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Facial Scanning Now Arriving At US Airports (npr.org)
According to a report via NPR, a Geneva-based company called SITA that develops information technology for the world's airlines has installed facial scanning cameras at Orlando International Airport. "Britain-bound passengers -- some wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts and other Disney paraphernalia -- lined up at Gate 80 recently for the evening British Airways flight to London's Gatwick Airport," reports NPR. "It looks like any other airport departure area, except for the two small gates with what look like small boxes on posts next to them. Those boxes are actually cameras." From the report: Sherry Stein, a senior manager at SITA, says the cameras are triggered when passengers step onto designated footprints. "We collect a photo, send it to CBP, who checks to make sure that person is booked on the manifest and matches the photo that they already have on file." If everything matches, Stein says, "we open the doors and give them the OK to board." All that happens, she says, "in three to five seconds." If things don't match, the traveler's passport is scanned manually by a gate agent. CBP is testing biometric scanning at a dozen or so U.S. international airports to ensure that people leaving the country are who they say they are, and to prevent visa overstays. The Transportation Security Administration, another agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is testing similar devices at security check-in lines.
I know.
I thought this was already a thing for US visitors? Step up to a kiosk, a camera on top takes your picture, etc, etc?
What's new here?
Russians must be laughing their asses off at the Americans. During Soviet times, bet they didn't think that the US would move towards a system just like theirs or East Germany's, where you needed permission to leave the country. But that's what the US is doing, all under the guise of safety and keeping residents of "shitholes" out. Congrats to us.
More likely, Bush & Co knew about a plot and let it happen. Maybe Bush's idiot son wasn't that evil, but Rummy and Bypass Dick sure were.
Agreed. For as much as Russia has and keeps doing, we seem hellbent on racing to catch up to them.
Automated passport booths are commonplace in Europe. Scan passport, computer takes photo of you and checks that it matches the passport. Gate agents currently check your photo to see that your passport is actually yours before you board an flight. US CBP already keeps flight records.
All this is is replacing a human with a computer.
No matter how good a percentage you have (below 100%, of course), the birthday paradox will give you a ton of false positives.
It's because you're actually doing N*(N-1) comparisons, where N ::= (the number of passenger a day at the airport + the number of crooks you're looking for). For a probability of 1-(1/365) (ie, 99.7% accuracy), you get a 100% chance of a false positive after 367 people... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The German security service supposedly identified somebody's grandmother as a terrorist, and stopped the experiment abruptly.
davecb@spamcop.net
where you needed permission to leave the country.
You don't need permission to leave the country. You need permission to enter if you aren't a resident, and some people are avoiding that step. They're also avoiding leaving when their permission runs out.
I hate flying now. Every trip reminds me of how an attack by few men with a few planes has us throwing out the Constitution. The attack was terrible, but the fact that bin Laden predicted it would lead to a U.S. government crackdown on its own citizens really pisses me off.
We should have been better, braver.
If they screen people when they leave, how long before they start restricting citizens from leaving? A "no travel list" vs a "no fly list" -- people will start finding themselves on it due to unpopular views. Remember, the current administration is known for extreme pettiness.
Government shouldn't be given this power.
If they screen people when they leave, how long before they start restricting citizens from leaving?
I can play that game, too. If they keep citizens from leaving, how long before they shoot you to death while standing in line? This is fun. Can we make up more fanciful stuff instead of talk about what is actually happening?
You probably don't realize, if the government really wanted to stop people from leaving they'd implement customs and immigration exit points like a lot of other countries already do. For example, when you exit Germany, you go through immigration where they stamp your passport and check you.
Government shouldn't be given this power.
Government already has the power and responsibility to control the borders. I would say "if you don't like it go to some other country", but those other countries are a lot stricter about such things than we are.
In Germany, you can literally walk across the French border without being screened. e.g.
http://static.panoramio.com/ph...
BTW, as far as the shooting example, if they murder you, they can't milk you for tax money for the rest of your life. In East Germany, they let you leave at age 60, when you were no longer useful to the State. Who says the US won't do the same to prevent a "brain drain", considering the current tide of anti-intellectualism that will likely send smart, productive people running.
In Germany, you can literally walk across the French border without being screened. e.g.
What does that have to do with what happens at an airport?
The rest of this flight of fiction could be fascinating, but not tonight. It's a waste of time playing "what if" games.
What difference does it make whether you leave the country by air, train, or foot for the purpose of immigration enforcement?
I thought the department of homeland security was a temporary thing. Yet here you are now, 17 years later. And they have money to advocate for anything they want to do, the same as your ministries of education and health.
Amazing how that happens.
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You are such an insufferable twat. You need to stop posting here.
If you say something against the grain of popular opinion in US (e.g., "Hillary is a crook"), you will be added to the US facial recognition database and American authorities will harass you with impunity at the airports. Something similar happened to the journalist that was writing articles on Snowden's revelations; she even had to go to court to fight the corrupt US government.
Now Americans automated this system of abuse. The way it works is you post something on Facebook that Americans don't like (e.g., Americans sponsor terrorists in Middle East); the message is automatically picked up by some half-assed Python script and your account is flagged; the photos in your Facebook account are automatically pulled from your account (with full approval of Zuckerberg), scanned and added to the "database"; once at the airport, an American officer, wearing Chinese-made facial recognition glasses, will be able to spot you from the crowd and politely escort you to a private room where himself and his TSA colleagues will beat and Taser you until you sign false confession; once over, you will be released without your money and electronic gadgets which will be confiscated as "evidence" and never returned to you.
I have met people who looked more like me than _I_ do. How subtle a delta will differentiate me from any of them? (Some were older than I, so I'm not an original, I'm one of the replicants.)
I am NOT, I believe, the only one who's seen doppelgangers of themselves.
Says the Anonymous Coward.
I miss the cold war.
State ID card. I'm flying from San Diego California to Austin Texas and must provide a valid ID. Don't drive so I must goto the DMV to get another type if ID. Also I want to bring two walkie talkie radios with me, hope they're not confiscated.
What difference does it make whether you leave the country by air, train, or foot for the purpose of immigration enforcement?
If you're leaving for a non-Schengen destination by air, you'll go through border controls before boarding the plane. If you're flying to another point within the Schengen Area, you don't even need your passport, just your state-issued ID card showing that you're a Schengen national. Doesn't matter if the airport's in Germany, France, or even Sweden. If you're crossing a land border between two Schengen countries, you generally just walk, ride, or drive past the little "Welcome to $country" sign by the side of the road. Germany checks your papers on trains coming into the country; I don't think anyone else does right now.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Criminal recidivists (and their crimes) are well known to authorities. I mean why harass millions of travelers at airports to catch dealers when they deal practically openly on city streets.
How is it an issue?
You already need a passport with a photo. How is taking an up to date photo a problem?
It's not a problem per se. However, some people don't like it because of how the information will be used or because of how they're afraid the information will be used. The general rule in a free society should be defense-in-depth of that freedom, which includes both limiting the amount of information about an individual that the government collects and limiting the ways in which the government can use the collected information.
We have relatively small limits on these things. The most significant is a mostly-court-created doctrine to protect us from having the results of unreasonable search and seizure be used against us in a court of law. We should all be able to understand easily why that is inadequate to protecting individual freedoms: once information is collected it can be misused in ways that curtail freedom without going to court. And even if it is used to bring a case in court, the majority of cases are never tried.
Even that small limit on government data collection is almost, but not completely, nonexistent at the airport. The airport is considered the functional equivalent of the border and the First Congress authorized the complete search of all areas of a ship for contraband, so obviously the founders didn't consider thorough searches at the border "unreasonable" under the Fourth Amendment.
Why do I say the prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is mostly court-created? The U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from engaging in unreasonable searches and seizures. When some state governments got too intrusive on individual liberties in the twentieth century, the federal courts began pretending that the guarantees in the Constitution applied against state governments. There are two sanctions for violating the rule: the most common is that evidence can't be used in court against the person whose rights were violated. The other is that occasionally a person whose rights were violated will sue for money damages or to prevent such a violation.
Real lawyers write in C++
And the idiot son is a genius if compared to the trumpanzee...
The Soviets were the good guys during the Cold War, fella. At least according to the Left. Look at some back issues of Mother Jones or The Nation from 1989-1991 and watch them cry that the last, best hope of mankind was dying.
Russians must be laughing their asses off at the Americans. During Soviet times, bet they didn't think that the US would move towards a system just like theirs or East Germany's, where you needed permission to leave the country.
Please show me airport taking an international flight where your passport is not checked on exit.
Schengen zone excepted of course.
Seriously I'm struggling with this concept. Exit checks have been part of flying since flying existed. Errr. actually since passports existed. These cameras are also in airports all over the world and I actually think the USA are among the last to get them.
Hungary has entry checks. Rented a car in Germany, drove around in Central Europe for a couple of weeks, but they did stop us at the Austrian-Hungarian border. No questions were asked, no passports were pulled out, but we were also in a German-tagged car and were clearly of European ancestry. Also, we were driving a station wagon (no trunk to hide things), and we’re both in our forties, so not exactly the kind of people trying to smuggle stuff or ourselves into the country.
Lay off the crack pipe. As bad as the Big Brother nonsense has become, it is nothing remotely like what people had to deal with on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Baby steps, baby steps, give it time. Trump's blatent hatemongering about outsiders is very much in the style of an East European or Latin American caudillo.
Yep. Remember when you didn't need to show your "papers" just to travel within the US?
Read "The Feast of the Goat," ideally in Spanish if you can. The parallels between Trujillo-era rhetoric in DR and Trump-era rhetoric in the US are telling, and disturbing as hell.
So I can beat her over the head with the irony that in under 30 years the United States is all the propaganda points she used to rant to US for why the US was superior to the USSR (Pretty sure she Soviets, Commies and Russians interchangably with USSR though.)
What a difference 30 years can make...
When we're talking about a facial recognition system at an airport, it is kinda relevant whether you are at an airport or not. Don'tch think maybe?
"and to prevent visa overstays" Huh? You want to detain people for visa overstays as they're trying to leave the country? How does that help?