Fight for the Future campaign to ban government facial recognition in the United States (2019–ongoing)

On 9 July 2019, Fight for the Future launched BanFacialRecognition.com — the first major US civil-society campaign explicitly calling for a complete federal moratorium on government use of facial recognition, rather than the "light regulation" framework that technology companies and some legislators were advancing as a compromise. Evan Greer, the organization's director, framed the demand in existential terms: the technology's dangers "far outweigh any potential benefits." The campaign's launch came days after San Francisco (May 2019) and Somerville, Massachusetts (June 2019) became the first two US jurisdictions to enact outright bans — and Fight for the Future's infrastructure positioned those early victories as proof of concept for a national municipal wave.

BanFacialRecognition.com — platform architecture

The campaign's operational backbone was BanFacialRecognition.com, a dedicated action site designed to collapse the distance between public concern and political action. The site enabled constituents to contact their congressional representatives directly from the campaign interface; it maintained a congressional scoreboard tracking which lawmakers had and had not sponsored the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act; and on 18 July 2019, Fight for the Future launched an interactive map tracking facial recognition deployments, existing bans, and pending legislation across every US jurisdiction — the first nationally-maintained public dataset of its kind. The map, described as a tool to "kickstart more local- and state-level efforts," gave organizers in other cities a real-time picture of both the threat landscape and the available precedents.

The coalition supporting the campaign comprised more than 40 organizations, including the ACLU, Color of Change, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), Free Press, Greenpeace, MoveOn, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Algorithmic Justice League — whose Gender Shades research on differential accuracy rates across race and gender had supplied the empirical foundation for the movement's harm argument. The campaign's six-point case against facial recognition — unreliability, invasiveness, racial and gender bias, security vulnerabilities, law enforcement misuse, and authoritarian-control potential — explicitly synthesized AJL's technical audit findings into a political demand.

The music festivals victory (October 2019)

The campaign's first major win came in an unexpected sector. In September 2019, Fight for the Future mobilized artists — including Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Amanda Palmer, Atmosphere, Anti-Flag, and Thievery Corporation — to pressure music festival operators against deploying facial recognition at their events. LiveNation had announced in 2018 a partnership with Blink Identity, a facial recognition firm, as a potential replacement for ticketing; AEG, the other major US live-events conglomerate, was evaluating the technology. By 23 October 2019, more than 40 major festivals — including Coachella, SXSW, Bonnaroo, and Austin City Limits — had committed to not using facial recognition, and both LiveNation and AEG had publicly declined to implement it. Fight for the Future described the outcome as "the first major blow to the spread of commercial facial recognition in the US" — a sector-specific win that demonstrated the campaign's capacity to generate corporate accountability pressure outside a legislative process.

The municipal ban wave (2019–2021)

The campaign's central strategic contribution was providing national infrastructure for a wave of city and county bans that cascaded from 2019 through 2021. Fight for the Future did not drive each individual municipal ban — local coalitions of civil liberties organizations, community groups, and sympathetic council members were the operative forces in each jurisdiction — but the national campaign supplied the ban-not-regulate framing, the organizer toolkit, and the interactive map of precedents that enabled each new city to position its effort as part of a documented trend rather than a local anomaly.

The municipal ban wave proceeded as follows: San Francisco enacted the first US ban in May 2019; Somerville, Massachusetts followed in June 2019; Oakland, California voted unanimously to ban in July 2019; Berkeley considered legislation in fall 2019; Cambridge, Northampton, Brookline, and Springfield, Massachusetts enacted bans through 2020; Boston banned the technology in June 2020; Portland, Oregon enacted the broadest US ban in September 2020 — covering not only city agencies but private businesses operating in public spaces; Madison, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Santa Cruz, California, King County, Washington, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota had all enacted bans by the end of 2021. By May 2022, the EFF counted 17 US jurisdictions with enacted facial recognition bans — a figure the BanFacialRecognition.com map reflected in real time throughout the campaign.

The municipal win count came with a significant caveat: New Orleans, which had passed a ban in 2020, reversed it in July 2022 to allow limited police use for violent crime investigations — demonstrating that municipal bans enacted without statutory durability were subject to rollback under political pressure.

Federal legislative track

The campaign's federal legislative vehicle, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, was introduced on 25 June 2020 by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). Fight for the Future was among the named endorsers in the bill's July 2020 momentum announcement, alongside the ACLU, Algorithmic Justice League, Amnesty International, and more than 20 other organizations. The bill would have prohibited federal agencies — including ICE, the DEA, the FBI, and CBP — from using biometric surveillance technology, conditioned federal law enforcement grants on state and local moratoria, and created a private right of action. It was re-introduced in March 2023 in the 118th Congress. As of mid-2026, no federal moratorium had passed.

Schools and campuses sub-track

In January 2020, Fight for the Future extended the campaign into educational settings, launching a dedicated ban facial recognition in schools and campuses track co-launched with Students for Sensible Drug Policy and banfacialrecognition.com/schools. The schools campaign produced its own principal legislative win — the New York State Biometric Identifying Technology in Schools Act (2020) and the permanent statewide prohibition issued by the New York State Education Department in September 2023 — and is documented as a separate corpus entry. The parent campaign and the schools sub-track shared infrastructure, coalition, and the ban-not-regulate framing; their distinction in this corpus reflects the different harm theories, legislative venues, and documented outcome timelines.

Airports track (2020–ongoing)

Fight for the Future separately campaigned against the Transportation Security Administration's expansion of facial recognition at US airports, which by the mid-2020s was rolling out across more than 400 airports. The campaign supported the Travel Privacy Protection Act, which would protect travellers' right to opt out of face scans and require the TSA to dispose of collected biometric data. A 2025 AJL report cited by Fight for the Future found 80% of surveyed travellers concerned about airport facial data collection and 99% unaware of their opt-out rights — continuing the campaign's empirical-documentation-to-advocacy pipeline first established by the Gender Shades research. The airports track remained actively contested as of mid-2026.

Significance

The BanFacialRecognition.com campaign is the corpus's primary entry for the US movement to ban government facial recognition through municipal and federal legislative action — the domestic political infrastructure through which the ban-not-regulate position became the mainstream civil-society posture. The campaign's 17+ municipal wins represent the largest documented cluster of jurisdiction-level AI technology prohibitions in any single country, achieved through a combination of national coalition infrastructure, local organizer toolkits, and real-time mapping of precedents.

The campaign's central contribution to the movement's strategic repertoire was making explicit refusal the default demand: by treating regulation as insufficient and moratorium as the floor, BanFacialRecognition.com shifted the policy conversation from "what safeguards should accompany facial recognition" to "should it be banned outright" — a reframing that the municipal ban wave then operationalized jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The interaction between the national campaign's demand-setting and the local coalitions' legislative wins produced the movement's most concrete US domestic record of restrictive AI governance before the New York State DEIA school prohibition.

The campaign's festival victory stands apart as a corporate accountability mechanism operating entirely outside the legislative process: mobilizing artist leverage and consumer pressure to prevent a technology's commercial deployment, rather than enacting a prohibition after deployment had begun. Access Now's global Ban Biometric Surveillance campaign is the closest international parallel — targeting the EU AI Act as its primary legislative vehicle — while this campaign represents the US municipal and federal track of the same demand applied through the American legislative system.