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Facial Scans at US Airports Violate Americans' Privacy, Report Says (nytimes.com)
Ron Nixon, writing for The New York Times: A new report concludes that a Department of Homeland Security pilot program improperly gathers data on Americans when it requires passengers embarking on foreign flights to undergo facial recognition scans to ensure they haven't overstayed visas. The report, released on Thursday by researchers at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University's law school, called the system an invasive surveillance tool that the department has installed at nearly a dozen airports without going through a required federal rule-making process. The report's authors examined dozens of Department of Homeland Security documents and raised questions about the accuracy of facial recognition scans. They said the technology had high error rates and are subject to bias, because the scans often fail to properly identify women and African-Americans. "It's telling that D.H.S. cannot identify a single benefit actually resulting from airport face scans at the departure gate," said Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the center and one of the report's co-authors. "D.H.S. doesn't need a face-scanning system to catch travelers without a photo on file. It's alarming that D.H.S. still hasn't supplied evidence for the necessity of this $1 billion program," he added.
Researchers at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University's law school made this claim. Not the Supreme Court, which has granted great leeway to what customs can do at the borders. It's a legal opinion paper that is just that, opinion, with no legal standing.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Has NEVER required evidence for the necessity. Why should this be any different?
Airport security only applies to those of us who fly commercial. When is the last time the top critters in our government flew commercial? Some of them might never have. When you can charter your own aircraft you don't have to go through security, you go straight to the airplane cabin door. Same deal with government aircraft. These people get treatment that is better than the best we can buy, and they have no reason to care about what the rest of us go through.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They can build a $1 billion program to catch people leaving late, but cannot do a single thing to keep people out. Besides, what's the penalty if they're on a flight home one day past their visa? Throw them in jail and then send them home?
it requires passengers embarking on foreign flights to undergo facial recognition scans to ensure they haven't overstayed visas.
Okay, maybe I’m missing something...
So if I’m visiting the US and I overstay my visa. Now I’m getting on an airplane to leave the country and they want to make sure that I didn’t overstay?
Hello? I’m leaving...
What, you’re going to arrest me for overstaying my visa while I’m leaving? And you’re going to spend a billion dollars to catch me as I do just what you want me to do—leave!
Really? My tax dollars at work...
It's telling that D.H.S. cannot identify a single benefit actually resulting from airport face scans at the departure gate
As if benefit analysis was EVER a consideration for DHS or TSA... I would love to see the benefit analysis of confiscating people's nail clippers from carry on luggage.
Easy - they put you on the "You can't come back" list.
No tinfoil needed.
Private companies got $1 billion in revenue.
This is America. What greater necessity could there be than a company making money?
The ostensible reason for the scans is " to undergo facial recognition scans to ensure they haven't overstayed visas." Really, if a person is leaving, who cares at that point if they over-stayed. The good news is that they are leaving! Therefore, since they are scanning everyone, could it be that the real reason is something that they do not wish to admit.
A smart traveler would overstay their VISA, and then purposely get caught. Free flight home?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Since when do Americans need a visa to visit America? By definition anyone carrying a US passport should be exempt, if you believe their excuse for doing the scans.
What part of scanning everybody are you having problems with? They are scanning everybody, Americans and non-Americans alike, in order to catch the ones with expired visas.
What I don't get: these are people leaving the country. If somebody has an expired visa, what they are supposed to do is to leave the country. I don't see the point of a billion-dollar program (!) to catch the people leaving; what they're supposed to be doing is catching the people on expired visas who are not leaving the country.
Well, first off, there's the fact that research done by visual researchers reveals that that human forgets faces not of his/her ethnicity significantly faster their own ethnicity. Your memory of a face in a crowd declines in under 10 seconds, and happens even faster than that when you're glancing at someone who doesn't look like you. Crowds are also very confusing because of other visual factors that are similar in what you're looking at and distract ... movement, colours, clothing, shapes, etc.
Second, people have an utterly terrible memory for faces, and one's cognitive ability runs across a wide spectrum. Unless there is a mark or deformity that is significant, people are generally poor with faces, especially ones in a crowd. And while it's unlikely that someone with a condition like prosopagnosia is going into law enforcement, it still means that about 2% of the population is hopelessly "blind" when it comes to recognizing people's faces. Additional research shows, in experiments we can replicate, that even close family members, if their appearance is slightly altered, are missed in a crowd to a significant degree when scanning faces in a crowd.
Third, it takes on average 2.5 seconds for the average human to look at and recognize a face. Sometimes as long as 5 seconds. How do you imagine that you could have enough security personal around to scan the thousands of people who move through crowded public spaces like airports, train stations etc every minute or two?
I've been in the same room as two police detectives trying to get accurate descriptions of criminals one time, and the variations of what the guys supposedly looked like from one interviewee to the next was amazing to hear. There is no way a human scanning a crowd is going to do anywhere near as good a job at facial recognition than decent software that stores potentially millions of faces (note that accuracy is debatable, and is still pretty hard to get right with most of these systems). I think the problem here are the questions around who has this data, how is it being used that you're not being told about, how long is it kept, who is it being shared with, and what is the measurement of it's success (besides a few companies making 100s of millions of dollars). A better system takes into account different physiological aspects of you ... height, weight, appendage movements, stride type and length, etc. But I have no clue whether or not it's legal, though.
DaveyJJ