Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group

“Do not mention FITlist.”

Credit: Alex Knight/Unsplash

Over the last decade, large police forces in Washington state like the Seattle Police Department and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department have turned to facial recognition technology to identify and track down suspects. But it was, until now, unclear just how widespread the use of the technology was across the state, and whether smaller law enforcement departments had access to those same tools.

Now, thanks to thousands of pages of previously undisclosed emails, OneZero can confirm the existence of a massive, secretive network of police departments working together to share these controversial facial recognition tools. The emails, which date back to at least 2016, also indicate that these departments explicitly tried to keep this cross-department partnership secret from the public. These emails were shared with OneZero from a source who obtained the documents through an open records request.

Many of these cross-department requests in Washington state were made through a previously undisclosed email listserv known as FITlist. FITlist — with FIT standing for “Fraud and Identity Theft” — includes officers from at least a dozen police departments, from large organizations like the Seattle police and…