Advances in technology are outpacing our laws, threatening our privacy rights and undermining our civil liberties.

Across the country, facial recognition technology is being quietly deployed by government agencies of all sizes and, now, more than half of all adults in the United States are in at least one database used for facial recognition, according to an estimate from the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.

There is no time to waste. Congress must pass a set of meaningful reforms to protect our civil liberties from the rapid deployment of facial recognition technology.

Congress must:

• Develop laws and regulations governing the use of facial recognition technology. Constitutional precedents on the warrantless use of facial recognition by law enforcement do not exist, and courts have yet to address whether use of these technologies constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment.

• Reform the Freedom of Information Act to ensure government contractors must comply with FOIA requests and provide information necessary for the government to adequately oversee surveillance technology systems. These much-needed reforms will ensure the public is empowered with adequate information to understand the use and impact of surveillance technology.

• Require judicial authorization based on probable cause to condition the use of facial recognition technology in order to protect against unlawful surveillance.

• Require the public release of technology policies that address privacy and data retention concerns prior to allocating funding for agencies’ acquisition of facial recognition.