[This is a guest post by Nitya Singhania.] Introduction Recently, the Supreme Court began hearing petitions on the Delhi Police’s use of an Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) at the Cockroach Janta Party’s Jantar Mantar protests. Such Facial Recognition Technologies (FRT) generally work by comparing the image of an unidentified person with existing databases, which contain both the individual’s image and a comprehensive set of information about them. This approach has been defended by the State as being necessary for identifying disturbance-spreading elements at the protest. The State claims that FIRs were registered only against 2,873 persons with prior criminal antecedents and students were ‘presumed’ to not have taken part in any violent acts. However, concerns have been raised about the surveillance’s lack of legality, its effect on the right to protest and violations of data privacy. This is the first challenge to the deployment of facial recognition at such a scale against a peaceful protest, in comparison to previous cases which dealt with either targeted surveillance or welfare-based databases. This blog will seek to establish how FRT usage at a protest fails the test of proportionality laid down in KS Puttaswamy vs Union of India (2017) (“Puttaswamy”). Assessing FRT Surveillance Against the Proportionality Test In Puttaswamy, it was held that any interference with the Right to Privacy must meet the three-fold criteria of (a) legality (b) legitimate state aim and (c) proportionality [para 180]. The blog will analyze how the requirements under each of these prongs have been interpreted and how the usage of FRT at the Jantar Mantar protest fails each of these. - Valid Law In Puttaswamy (I), the Court held that there must be a valid ‘law’, like a statute, rule or regulation, to restrict the scope of a fundamental right [para 180]. According to KS