SALT LAKE CITY After a heated debate on Thursday, the Utah Senate is poised to pass a bill to drop the permit requirement for Utahns to carry a concealed firearm.
HB60 co-sponsor Sen. David Hinkins, R-Orangeville, emphasized that the concealed carry permit does not include extensive gun safety training, but simply requires someone to take a three-hour class, submit an application and pay a fee. But for people that say this somehow qualifies me to carry around my firearm with any sort of training is ludicrous. I can get this without having one minute of training with a firearm. That s the law today. So going from this to the constitutional carry provision is not going to increase or decrease safety one iota. This is going to, I think, restore quite literally what the Founding Fathers had originally intended, Hinkins said.
1:45
On Monday, the Utah Senate passed a bill that would add some constraints to the state’s use of facial recognition software.
Republican Senator Daniel Thatcher from West Valley City sponsored S.B. 34, which limits use of the Department of Public Safety’s facial recognition database to law enforcement officials who make a specific request in the course of an investigation.
During the bill’s committee hearing on January 22nd, Senator Thatcher said DPS has the most comprehensive database in the state, currently most often used to compare faces in an attempt to prevent identity theft. In addition to requiring specific requests from officials to use that database, S.B. 34 would also notify people when they are subjected to facial recognition searches.
Utah Bill Looks to Tighten Grip on Facial Recognition Use
The proposal out of the Senate is the latest in a string of efforts to limit the use of the technology in Utah. Allegation of misuse first surfaced in 2019, kicking off a long-running conversation about guardrails. Shutterstock/Legacy Images
In response to privacy concerns regarding Utah’s use of facial recognition software by law enforcement agencies, the state’s Senate recently approved a bill to prevent law enforcement from scanning the drivers’ license database using facial recognition technology unless they’re investigating high-level crimes.
In 2019, the
Washington Post published an article about a report by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology stating that the Department of Public Safety (DPS) allegedly scanned driver’s license photos to search for a wanted person at the request of out-of-state interests, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FB