How One State Managed to Actually Write Rules on Facial Recognition Massachusetts is one of the first states to put legislative guardrails around the use of facial recognition technology in criminal investigations. “One of my concerns was that we would wake up one day in a world resembling that depicted in the Philip K. Dick novel ‘Minority Report’,” said Kade Crockford, an activist at the ACLU of Massachusetts.Credit...Tony Luong for The New York Times Listen to This Article . Though police have been using facial recognition technology for the last two decades to try to identify unknown people in their investigations, the practice of putting the majority of Americans into a perpetual photo lineup has gotten surprisingly little attention from lawmakers and regulators. Until now.