78 Illustrative examples of health and human rights implications The inherent secrecy of many surveillance tools makes it difficult to gather specific instances of human rights violations caused by their use. It has been reported that police recordings of public gatherings have been used inappropriately in an OSCE participating State. Practices of concern include using recordings to intimidate and threaten participants in public gatherings, particularly civil servants, and passing recordings to media organizations in order to stigmatize protesters. Law enforcement authorities used a video analysis system during large scale protests in 2017 and to subsequently investigate alleged offenses. Its use reportedly led to the identification of three people. The system incorporated several steps:  ata gathering – over 100 terabytes of video and photographs, with the bulk com• D ing from public transport CCTV and other sources, including data captured by the police, shared by the public and taken from media sources, the Internet and social networks; • Content was viewed and software was used to stamp it with a time and date stamp (Geodata); • Separate software was then used to index files and filter out duplicates and irrelevant material; • Some 17TB of content (thousands of videos and images) were placed on a server for use with facial recognition software. This then generated algorithms for each uniquely identifiable face. The Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information has referred to this as “a police biometric database”, which he suspects includes “face IDs” of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom did not engage in criminal activity or who were not even involved in protests. The Commissioner has informed the police that the facial recognition software breaches data protection law and has no legal basis. He stated that its use interferes with the “right to informational selfdetermination” of those affected. Nonetheless, the police reportedly intend to use this system on an ongoing basis.