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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.
It's happening to everyone (including US citizens) who leave the US. Not enter. That's the issue.
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.
"All this is is replacing a human with a computer."
The human who looked at me and compared my face to the photo has forgotten my face about a minute after processing me and no permanent record was made of it.
The computer stores that photo forever in a searchable database. So... yeah... its completely different.
In the past it was for color of law parallel construction to track faces connected to drugs.
The court approved question would be are you a US citizen and that would provide a location to place sets of cameras.
The same secure location would then be used as cover for drug enforcement to take a image of the driver, passenger, back/front license plate.
So that was data was always getting collected all around the USA. license plate.
Now the same is going to be extra legal at every other location.
Bus, train, airport, port, toll roads... any location where the population gets collected at.
What was once Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is now going to be fixed CCTV in public and private partnerships.
A Domain Awareness System for all of the USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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
AC its the interconnected state and federal database behind the scan thats the amazing new part in the USA.
Illegal migrants who could used their decades of created papers where once assured that the papers on the day would never be cross referenced with any other deeper US federal and state, city databases due to federal "privacy" laws.
With advanced new CCTV getting every face that search could be wide and deep into many very different US databases.
Criminal, courts, FBI, state, city, federal, DMV, public/private partnerships, huge amounts of past social media data sold to the US gov.
Illegal migrants with a collection of average US paperwork will not longer be able to wonder in and out of the USA secure that their image will pass as it always did.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
This is an old story. We hashed this to death a couple of months ago.
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.
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.
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.
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++