Al Franken
Former US Senator and Comedian
SNL comedian turned US Senator who convened landmark 2012 hearings on facial-recognition technology, warning that biometric data is uniquely dangerous because you cannot change your face.
In his words
You can change your password. You can get a new credit card. But you can’t change your fingerprint, and you can’t change your face.
Biography
Al Franken (born 1951) spent fifteen years writing and performing on Saturday Night Live before winning a US Senate seat from Minnesota in 2008. In the Senate he became an unusually technical voice on privacy, chairing the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.
Facing the machine
In July 2012 Franken convened one of the first congressional hearings devoted to facial-recognition technology, pressing the FBI over its Next Generation Identification database and Facebook over automatic photo-tagging. His central argument was that biometrics are categorically different from other personal data: a leaked password can be reset, but a face, once catalogued, is permanent and can be matched from a distance without consent.
Facial recognition is one of the oldest deployed forms of machine learning, and Franken’s 2012 questions — about accuracy, bias, secret databases, and the chilling of free assembly — anticipated nearly every concern that would later surround AI surveillance. He resigned from the Senate in 2018 amid misconduct allegations, but his hearings remain a reference point in the privacy debate.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/al-franken