Video analytics under contract: who answers when the system points at the wrong person?

The day your video analytics installation flags a person who turns out to be innocent, the question will not be whether the camera worked. It will be who, between you and whoever sold it, had to know how often it errs. That is one line in a specification, and in Italy it is worth zero points: the tender through which ATAC fitted video analytics to 53 Rome metro stations was decided on price, weighting 100. In the United States it has just become a lawsuit against the component’s vendor.

The docket, opened

On 13 August 2026, before the federal court for the Eastern District of Missouri, Christopher Gatlin filed the second amended complaint in Gatlin v. Welle, 4:25-cv-00043-ACL: 48 pages, docket entry 105. It adds a defendant that was not there before, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

On 7 December 2020 two men assaulted a guard at the MetroLink station on St. Charles Rock Road. The victim suffered a traumatic brain injury and told investigators four times he could not identify his attackers. Eight months later the detectives uploaded a still from an on-board camera — grainy, shot from above, the face covered by a hood and a mask — into the county facial recognition system, which the complaint says rests on Rekognition. Out came Gatlin’s name, and the charges stayed pending until 14 March 2024, when the prosecutor dropped the case.

Against AWS the complaint brings five Missouri law counts: strict product liability, negligent design, failure to warn, negligent training, negligence. But for a buyer the trajectory is what counts: in the first amended complaint, of 29 January 2025, the technology defendant was a different company, Surescan Technology, LLC, which left the case on 8 May 2025. Fifteen months later the claimant went up the chain to the component’s supplier.

The allegations that concern the buyer

These are allegations by one party, not established facts. They describe two blind spots in any video analytics contract.

The threshold. The complaint alleges the programme returned possible matches even where the confidence threshold sat below the suggested level, and that the vendor never made it mandatory. Paragraph 29 holds the sentence that ought to sit in every specification: “Facial recognition systems are not designed to produce, and are not capable of producing, a definitive match or positive identification”.

The terms of use. In 2020 Amazon announced a moratorium on law enforcement use of Rekognition. According to the complaint it reached the customer as a single sentence — “50.9.1. Amazon has implemented a moratorium on use of Amazon Rekognition’s face comparison feature by police departments in connection with criminal investigations” — inside terms running to more than 180 pages across 110 topics, amendable unilaterally: nobody at the county learned of it. Invoices for Rekognition, the complaint states, kept arriving at the county police, and the one for August 2021 — the month of the match — is reproduced in the filing.

AWS has not yet answered on the merits: it appeared on 4 September 2026, obtained an extension to the 21st and on the 17th asked for a second one. It told the trade press that its terms prohibit police use of face comparison in criminal investigations and that it does not know how the software was used here. The city, the county and the three officers filed their answers on 27 August 2026; jury trial is set for 1 November 2027.

Italy buys the same function, and buys it on price

On 4 August 2025 ATAC published in the EU journal a tender for 53 CCTV installations in thermal technology with advanced video analytics in the stations of metro lines A-B-B1 in Rome. Open procedure, estimated value 2,165,947 euro, award criterion: price, weighting 100. Seventeen tenders, award to Calzavara S.p.A. for 1,070,108.12 euro, contract of 20 February 2026, CIG B7DA79F130.

There is no biometrics here: thermal cameras do not recognise faces, and nothing in the notice suggests otherwise. The point is the shape of the purchase. The function that decides sits in three words inside the title, everything else is deferred to the tender rules, and the bids are compared on a single quantity. How often the installation flags an event that did not happen, under which conditions that figure was measured, who re-verifies it after a model update: none of those questions carries a point.

Three dates that arrive almost together

In Italy facial recognition in public places, or places open to the public, is suspended: article 9, paragraph 9 of decree-law 139 of 8 October 2021 carries the suspension no later than 31 December 2027, in the text as amended by the conversion law published on 28 February 2026. But it is paragraph 10 that describes the real market: the suspension does not apply to video surveillance installations that do not use the facial recognition systems referred to in paragraph 9. Everything that is not biometrics can be bought today.

The other two close the circle. Directive (EU) 2024/2853 brings software and AI systems inside defective product liability, with transposition due by 9 December 2026: the claims Gatlin is bringing in Missouri will have a European footing. The high-risk obligations for Annex III — point 1, biometrics — bite on 2 December 2027. An installation awarded today on lowest price will meet all three at mid-life, and the Italian decree on police facial recognition still has not settled who authorises what.

What to put in the specification

Four lines, valid for a renewal too. The false positive rate declared by the supplier, with the test conditions. The operating threshold, imposed by contract and not alterable in the field. Direct notification — not through terms of use — when the supplier changes model, threshold or restrictions. A mandatory human step between the alert and any consequence for a person, with a log.

Why a closed system

Because the rule that binds you cannot live in a document the supplier rewrites on its own. The mechanism here is complete: a restriction announced in public, delivered in one line inside 180 pages, and an installation that carries on as before. Inside a perimeter you staff, that restriction is not a clause: it is a configuration you can exhibit, with the date it was applied and the signature of whoever changed it.

Because the threshold is a choice dressed up as a parameter: whoever sets it decides how many innocent people will be put in front of an operator. On open-weight models, inside machines that are yours, it is a versioned file and every match leaves a trail — input, model, threshold, outcome, operator. On a rented platform it is a field somebody else can redefine.

Because when the question comes — who decided, and on what basis — the answer the system said so will not do. An installation that cannot reconstruct its own match turns a technical error into the personal liability of whoever pressed the key.

The two axes, applied to this case

Complying. The control we put into service compares every day three things nobody compares today: the supplier’s restrictions as they stand, the configuration actually running, and the matches produced, with the dated trail for an inspection or a court.

Deciding. The same architecture holds video streams, alarms, maintenance records, contracts and archives in a single operating model, on which AI agents execute decisions with a human operator in command — for large companies, defence, healthcare and public administration. On-premises on autonomous machines, or in a dedicated cloud with a data centre in Italy staffed by us, always with shared management.

Could you say, for the video analytics installation you are running, what the active threshold is and who set it? Half an hour with one of our engineers is enough to start.

What we do not know

We do not know how it will end: AWS has filed no defence on the merits and nothing alleged has been established. We do not know what the ATAC tender rules say: the contracting authority’s portal publishes the outcome, not the technical requirements. We do not know exactly what that video analytics does, nor have grounds to think it processes biometric data. Full-text search on TED covers the notice, not the tender documents: no Italian notice after 2022 contains the phrase riconoscimento facciale, which does not prove nobody buys the function. The statements by AWS reach us through the trade press.