Slashdot Mirror
Is Homeland Security's Face-Scanning At Airports An Unreasonable Search? (technologyreview.com)
schwit1 shares an article from MIT's Technology Review:
Facial-recognition systems may indeed speed up the boarding process, as the airlines rolling them out promise. But the real reason they are cropping up in U.S. airports is that the government wants to keep better track of who is leaving the country, by scanning travelers' faces and verifying those scans against photos it already has on file... The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has partnered with airlines including JetBlue and Delta to introduce such recognition systems at New York's JFK International Airport, Washington's Dulles International, and airports in Atlanta, Boston, and Houston, among others. It plans to add more this summer...
As facial-recognition technology has improved significantly in recent years, it has attracted the interest of governments and law enforcement agencies. That's led to debates over whether certain uses of the technology violate constitutional protections against unreasonable searches... Harrison Rudolph, a law fellow at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, and others are raising alarms because as part of the process, U.S. Customs and Border Protection is also scanning the faces of U.S. citizens... They say Congress has never expressly authorized the collection of facial scans from U.S. citizens at the border routinely and without suspicion.
"We aren't entirely sure what the government is doing with the images," the article adds, though it notes that the Department of Homeland Security is saying that it deletes all data pertaining to the images after two weeks. But Slashdot reader schwit1 is still worried about the possibility of an irretrievable loss of privacy, writing that "If the DHS database gets hacked, it's hard to get a new face."
As facial-recognition technology has improved significantly in recent years, it has attracted the interest of governments and law enforcement agencies. That's led to debates over whether certain uses of the technology violate constitutional protections against unreasonable searches... Harrison Rudolph, a law fellow at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, and others are raising alarms because as part of the process, U.S. Customs and Border Protection is also scanning the faces of U.S. citizens... They say Congress has never expressly authorized the collection of facial scans from U.S. citizens at the border routinely and without suspicion.
"We aren't entirely sure what the government is doing with the images," the article adds, though it notes that the Department of Homeland Security is saying that it deletes all data pertaining to the images after two weeks. But Slashdot reader schwit1 is still worried about the possibility of an irretrievable loss of privacy, writing that "If the DHS database gets hacked, it's hard to get a new face."
I'm waiting for the AMA to declare "Investigating Hillary Clinton" a leading cause of death.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
>Which has been true since the first person ever sat for a passport or drivers license photo.
Yeah but those were done with very different technology.
For instance, my state added the photo to the driver's license but, by law, didn't authorize or intend to create a central catalog of photos. The law merely said the state could add a photo to the license. Years later when they went to digital licenses, the state just adopted the central database. And as time has gone on, they have increased the quality of the photos captured so they can be used for biometric matching. Several generations of technology improvements have occurred and yet the state still never got authority to keep a central photo archive. Taking a mile from an inch.
In the same way, the passport has you send in two pictures. But there is a world of difference between operating a central passport photo database with facial recognition, and having a paper file somewhere with the 2nd picture sitting in it, which can only be referenced manually by a human.