Not Ready for Takeoff: Face Scans at Airport Departure Gates

https://www.airportfacescans.com/

by driverdan • 9 years ago

191 144 9 years ago

I've often wondered why the us does not have any exit passport controls. It is the only country I've been to that only checks incoming and not outgoing.

I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, just observing.

matte_black• 9 years ago

They do not care.

CPLX• 9 years ago

It's literally the definition of "a free country"

Specifically it was always used as a sharp contrast with the policies of the Soviet Bloc which did not allow people to freely leave their countries.

LV-426• 9 years ago

The definition of "free country" is not zero passport controls on exit, and:

    Robeson declared that it was “rather absurd” that he was
    not “allowed to travel because of my friendship - open,
    spoken friendship - for the Soviet people and the
    peoples of all the world.”

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/paul-robeson-lose...

decebalus1• 9 years ago

It's literally the definition of "a free country"

citation needed. First off, it does, but it only becomes visible to passengers when they violate the conditions and try to re-enter. Second, this is not the definition of a 'free country'. Third, by modern definitions of a 'free contry' (1) the USA should not be considered 'THE land of the free'.

(1) https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-...

monksy8• 9 years ago

You can have your rights to leave the country stripped away by being accused of felonies, a judge can take away your PP, and even renewals can be rejected if you owe the government money.

anigbrowl6• 9 years ago

No it isn't. The right to depart and the right to do so without being recorded are two different hings.

ojbyrne• 9 years ago

Answers on Quora suggest it's automated, and invisible to most people. https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-US-not-have-immigration-c...

CydeWeys2• 9 years ago

I've never understood why other countries have the exit controls. What is the point?

kurthr2• 9 years ago

The second "stamp" allows them to track how long you were in the country and which country to left through (which may not check on exit either). For visas (especially EU) this is a big deal, because you (as a US citizen) are not required to apply for a short term business/tourist visa, but you can't stay more than 30days. If you exit through the UK, however, you may not receive the exit stamp (e.g. EuroStar). They may then deny you re-entry due to the apparent violation.

uiri2• 9 years ago

Catching wanted criminals and suspects as they try to leave the country. Flagging people who have overstayed their visa when they try to leave so that they can't come back. If someone tries to leave on a stolen or fake passport, it is cheaper to catch it before they exit than when they try to enter somewhere else.

kurthr2• 9 years ago

Many do have exit checks (EU, most of Asia), but many don't (US, most of the Americas). I'd assume some of it in the US occurs when you buy the ticket... however, in some places you could still enter Mexico without a passport (returning is a challenge!).

The bigger issue is that Congress hasn't issued a specific mandate for this collection (by a private entity) and spending authority for the apparently ~$1B program. The article's concerns are for a more intrusive security state without congressional authority.

DHS’ current face scan-based program also may not comply with federal law. The program may exceed the authority granted to DHS by Congress because Congress has never explicitly authorized biometric collections from Americans at the border.26 Even if DHS has sufficient legal authority for the program, DHS has failed to complete a prerequisite public rulemaking process for the program, as mandated by federal law.

mcast• 9 years ago

I accidentally* drove past the US southern border into Tijuana from San Diego without passport control, there was only an automated plate reader managed by US CBP. I also did not have my passport or passport card on me.

Coming back the same day, there was a line to drive back into the US that took several hours. Luckily, I was allowed back in with a driver’s license by the agent.

*I was dropping off 2 American friends who were taking a day trip to visit Tijuana, but the road signs were terribly marked and I crossed over unintentionally.

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

There are 1000's of kilometers (miles if you prefer) of unsecured border in the North. You could leave and re-enter the US without being aware of it, much easier still on the lakes.

us0r• 9 years ago

The bigger issue is that Congress hasn't issued a specific mandate for this collection (by a private entity) and spending authority for the apparently ~$1B program. The article's concerns are for a more intrusive security state without congressional authority.

Posted about this 200 days ago.

"The first legislative mandate for an automated identity check on departing foreign visitors dates back to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and since 9/11 Congress has passed three laws requiring the Department of Homeland Security to set up a biometric exit system."

Doesn't address the citizen part but they'll sell it as "national security" and of course citizen data is immediately discarded </s>.

https://www.fedscoop.com/cbp-will-implement-long-mandated-bi...

Edit: Apparently they responded to this report a few days ago: https://www.fedscoop.com/cbp-biometric-and-face-recognition-...

z2• 9 years ago

Yet the onus is on visitors to prove that they did not overstay their visa, if leaving by land/sea, or if by some airline/airport fluke the departing passenger list didn't make it over to the DHS.

https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/1674/~/report-d...

astura• 9 years ago

Ignoring false positives for a second, isn't this easily fooled by putting on a prosthetic nose or something? Or plastic surgery? Hollywood makeup is pretty good at drastically altering someone's appearance in a few hours at the most. I don't know why a motivated terrorist can't just change their appearance before bombing a plane.

Who is this really going to stop?

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

It's not even that hard. Grow a long beard and get punched in the face the day before your flight.

EpicEng• 9 years ago

The goal isn't to have a 100% success rate, it's to work most of the time in order to speed up processing.

QAPereo5• 9 years ago

I feel like even a mediocre TSA agent is going to be suspicious about the heavily bearded man with a serious bruise on their face. I mean, unless that matches your passport!

monksy8• 9 years ago

punched in the face the day before your flight.

Not a hard thing to have that happen to you these days considering the "pre-flight interview" they're now doing.

drpgq• 9 years ago

It’s for verification based on your passport. If you don’t match you get more scrutiny. It cuts down on the cost of checking everyone.

eesmith2• 9 years ago

Right now there's no in-person scrutiny upon exit, so I don't see how this would cut down the costs.

DHS needs to justify the benefits and costs of creating such a system. That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system, and what failure rate is acceptable?

If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.

While many people overstay their visa, the vast majority are not going to get someone else to depart the country on their passport, which is what this system is supposed to prevent.

Remember, even 10 seconds per passenger adds up. There were 243,195,022 international passengers in the year ending March. Figure 1/2 of them were departures. That's 121 million people.

At 10 seconds per passenger that's 38 years of additional waiting. If we figure everyone's time is worth $7.25/hour then that's about $2.5 million of additional wasted time.

How much fraud do we need to stop to make this time and money worthwhile?

I'd rather spend that money on reducing a much bigger sort of fraud - the tens of billions in wage theft each year.

anigbrowl6• 9 years ago

Yes, everyone knows that. It's not helpful to just repeat the purpose of a system in response to a criticism of its ability to fulfil that purpose.

QAPereo5• 9 years ago

The problem with the disguise is that people are pretty good at seeing through, and the more prosthetics and make up you have on more obvious it is. It works in the movies with an editor and the lighting director and cameraman, but not so much in real life. Worse you’ve now given people a very good reason to stop you and question you further, because after all you’re wearing a disguise! You also have to consider that the disguise to fool a person, and the disguise to fool a computer might be very different, especially if the computer isn’t just using the visual spectrum to analyze you.

anigbrowl6• 9 years ago

That depends on the makeup artist, the face one starts with, and the degree of work involved. Source: working in film for a decade. The closer someone is to an average, the easier it is to make them look like someone else. This is one reason (among others) some actors 'disappear' into a role and others always look like themselves.

dawnerd• 9 years ago

If DHS stops doing this, there’s still lots of companies that will including Delta. I think if they fix the failure rates they could make it a much more efficient system and perhaps turn it into a form of preclearance for supported countries.

http://news.delta.com/delta-opens-first-biometric-self-servi...

lerie82• 9 years ago

Shouldn't they just do a fingerprint scan then?

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

That would be much harder to fly under the radar because fingerprinting is what you do to people who are arrested. People wouldn't put up with that so easily.

There's been some rumblings of the "uniqueness" of fingerprints being far less than you'd think. Fingerprinting everyone who flies would just produce more false positives. The people that's bad for overlap a lot with the people who stand to benefit from invasive security theater.

anigbrowl6• 9 years ago

I'd be very interested in any source material you have detailing these 'rumblings', both from the first hand experience of having been fingerprinted (which is oddly misrepresented in TV and movies) and from a general interest in forensic history.

As a child I recall an antique book on criminology which spoke glowingly of the reliability of fingerprints in investigations, and cited the unsuccessful defense of one convict who claimed (sometime in the late 19th century) that fingerprinting was a 'hazy and fallacious method imported from France, where many innocent men have been convicted by it." It is true that juries have an unfortunate tendency to believe in the first order results of any technical procedure, from ducking stools to DNA matching.

isostatic4• 9 years ago

Fingerprinting is what you do to people visiting your country. It's quite common

monksy8• 9 years ago

They do for GE. I'm not sure why they gave me a RFID card for it. I've always used my fingerprints and passport to get back in via that.

I'm ok with the idea of an opt-in program like GE. With that you understand that your data is being scrutinized and that you're voluntarily giving them your image data+your biodata. I'm not cool with this new introduction of an exit verification as that it's not a formal thing and it's just being pushed on the populous.

This kind of thing really makes you wonder when the American people became enemy combatants. (This has been happening for years)

ben1040• 9 years ago

I'm not sure why they gave me a RFID card for it.

The card is for crossing the border via car. You can use Global Entry at the NEXUS (when arriving from Canada) and SENTRI (inbound from Mexico) lanes, and the procedure there is you are to wave your RFID card across a reader as you approach the agent's booth.

freeflight• 9 years ago

I'm ok with the idea of an opt-in program like GE.

It isn't "opt-in" for non-US Americans, one of the reasons why I will probably never visit the US.

This kind of thing really makes you wonder when the American people became enemy combatants. (This has been happening for years)

As opposed to everybody who just wants to visit the country? At this rate, I wouldn't be too surprised if 10 years from now they gonna require the full biometric program from foreign visitors: DNA, retina, face, fingerprints, speech samples and whatnot.

I do understand the need for security and proper authentification, I just think these are often used as an excuse for building some kind of police state with a vast database of people with all their attributes from physical (biometrics) to mental (crawling social media).

The last part might seem quite "out there", but it's quite real [0] and has already been for a while [1].

Also doesn't help that all of this reminds me way too much about biometric data programs the US military conducted in Iraq, still sitting on that data and using it [2].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/us-approves-social-media-b...

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312

[2] https://www.wired.com/2011/12/iraq-biometrics-database/

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

The contracts for facial scanners in the security industrial complex is likely much more lucrative than fingerprint scanners.

anigbrowl6• 9 years ago

A proper fingerprint scan is labor-intensive. It's more than just putting palms down flat on a scanner, individual fingers need to be rolled. You could use some sort of mechanical assistance if you really wanted to automate it but people would naturally be rather reluctant to put their hands into a machine that was going to apply any sort of force to them.

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

Not that I approve of this in any way but I'll run out of money long before I run out of places in The US and Canada I want to go visit.

mikestew• 9 years ago

Same boat here, I in no way approve of this. From a pragmatic POV, though, I’ve spent 35 years wandering the U. S. on my motorcycle, and probably most Canadian provinces. I’ve covered 49 of 50 states, but Canada still has a lot of holes. If I can get to the Northwest Territories, more Yukon, the Maritimes I’ve missed, all before old age takes me, I’ll consider that good.

So it makes it pretty easy to fly once, twice a year at most. Between the CO2 output of a cross-country flight and all the responsible parties making flying as unappealing as possible, if I never step foot on a plane again it would be fine by me.

forapurpose• 9 years ago

'Traveling broadens the mind.' Some people never leave their hometowns, either. I can't speak for you in particular, but generally, staying in our home countries greatly narrows the ideas and experiences we are exposed to. It's a big, big world, and there is nothing in the U.S. which can substitute for Delhi or Tokyo or Vatican City.

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

We have these in NL. They malfunction frequently, people don't understand what is going on and the people staffing them are unable to do much to improve throughput. It was just a cost savings measure so that fewer border guards can process more people but from the point of view of the travelers it is a net loss.

Before there would be a very short wait, you'd walk up to the border guard (one of three or four on duty typically), put your passport on their desk, they'd look at it for three seconds and swipe it, then you'd be on your merry way 10 seconds later. Now you wait for 10 or 15 minutes (if you're lucky), insert your passport into the machine, wait for the silly glass doors to close, have your passport spat back out again, repeat the whole thing, find that you were looking a bit too low, so re-do that and so on until finally the second set of silly glass doors opens and you can move on.

It's a complete failure from a usability point of view.

monksy8• 9 years ago

I feel that I want a border guard more than this. This isn't going to catch someone doing something funny. (Like smuggling drugs out of the country, or smuggling other people out)

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

This isn't going to catch someone doing something funny. (Like smuggling drugs out of the country, or smuggling other people out)

That's not what it is for.

It's simply to verify that what your passport says about you picture wise matches your face, and to be able to detain you in case you have an outstanding arrest warrant or open traffic fines.

jdavis703• 9 years ago

That “border guard” is an immigration agent, all they care about is if you’re legally allowed in the country. The customs agents are usually after you clear immigration, and they only care if you’re in possession of something illegal.

marklyon2• 9 years ago

I just went through a similar system at Hong Kong. It worked well and I breezed through the automated gates while a long line of people were backed up at the traditional line. Perhaps they just did a better job of designing the system, but you scan your passport at one station and then step forward into a scannner with a sign telling you where to look. A gate closes behind you. If it fails, it flagged a human to that lane but kept you locked in the box. In my case, it beeped and opened the door into the terminal.

I’ve lost a significant amount of weight since my passport photo was taken. Several human border guards in other counties suggested I get a new passport. One required me to show a second form of ID. The camera system had no issue.

rhizome3• 9 years ago

So, the "facial recording" worked, but the recognition didn't?

rconti• 9 years ago

It's worth noting that the US does not have exit immigration, so this wouldn't be a "step up" in the same way, but of course your comments about how well it works stand.

robjan• 9 years ago

Are you sure about that? The Hong Kong frequent flyer e-gates are supposed to check your right thumbprint.

Improvotter• 9 years ago

I've been to the one in Amsterdam more than once and they work just fine. I've also tried a few other ones and so far they've all worked better than border guards. The reason is because you can fit more scanners on the same surface area than border guards. Even if one is not working "perfectly", I'm pretty sure the rate of people going through is higher regardless.

stevesimmons• 9 years ago

Amsterdam isn't a great advertisement for the passport gates. As a regular traveller through Amsterdam for 17 years (including right now, my flight leaves in 40 minutes...), I have never seen worse queues or longer delays for incoming passengers.

The last time I arrived at Schiphol, I had plenty of time to compare the relative throughput of the gates and manual checks. At best two automated gates have around half the throughput of one equally wide manual desk for EU travellers.

Schiphol's big problem, however, seems to have been using the gates as an excuse to cut back staff too far.

The result, at least, on the D pier, is regular queues of passengers through the passport hall and back up to the main concourse.

avianlyric• 9 years ago

The machines you find around the EU are completely different from the ones in the article.

The EU machines just scan your passport, including RFID data, and take a photo of your face. All of this is then sent to a border guard in a booth who manually matches your face to your passport.

The “efficiency” boost comes from allowing a single border guard to check 4-5 passports simultaneously, without having the delay that comes from waiting for the next person to walk forward and present a passport.

In Heathrow, London, the digital gates process people much faster than normal gates, and have half the staff. Unfortunately they are a little confusing for non-tech literate people who often get stuck.

ethomson• 9 years ago

Where in Heathrow are there digital gates to exit?

The US already has a variety of digital gates to _enter_ the country - similar to the digital gates that Heathrow has at immigration - but this article is talking about special electronic gates at _exit_ which I've never seen at any LHR terminal.

paulcole• 9 years ago

Are the systems you’re describing the same ones talked about in the linked article?

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

Totally different form factor but software wise I would expect them to do the same thing. The passport photographs taken here are definitely spec'd with biometric intent, the list of what to do and what not to do runs to 15 items or so.

sitepodmatt• 9 years ago

Even if the human operator is faster, you can buy many more machines. Airport immigration is extremely inefficient, e.g. Malaysia being one of the worst, but I think there's much that can be improved if the space was disrupted.

My idea would be when you approach the immigration hall there are 50+ first-step machines where you slide in your passport, it does just enough to detect if you're going to need a grilling or likely to pass through with no questions, then takes your biometrics if required, and then it prints you a number and you head to either an automated gate or low grade desk operator or high grade desk operator for the more thorough processing. It could potentially also discriminate against old people - you don't want a 70 year old queuing for long after a long flight so they get priority etc...

Then again nowadays I'm quite good at figuring out which lines will move faster, it might sound racist, but if a flight from Ethopia has just arrived at KL then I'm going to choose the line with less passengers from that flight as they mostly get grilled or havent got right documentation or completed formalities properly. I also avoid Chinese on exit immigration in BKK as they almost always miss out details from their departures form (perhaps due to no Chinese instructions) and don't heed the advice to move out the way whilst they complete the form. Children can be a problem too, and a short line might be masking a few brats hidden in the leg space of adults, always take a side scan of the line, because 1 child = 1.25x adult time - lifting the brat up for photos etc... Avoid Indians/Pakistans/Bangledash on check-in as they travel with the kitchen sink and 9/10 there going be at least one argument over excess luggage. Sometimes you can't really tell and just look for preparedness - do these people have their passports in their hands ready to go, or buried in the handbags, have they removed their cap or will they wait to be told. grumpy traveler

cypherpunks01• 9 years ago

Is there currently no possibility of opt-out for this - what happens if you refuse on legal grounds? Will DHS not allow US citizens to leave the country unless they consent?

GuB-42• 9 years ago

How can they tell you really are a US citizen unless they check your ID?

The cameras do just that. The problem is that it is done poorly.

dannyw• 9 years ago

The program is apparently a field trial and optional.

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

For its part, DHS says that airport face scans are designed to verify the identities of travelers as they leave the country and stop impostors traveling under someone else’s identity."

And yet you already have to show an ID and a boarding pass to a DHS agent as part of security in order to get to the gate in the first place.

If only those clowns could focus on making the absurd bit of theater they currently have even just the slightest bit more efficient.

iak8god• 9 years ago

If only those clowns could focus on making the absurd bit of theater they currently have even just the slightest bit more efficient.

Maybe efficiency is not the goal. Cui bono? We got all those nifty body scanners in part because Michael Chertoff, right after serving as director of DHS, went around promoting scanners on behalf of his consulting client, body scanner manufacturer Rapiscan[1].

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/airport-scanner-...

mLuby• 9 years ago

Follow the money…

oliv__• 9 years ago

One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand...

Why do 300m people have to suffer for the boogeyman terrorist? I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Where does this stop?

This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with control and mass surveillance. It's pretty depressing.

erric2• 9 years ago

One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand...

It was already well out of hand when congress approved the patriot act as a knee jerk reaction to terrorism. That was the proverbial straw and everything since has just been gravy for the MIC and other companies milking the government teat.

sebnap• 9 years ago

Read Carroll Quigley, read Gioele Magaldi, combine.

zeep• 9 years ago

thanks Obama for repealing, not signing the extension and for not expanding the "PATRIOT" Act /s

microcolonel2• 9 years ago

To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat

People are willing to curtail the right to keep and bear arms (and it is a right, whereas there is no official right not to be surveilled in public) for a threat which is within an order of magnitude of it; and we can only really tell what the rate is like with the current countermeasures. If the rate climbs after removing countermeasures, will your opinion change? I'd still be against pervasive surveillance if the rate went up maybe tenfold.

hammock• 9 years ago

It could be argued that all the lawful gunowners together are causing less harm and/or hassle than all the TSA combined.

In other words, having a gun as last resort protection against a tyrant isn't hurting anyone the way an extra hour of unproductive scanning and associated privacy intrusions are.

macintux2• 9 years ago

It's a "right" by way of an awkwardly-phrased amendment that could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today, designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today.

(In fact, the NRA itself wasn't all that upset about gun control in the fairly recent past.)

And "mass surveillance" would have meant something very different 200 years ago. Why bother writing something into the Bill of Rights when no government could possibly afford to do what they can today?

So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.

meddlepal5• 9 years ago

Devil's advocate: What is so bad about everyone being tracked and accountable for where they are at any point in time? It would seem a lot of mistaken identity, fraud, and he-said she-said issues could be removed if we can locate people at any point in time.

rhizome3• 9 years ago

Facial recognition will not make a dent in "mistaken identity, fraud, he-said she-said issues" without displacing something like "the entire military budget," which is not going to happen. Facial recognition also doesn't work.

pmiller22• 9 years ago

Let's say I make frequent visits to mosques, and there's a government unfriendly to Muslims in power, as one of many hypothetical scenarios where this could be a real problem.

miketery• 9 years ago

The problem isn't with the ideal scenario, the issue is when systems fail or are used outside of the ideal scenario. Generally this will be in a muzzling and controlling capacity when it comes to surveillance.

Interestingly merely paranoia of surveillance results in self muzzling and self imposed restrictions.

In the end the results are not conducive for societies progress.

DashRattlesnake• 9 years ago

It would also be a great help in controlling dissenters and subversives. Once we have the infrastructure in place, it's there for anyone with enough power to use for any reason...

solatic• 9 years ago

False positives. No system is 100% accurate, but the closer that systems get to 100% reliability, the more people confuse those systems with 100% reliability.

The Panopticon™ claims you robbed the bank. You know you were at work, in a meeting, and your coworkers vouch for your alibi. But the Panopticon™ is "always" right, so you get fast-tracked through the courts (saves taxpayer money not to have the case dragged out) and sentenced to ten years for a crime you didn't commit (your public defender was a huge help at sentencing). Because after all, if you couldn't trust the Panopticon™, then why the hell did they spend $600 billion of taxpayer money building it?

American society was founded on the bedrock of a few principles: you're innocent until you're proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, crime is prosecuted and not prevented, your reputation can be reset by moving somewhere new and making a new beginning, and trust, faith, and forgiveness are more worthy aims than proof, evidence, and justice, for the latter can only really obtained with great difficulty and cost through the courts. Panopticons go against all these principles.

csallen• 9 years ago

I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat?

Is that really the point of terrorism? Is there even such a thing as a general "point" to all terrorism? I would assume there as many different goals as there are terrorists, or at least terrorist organizations.

Rather, what's more interesting is what the people in power do to take advantage of terrorism. The policies they implement, programs they put into place, etc. Terrorism (and other external threats) can act as a convenient cover for domestic actions that would otherwise be scrutinized.

And then there are the more mundane issues. Sometimes the changes that become visible to the public come from relatively low-level managers and officials, who simply enjoy playing with a bigger budget and new toys. It's not all conspiracies in dark rooms at the top.

We have to give democracy its due as well. Just because people can vote doesn't mean we inspire the most desirable behavior in our leaders, because the masses aren't rational. Who wants to be the politician responsible for having weakened security before the next terrorist attack? It's similar to being "soft on crime." The public will hold you responsible, right or wrong.

closeparen• 9 years ago

Terrorism is the deployment of asymmetric warfare techniques by an organization we won’t dignify as a state or military.

Getting the victim to raise its defenses doesn’t have to be a goal, but it can.

zxcmx3• 9 years ago

Suppose your job was to work out whether the identity of people entering or exiting your country matched what was stated on their travel documents.

How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors?

Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem.

The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right?

[I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process].

DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable.

I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too?

Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement.

If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points.

Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?

saguro3• 9 years ago

and results aren't logged

There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged.

Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?'

The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.

nsm• 9 years ago

Who makes the rules about how long these records can be stored and so on? Do citizens have a say? I feel I’d be ok with this as long as the data was used once for a quick criminal check or whatever and then discarded. Of course, we need strong verification that the data is really deleted.

ntaeuc4nt• 9 years ago

Absolutely. This is the real problem. It's not bad that they came up with such a system. It's that they haven't thought it through so it's ripe for abuse. There definitely need to be safeguards in place before it's actually implemented that spell out what can and can't be done with the data, who has access, how long it will be retained, etc.

Havoc• 9 years ago

Personally I don't have a problem with this. I do want gov to take ID control at borders seriously & if face rec helps with that fine.

Less pleased about stuff like "we need your passwords". That's invasive bullsh.

Not Ready for Takeoff: Face Scans at Airport Departure Gates

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