-mapping-litigation-petition strategy against a specific municipal police department's FRT deployment over a sustained multi-year arc; most comparable campaigns operate primarily in one register. Second, the Decode Surveillance NYC methodology — mobilising 7,000+ volunteers from 144 countries to produce public-interest surveillance data the NYPD had not published — is the corpus's primary instance of a crowdsourced citizen-investigation tactic applied to public surveillance infrastructure, producing research with direct legislative and judicial downstream application. Third, the campaign's jurisdictional expansion from New York City to Hyderabad to the Occupied Palestinian Territories — three deeply different governance contexts, each anchored on the same organisational brand and core prohibition demand — illustrates both the portability of the "ban the scan" framing and Amnesty International's capacity to use its global footprint to embed a US-originated civil-society campaign in international human-rights accountability terrain across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.