Officials at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City have decided not to use a facial-recognition surveillance system to scan the spectators at Olympic hockey games.

In a story Saturday, Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News quoted West Valley Police Chief Alan Kerstein as saying the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and the city agreed not to use the FaceTrac surveillance system at the E-Center rink until after the games end. Kerstein gave no reason for the decision.

Crews from Pennsylvania-based Graphco Technologies started installing the equipment in November, and police had been loading pictures of terrorists and criminals into the database. Pictures of missing children were also being added, in the hope that a camera might spot one.

Graphco officials expressed surprise at the decision. Director of business development Nick Abaid called it a "safety issue," and asked why officials chose not to utilize state-of-the-art technology when it was available for free. FaceTrac's computer measures 128 distinct facial features of every individual passing by its cameras and matches them against a database of criminals. But critics say the system is unreliable and violates a person's constitutional rights.

Some information for this report provided by AP.

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