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Australia Plans Biometric Border Control (bbc.com)
The Australian government is planning to allow 90% of travellers to pass through passport control without human help by 2020. From a report: With a $100m budget, it has begun the search for technology companies that could provide biometric systems, such as facial, iris and fingerprint recognition. Head of border security John Coyne said it could be a "world first." But critics have questioned the privacy implications of such a system. "Biometrics are now going in leaps and bounds, and our ability to harness the power of big data is increasing exponentially," Mr Coyne told the Sydney Morning Herald. The department of border security hopes to pilot the "Seamless Traveller" project in Canberra this summer, with rollout to larger airports scheduled to be completed by spring 2019.
I'm a fan of colonic mapping myself.
The NSA regulary takes my biometric data, such as, the size of my anal cavity.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I went to Australia two years ago and passport control was pretty much all automated. A machine scans your passport and takes your picture, you answer some questions on the machine, and you are printed a little receipt with your picture. Pretty much your only human interaction is handing that printout to an agent on the way out to collect your luggage. They still had plenty of human border patrol agents. And my last from the US to UK and back had a lot of passport control automation to it as well. Smile! You are on facial recognition TV.
Besides the Orwellian aspect of the whole thing what I miss most is having my passport stamped.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
More research should be done on this subject.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Australia should build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants!
There will be some controversy about which country will pay. For example, who pays for the wall along the Australia-Canada border?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Many countries have this. I don't really get how this is a world first. Nor why you care so much.
They insist on rectal probes because they're GAY!!!
from the ./ summary:
Why? The proposal is to make border control more efficient and accurate; They already check to see who you are when you enter or leave the country and you are required to show ID. You have no privacy now. Next, you will continue to have no privacy but transiting the the border will be faster and terrorists and other criminals faking their identities will be more easily detected.
If you oppose a government policy, then change the law, don't handicap its enforcement. We end up with these wasteful compromises in democracies, where one group prevails and enacts a policy as law, while its opponents undermine it by weakening its enforcement. ("Don't Ask Don't Tell" being the perfect example, the treatment of speed limits in the U.S. a good one as well.) Not collectively rational behavior.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Nerd rage. You know, the funniest rage: they huff and puff and flail their flaccid arms about while everybody laughs. Always riled up for the long-lost causes nobody cares about. Biometric ID is actually very handy and is loved by all professionals who actually travel the world to live. Real People do not like to stand in a queue for hours because a bunch of fatsos in trenchcoats who think they're the Chosen Ones believe the Matrix is out to get them. So we get things done and you can fuck off. You don't ever travel out of your mom's basement anyway.
With the Nexus system, we already have this in Canada. When flying, i stick a card in a terminal, it scans my irises, asks a few questions, and prints out a receipt to give to the official upon exiting, no questions. Super easy. Similar with Global Entry in the US. That one scans your passport and finger prints and takes a picture to present to the official who then asks a few questions...because America.
Stop taking our jobs!
Authentication credentials that can't be hashed, can be stolen off your body, and can't be reset at will - but they do change with age, so maybe you can wait it out?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Who says it's a world first?
Everybody claims their system is the first even if it's obviously not true. Surely the border control officials have learned at their international conventions that iris scanning have been used for years in selected locations at the Arabian peninsula for guest workers from the African continent and that those chipped ID/"Schengen passport" cards available in the EU usually carry biometric ID as well. Some of those systems are expensive for the citizens, some of them are expensive for the state and some of the are probably less so after the first investment.
If you oppose a government policy, then change the law, don't handicap its enforcement.
Conversely, and arguably more importantly: If you can't get sufficient consensus in favor of the law to ensure that it will be enforced efficiently and uniformly, don't pass it in the first place!
Of course repealing the law would be the best approach, assuming it can be done. In the meantime, however, when a bad law can't be changed handicapping its enforcement is a far better option than simply giving up and letting others with no regard for your rights do whatever they please.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
How? Identify a possible mechanism, don't just hand-wave and shout "but PRIVACY!" You already have to identify yourself and subject yourself to an interview when you enter the country. How is automating this process going to invade my privacy any more than the existing system does already?
Why wouldn't it be ethical? Again - identify a possible ethical issue with the system, don't simply shout "but ETHICS!" as if that automatically proves that the system is unethical.
Loss of staff through automation is not a privacy concern. Loss of staff through automation is not even a foregone conclusion - these systems will need to be designed, built, installed, serviced, and operated - those are all new jobs, so it remains to be seen whether or not there's a massive net job loss or not.
As for "discrimination of people who may appear different" -- what the fuck? The entire purpose of a biometric system is to uniquely identify people based on variations in the appearance of their eyes, faces, fingerprints, etc. An automated system will be LESS likely to discriminate based on "hurr durr brown people" than a dumb-ass minimum wage government shitlord sitting behind a desk and lording his small amount of power over travelers.
The only possibility that this would somehow "increase" discrimination based on appearance would be if the developers wrote something like this into their code:
if (traveler.skin_color > "#777777") {
arrest(traveler);
extraordinary_rendition(traveler);
}
Jesus fuck. What are these people smoking?
I'm guessing the main concern among the listed methods is fingerprints. Unlike some other biometric identifiers, fingerprints linger, and they get picked up at places like crime scenes. Given the questionable standards of forensic analysis in criminal cases in recent years, the potential fishing expeditions when fingerprints are found in connection with serious crimes, and the scary potential consequences if you're involved in a case of mistaken identity, I can entirely understand why some people would be hesitant about giving any government their fingerprints (or a DNA sample, for the same reasons and more).
Something like an iris scan seems significantly less problematic from that point of view. It's still a useful identifier for practical purposes, but it lacks the persistence of fingerprints or DNA, it lacks the ability to identify covertly at a long distance like a voiceprint, facial recognition or gait analysis, and crucially, it will probably continue to lack those risks for a considerable time, because physics.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And it's the biggest cluster fuck you can imagine. Only registered travellers over the age of 18 get to use it. Every one else gets to join an EVEN LONGER QUEUE because they can't be bothered to lay on sufficient staff to process people coming through. Entire families stuck in a fucking queue for over an hour thanks to electronic borders. Progress.
Didn't read the article - but we already had facial recognition for in and outbound immigration checkpoints at Sydney international airport for the last few years. Anyone with a newer smart passport goes through these gates and the camera checks your face and lets you through.
Aside from the occasional grope from security I've not had to speak to anyone in ages.
Now we just need to ditch the useless immigration card we fill out (and subsequently place in a bin I'm sure is simply emptied into recycling anyway) and it'll be a smooth experience.
from the ./ summary:
total 96K ./ ../ .cache/ .config/ .local/ .npm/ .bash_history .bashrc .gitconfig .mysql_history .nano_history .nanorc .profile
drwxr-xr-x 6 4.0K Jan 24 13:42
drwxr-xr-x 8 4.0K Jul 28 14:34
drwx------ 3 4.0K May 27 2016
drwxrwxr-x 4 4.0K Jun 28 2016
drwxrwxr-x 3 4.0K May 27 2016
drwxrwxr-x 808 32K Jun 28 2016
-rw------- 1 4.4K Jul 13 2016
-rw-r--r-- 1 3.5K May 17 2016
-rw-rw-r-- 1 51 May 17 2016
-rw------- 1 51 Jun 28 2016
-rw------- 1 8 Jul 12 2016
-rw-r--r-- 1 8.5K May 17 2016
-rw-r--r-- 1 675 May 17 2016
I am fine with it as long as it can detect sand n1ggers and incinerate them on the spot.
How would Trump visit Australia then?
terrorists and other criminals faking their identities will be more easily detected.
Objection. Assuming facts not already in evidence.
They already check to see who you are when you enter or leave the country and you are required to show ID. You have no privacy now.
That assumes the border database is inaccessible to all other governments and government organizations. Again, something that hasn't been shown to be true.
Most likely, the database will be open to all law enforcement, and if so, the privacy of someone not at the border would be reduced by this system.
Learn to love Alaska
Well, from the /. summary:
altroot bin dev emul etc home kern lib libdata libexec mnt netbsd proc rescue root sbin stand tmp usr var
Australia is the worlds largest island - it doesn't have a border
Jesus people, read TFA and know a little bit about Australia.
Right, currently, in Australia, there are automated border gates, just like the ones in the UK and the US. I personally object to them because I do not wish to donate a dozen "perfect" photographs each year (I travel regularly) to the government's facial recognition training database.
This proposal is to extend the scheme to domestic travel (Canberra has no regular scheduled international flights) which currently in Australia is very good (from a civil liberties perspective) because (1) both travellers and non-travellers can pass security at the airport, and (2) no ID is required to board a domestic flight in Australia. I think both of these things are great.
What they want to do is make domestic travel more restrictive and use biometrics to ensure the person boarding the flight is the person who collected the boarding pass and is the person named on the ticket. It has nothing to do with security, and probably simply allows the airline to prevent people swapping flights with friends and family.
Heathrow T5 does this because BA decided to mix domestic and international travellers. As a result, UK domestic travellers must submit to biometric data collection (currently a photograph, but the full proposal was for fingerprints) once they have a boarding pass, but pre-security. That is then assessed at the gate to ensure the same person is boarding the flight. This is to prevent an international transit passenger boarding a domestic flight and entering the UK without clearing border control. It is only about BA being tight-arses with the terminal design. Should we really submit our biometrics to a private company because *they* want to save money? I say no, and vote with my feet, but avoiding BA entirely and not using T5 as a result of their policy.
A retinal scan has the properties you talk about in your last paragraph. An iris scan is only slightly harder than a facial recognition scan.
Sorry, you're quite right, it was retina scanning that I was thinking of.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Biometric ID is very fragile and is absolutely not loved by all people who travel and get things done. Your sample size of one inflated ego does not make your opinion true. Also, fuck you.
>"With a $100m budget, it has begun the search for technology companies that could provide biometric systems, such as facial, iris and fingerprint recognition."
The gov should not have fingerprint registration data (which will be horribly abused). Facial and iris are not good choices either...
There is only one safe and practical biometric I know of- deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.
Example: http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Stand up for your rights, people... and the rights of your children. Once you give fingerprint or DNA data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want. Even worse, with every crime investigation, you will be searched without probable cause.
If you oppose a government policy, then change the law, don't handicap its enforcement.
It's cute that you think government is restricted by law. You should look-up what a guy called "Snowden" revealed.
Very well. Go spend your coupla bucks elsewhere. See how the Australian government cares. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is catching up. Whatcha gonna do when biometric ID is the rule all over the world, hunh? Go hump a micro USB port, shit nerd.
Fuck you, you stupid bogan.
If you were in front of me right now I'd smash a bottle of Toohey's on your face. After I drank the
contents, of course.
This is the issue. For a comparison, look at the vast range of government agencies that want to get access to people's internet histories, now that is being stored by ISPs to 'protect the children'. This passport business all came out of a bureaucratic pow-wow where they complained about the cost of replacing lost passports. Solution: do away with the passport! Cue bureaucratic high fives. Only problem: it only works if every other country does it too. I doubt the Bolivian immigration would be impressed with "Oh, but we don't have passports in Australia any more."
Stand up for your rights, people... and the rights of your children. Once you give fingerprint or DNA data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted
Don't go to Japan then, they take your fingerprints on entry (started in around 2007).
Lol. Tough talk from a keyboard. And you have to use a bottle? Afraid the break your typists hands? Don't worry you can still use the other hand to get the bosses coffee and jerk him off fag.
We have passports with chips and automated gates at airports but the change being proposed now it to not require the passport. The gates would work entirely off biometric data.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I was there last year as a foreign visitor, instant 90 day visa at the border. No fingerprints. While the US collects prints from me every time. I'd rather visit Japan than the US, and currently plan to never visit the place again.