DHS Quietly Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition of Passengers Exiting U.S | Hacker News Reader

DHS Quietly Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition of Passengers Exiting U.S

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145 pointstsaoutourpants74 comments

This is awful!

Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and it's unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data distribution that's dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite faces). I'm not aware of a lot of research about this.

Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into custody for false positives?

This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more.

(See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult's tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, "Biometrics: Practical Issues in Privacy and Security," for a great high-level overview of these kinds of issues: http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securic... In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this kind of analysis)

Personally, I think talking about false positive and accuracy is a straw man problem.

The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy.

At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening?

That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen).

One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road.

Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).

100% agree. Dragging the issue into the "accuracy" direction away from the "moral" direction is a Thermian argument.

> At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening?

that's a "strawman" as well. Every law is oppression, the real question is what degree of oppression is justified for the good of society

I think accuracy is worth discussing, because even a 99% accurate system can produce poor results if the signal it's searching for is rare. Wikipedia has some good examples about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Examples

One of the examples is about terrorism, with 100 out of 1 million people being terrorists and a 99% accurate system. Being 99 percent accurate, 99 out of the 100 terrorists will trigger the alarm, but so will about 9,999 law abiding citizens. Given an individual that triggered the alarm, there's a less than 1% chance they're actually a terrorist.

Pretty sure this kind of capability exists on the highways as well, particularly between heavy trafficking corridors like Philly to Montreal.

IIRC, there was a NY Times article a few years ago (which I cannot find) that mentioned that it started with LPR cameras, but was capable of capturing faces as well.

The thinking behind this isn't complicated. The US wants to construct a database of people who visit the US, and using it on people leaving the US will probably encounter less resistance than people entering the US, as well as have people who don't travel much going "whats the big deal anyway?"

Now they have your face and personal data, and they can probably run that against all the surveillance information being collected daily by the NSA etc.

From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and you're not a citizen), this is F*g terrible, but that's what happens when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don't see this ending up anyplace good.

I'm less concerned about privacy, although still concerned about that, than I am about the Brazil principle here. The sorts of people that end up in these border security jobs are, if nothing else, very good at "following orders" and if the computer says someone's a target who are they to think otherwise?

Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly.

They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features. What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to over-fit for a particular set of inputs?

The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.

Heck, there are lots of ways this could screw up a citizen like me.

I don't live in the US. I'm only going to be there for visits at the most, and at this point I'm holding out. I'm too afraid that one day, I won't be able to leave for whatever reason. This doesn't help that. My non-American spouse refuses to travel there again.

Even being late catching a flight could make things rather inconvenient.

Hate to say I told ya so, but [1].

Anyone who has any doubt as to the way this country is headed, should really read 1984 for a preview of what's coming.

All that will take to make this full-blown is some metastasizing event (see 9/11) that will take us from slipping down the slope directly to falling into the abyss.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878

When I think of things like mass surveillance, proliferation of felonies, over-charging & plea bargaining, civil asset forfeiture, and police militarization, the book I really think of is not 1984, but Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism. I think it is very thought-provoking and helps show what it means to lose the rule of law in your country. Also unlike 1984 it is about things that actually happened.

And just to be clear, I think these fears are non-partisan. The problems didn't start in January, but much sooner. Solving them isn't as easy as just electing the right party.

I question whether elections will be a concern for those in power soon.

Hate to say I told ya so implies that you are linking to some prediction about exit tracking, or facial recognition in airports.

Your post you link is about your prediction that Social Media account credentials will be required to be handed over by citizens on exit. That's not a complete non sequitur, but hold your horses, you have made a verifiable claim, and it isn't true yet. You haven't "told" us anything.

I agree with you, yet I wonder how many here who also agree put their money where their mouth is? If we're all still living here and investing here, we'll just be like any other group of intelligent people who will have seen the broad strokes coming, but are still caught by surprise.

Problem is, the rest of the developed world ain't so hot on this front either. And the developing world is usually worse if they have the resources to implement it.

This is part of the effort to detect visa overstayers. CBP tries to measure this.[1] As of the end of 2015, they estimate that there are 416,500 people in the US who overstayed their visa. They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them. This tells them who's entered the US legally but now needs to be found and deported.

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...

But why do we want to identify visa overstayers who are leaving the country? That doesn't do us any good. You could argue that we're doing it to prohibit them from re-entering, but the vast majority of our illegal immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving and thus will never be found on a jet bridge. Likewise, it obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth.

It seems to me that there are far more compelling reasons to implement exit controls if you have other, less savory motives.

If GP is correct, I would think that the point is not to detect departures by people who have overstayed but to more reliably detect all departures, so we can more accurately figure out who has not departed, but should have.

Assuming the facial recognition actually works. My base assumption is that this is a make-work for someone's friend, a contract that is continuous rather than for the Super Bowl or other single event.

Definitely it's the more likely assumption that simple cronyism is at play rather the unfolding plot of a dystopian novel. I'm not sure that it's the safe assumption though.

I've been thinking: you know what would be a beneficial use of image recognition? Trash dumps. Find out what brands aren't recycled when they should be, and penalize them.

In a society that would function to minimize waste rather than maximize it as a route to increased consumption, that would be a brilliant way to enforce sanity.

> If GP is correct, I would think that the point is not to detect departures by people who have overstayed but to more reliably detect all departures, so we can more accurately figure out who has not departed, but should have.

You don't need facial recognition for that, just passport data and passenger manifests. People who didn't break the law aren't going to be evading detection when they buy an airline ticket out of the country.

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/international-visitors/i-94-instr...

> CBP now gathers travelers’ arrival/departure information automatically from their electronic travel records. Because advance information is only transmitted for air and sea travelers, CBP will still issue a paper form I-94 at land border ports of entry.

But that's just silly, given that you can easily leave the country by walking across the border. Even if they implement this for every international plane departure, the data will still be massively incomplete.

Don't get me wrong: I don't support this. But I believe the fact that "you can easily leave the country by walking across the border" is also something the current administration would like to "correct." I can imagine this technology being installed at land crossings as well.

>you can easily leave the country by walking across the border

which is of course illegal...

I don't know where you got the idea that it is illegal to leave the country on foot, but you are mistaken.

There are vehicle and foot ports of entry all along the border, where legal passage between countries can be done.

Walk up to the checkpoint, do the security thing, and keep walking. Easy peasy.

Of course, but the parent comment didn't say that.

If they're going to implement this, obviously they're going to implement it at every border crossing for it to be of any use whatsoever...

The parent comment also didn't not say that. You could as easily say, being exactly non-specific as that comment, that it's illegal to fly across the border. Because it is, if you don't go through procedures on both ends.

> but the vast majority of our illegal immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving

That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point. So preventing re-entry is a plausible cause.

> obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth.

Unless their plot fails and they are trying to escape and regroup. Now how many of those failed plots that we were about to catch them but they escaped have we solved recently. I can't think of any.

Working with the government for a bit, I would say when stuff like this comes about, the reasons are usually more more about money. Something like a a company lobbied to get a large hundred million dollar contract to implement this. And it just happens that the head of DHS is first cousin with the CEO of said company.

> That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point

With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If you overstay a visa, you're going to stay in the country no matter what. I know folks who have missed family funerals because of that.

Especially once you realize you can get married and have children who are citizens. This is why amnesty is a huge deal for lots of folks.

> With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If you overstay a visa, you're going to stay in the country no matter what.

How is overstaying a visa a necessary requirement for staying in the country no matter what. Some people might just make mistakes and come clean and explain what they did. Some might hope to get lucky. Maybe some are extra sneaky and want to borrow a passport from one of their cousins (but that biometrics checks though it making it tricky these days).

> I know folks who have missed family funerals because of that.

So they snuck in on a tourist visa, lied about the purpose and then never left missing their mother's or father's funeral even?

> This is why amnesty is a huge deal for lots of folks.

You think this very common and now after they snuck in they want amnesty? Well I can certainly see that. But I can also see why a lot of Americans might not want to give them amnesty as well. Last year 2.5M people were deported that will probably continue.

> I know folks who have missed family funerals because of that.

Well tell your folks to stay put and especially stay away from anywhere near a border. People have been deported just by boarding an inter-city bus. Because it was stopped and searched by immigration officers.

Don't even go outside.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/fewer-immig...

> That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point.

No, they won't. If the overstay was on purpose, you can bet they are not leaving no matter what.

> So preventing re-entry is a plausible cause.

Which is something that's already done. When you leave, the airline reports that information(if by plane, no idea about other methods). It is a flawed system, but skewed against the individuals, as the airline may fail to report (not sure how often this happens).

I was actually scared the first time I left the US, because there was no exit stamp. I had only been to countries which stamp your passport when you leave.

If you are using the system for this purpose, you're using it to replace a cheap stamp, plus human verification.

It is with the hope that the penalties from getting caught will encourage people to comply with the limit of stay terms of their visa.

I've lived outside of the USA for most of my adult life and from the people I've interacted with, anecdotally, the threat that if they overstay their visa they'll be fined <insert large number here> per day and be denied a visa & entry in the future seems to motivate people to comply with the terms of their visa.

Sure, but when you threaten fines against Jose from Guatemala who walked into this country with nothing more than what he carried on his back, and has been working a minimum wage job here for the last 10 years trying to support a family... you're accomplishing nothing. The bottom line is that if you have money, you can get yourself a valid visa, and if you don't, a fine won't exactly be effective.

There's the consequences that might scare others into not overstaying. You may also be able to gain information from them that you could use to find others who aren't physically leaving the country.

It's of course completely possible that there are unsavory and foul motives at work. It's also possible that there are things other than mass human rights violations that such a system might be useful for.

> But why do we want to identify visa overstayers who are leaving the country?

Who said all of them were leaving the country?

> They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them.

The US doesn't even try to have general exit controls, though, and the routes of egress that DHS has the kind of presence at to implement facial recognition ar already have supposedly positive identification procedures for what is theoretically more critical and immediate security purposes in place, making facial recognition at those locations a very low value in improving ability to narrow down potential visa overstays.

Which isn't to say this isn't the reason, just that it's a very poor reason.

It seems to me that this would have to have a very high level of accuracy and reliability though. Visa overstays amount to a very small portion of total entry and exit, so if there is even a small false negative rate, ICE agents will be spending a lot of time looking for people who have already left the country.

As the report notes, though, they already have exit information from passenger manifests, and land border entry sharing from Canada and Mexico. I would have assumed this information would have already been sufficiently accurate.

Although Canada now reports land (and ferry) arrivals to the US, Mexico does not (yet).

There is no US record of who leaves southbound into Mexico, and in most cases Mexico doesn't have a record of their entry either (requiring a Mexico tourist permit isn't enforced at most entry points).

Fair enough. But it sounds like this technology is being developed for airports, not land crossings or ferries. How would you setup this facial scanning when people leave the country in a vehicle?

That's the number of overstays among 2015 arrivals as of January 2016, not the total number of overstays.

I guess the numbers for longer overstays will be lower, it'd be interesting to see the estimates.

If that was truly their intention, then I should simply be able to present a US passport and walk by.

Direction to implement this was in the executive order Trump signed which banned people from the 7 countries that the Obama administration had built a database of nationals of those countries.

When I read the executive order I was quite troubled to see this.

I also noticed the exit tracking part of the order went undiscussed in the media. I searched to see if anyone else had noticed but i didn't find anyone else talking about it.

It almost feels like some of the more outrageous parts of the order (eg ignoring green card holders) were designed to draw attention away from the real point: slipping in exit tracking without people noticing (because they are too busy distracted fighting the other parts of the order).

The next step is mandatory facial recognition of everyone in the U.S. What better way to track all of those visitors who come into the country and where they go than to track everyone everywhere all the time. License plates are already recorded almost everywhere. The location of your cell phone clearly has to be known by the carrier, it's a simple database dump to track your phone. Track everything you do online by tapping databases from Facebook and Google (as best you can since they probably don't want you to). Track all of your credit card, stock and other purchases. Correlate all of these data points together, and imagine the possibilities. Of course it's not 100% accurate, but for nearly 400 Million people (citizens, illegals and visitors) what's a few tens of millions of inaccurate data points.

There seems to be alot of ppl not sure as to why / what purpose scanning ppl on exit would acomplish. To me it makes the most sense that this would be an easy first step to start working out errors in the machines and get training data in a way that is not likely to cause the electorate to get upset. In the future once it is working then then can start moving it more inwards facing.

I can understand how this is an issue, however I kind of take issue in the way the article is written: starting with comparing the US to Nazi Germany and then escalating it to equate this with the Holocaust. Only then quietly noting that "they remain popular in Europe, Russia, and China." Kind of polarising from the get-go.

America is the only country I've been to which doesnt check people on the way out...

Hard at work manufacturing that freedom as always.

The "green light" part made it sound more like a retinal scan (because the inside of your eyeball is dark and needs to be illuminated).

If you've ever entered the country over the last couple years and used one of the kiosks at many airports, they're the same thing. They compare your passport to the image the device takes (and give you expedited clearance if there's a match and no red flags), and IIRC, they have a green light. Facial recognition needs illumination too (edit: but obviously, invisible illumination such as IR would do just fine).

retinal scan is way too invasive to be deployed at this point - iris or face is most likely

(Edit: I made the classic mistake of confusing iris with retina. Sorry. I assumed you're talking about iris recognition here.)

Not invasive at all. SRI's "Iris On-the-Move" product is a gateway that people walk through; a long-range infrared camera images their iris as they're passing through. As long as you catch a glimpse of the green light as you're walking, they can match your iris template. See "Iris on the Move: Acquisition of Images for Iris Recognition in Less Constrained Environments", Matey et al 2006.

(I'm trying to vaccinate you from this idea, not convince you. I obviously hate the idea of iris scanners at airports. My point is that unfortunately it can be done, and we should be careful.)

retina != iris

If you think about it, there's an argument to be made that face scanning is the most invasive because it can easily be done at a distance without your knowledge. The depths of your eyes may feel more personal, but facial recognition is insidious.

Another reason I'm nearly certain this was face recognition is that DHS already has a database of faces -- your passport photos -- and thus they have something to compare to. They don't have an iris or retina database for U.S. citizens.

There's "invasive" in terms of "ability to identify you, times ease of capture." Irises (and maybe faces) are very invasive by this metric.

Or there's "invasive" in terms of how much cooperation it requires to match you. I think that's what parent meant. A biopsy DNA sample or interrogation would be most invasive, followed by maybe something like a cheek swab, then palmprint, then willing fingerprint (ignoring latent fingerprints), then iris, then faces being the least invasive.

Just a question - wouldn't this actually help prevent criminals from fleeing the country with fake passports?

Personally if I was going to "flee the country" and was worried about DHS I would just paddle across the St Lawrence river and report to CanBSA as required. Exit visas aren't a thing and there is no requirement AFAIK to report that you are leaving.

When's the last time that actually happened in the US?

A passport isn't just a document anymore, it's an entry in a database. Hard to fake.

But, so-called “exit controls,” where documents are checked as travelers are leaving the country, were popularized last century by Nazi Germany as a great way to ensure that they could control, round up, and exterminate the Jews and other “undesirables.” It can obviously serve no purpose of keeping terrorists out, because it only affects those who are already in.

Or to put it another way, they're standard in practically every country apart from the US. Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?

> no record of whether they left at the end of it?

There already is a record, it's called the I-94. Used to be a paper thing you handed to the airline when leaving the US, now it's all recorded electronically.

I think that only applies to air crossings.

How else are you going to get out of a country surrounded by water?

At least w/ Canada there's an agreement for the Canucks to tell CBR that you've left the US (Source: I tried to surrender my i-94 at the US side of the border. The guy told me to give it to Canadians). Not hard to envision another agreement on the Mexican side

So does the CBP scan being discussed

I guess this is some kind of trial. My point is that exit records are neither novel, useless, nor in most countries the least bit controversial.

Not sure why the US needs to make a big deal out of it with biometric scans instead of the tried-and-true option of a little man in a box stamping your passport.

Then why make everybody get scanned (including US persons)? Or am I misunderstanding?

Comrade, you ask too many questions. Perhaps we need to send you to re-education...

> Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?

Well they do have a record, from the flight

Why is this a problem? Because it looks creepy?

You could try reading the rest of the thread, as several users have broke it down for you.

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