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US Government Will Be Scanning Your Face At 20 Top Airports, Documents Show (buzzfeednews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing its borders. That mandate stipulates facial recognition identification for "100 percent of all international passengers," including American citizens, in the top 20 US airports by 2021. Now, the United States Department of Homeland Security is rushing to get those systems up and running at airports across the country. But it's doing so in the absence of proper vetting, regulatory safeguards, and what some privacy advocates argue is in defiance of the law.
According to 346 pages of as-yet-unpublished documents obtained by the nonprofit research organization Electronic Privacy Information Center, US Customs and Border Protection is scrambling to implement this "biometric entry-exit system," with the goal of using facial recognition technology on travelers aboard 16,300 flights per week -- or more than 100 million passengers traveling on international flights out of the United States -- in as little as two years, to meet Trump's accelerated timeline for a biometric system that had initially been signed into law by the Obama administration. This, despite questionable biometric confirmation rates and few, if any, legal guardrails.
These same documents state -- explicitly -- that there were no limits on how partnering airlines can use this facial recognition data. CBP did not answer specific questions about whether there are any guidelines for how other technology companies involved in processing the data can potentially also use it. It was only during a data privacy meeting last December that CBP made a sharp turn and limited participating companies from using this data. But it is unclear to what extent it has enforced this new rule. CBP did not explain what its current policies around data sharing of biometric information with participating companies and third-party firms are, but it did say that the agency "retains photos ... for up to 14 days" of non-US citizens departing the country, for "evaluation of the technology" and "assurance of the accuracy of the algorithms" -- which implies such photos might be used for further training of its facial matching AI.
According to 346 pages of as-yet-unpublished documents obtained by the nonprofit research organization Electronic Privacy Information Center, US Customs and Border Protection is scrambling to implement this "biometric entry-exit system," with the goal of using facial recognition technology on travelers aboard 16,300 flights per week -- or more than 100 million passengers traveling on international flights out of the United States -- in as little as two years, to meet Trump's accelerated timeline for a biometric system that had initially been signed into law by the Obama administration. This, despite questionable biometric confirmation rates and few, if any, legal guardrails.
These same documents state -- explicitly -- that there were no limits on how partnering airlines can use this facial recognition data. CBP did not answer specific questions about whether there are any guidelines for how other technology companies involved in processing the data can potentially also use it. It was only during a data privacy meeting last December that CBP made a sharp turn and limited participating companies from using this data. But it is unclear to what extent it has enforced this new rule. CBP did not explain what its current policies around data sharing of biometric information with participating companies and third-party firms are, but it did say that the agency "retains photos ... for up to 14 days" of non-US citizens departing the country, for "evaluation of the technology" and "assurance of the accuracy of the algorithms" -- which implies such photos might be used for further training of its facial matching AI.
So this is really a law signed by Obama and Trump is just enforcing the law. Makes it sound like Trump is the bad guy. Sorta like the border prisons.Trump just is enforcing existing law.
The CCTV FRT has basically a zero percent success rate.
It's useless to look in a crowd of millions for one of a database of millions. The police basically confirm this on a regular basis.
They would be better off stopping every tenth person, in terms of catching people who might be wanted for "something" or have something they shouldn't have on them.
In terms of "spotting the terrorist in the crowd", it's literally zero arrests over many years of deployment.
Hell, they couldn't even trace the guys they wanted to speak to above the Novichok deaths recently. They had to correlate CCTV with passport data (i.e. look when that guy went through passport control and then pull the footage of that time).
Don't believe the hype about face-recognition.
No. Bombings and hijackings were not common in any way in the 1970s or 1980s.
Between 1968 and 1972, there were 130 plane hijackings in the U.S. alone, which is more than one per week.
As to bombings, the early 80s had many bombings, many in the Beirut area and Ireland. In the U.S. there were protest bombings. In the 18 months between 1971 and 1972, there were 2,500 documented bombings in this country. The deadliest year for underground violence was 1981, when eleven people were killed in bombings and bank robberies gone bad.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower