In my opinion, any country's executive power should have the right to restrict such travel for any and all reasons. In the United States, the executive branch has that specific authority.
The article body specifically disagrees with you: "Now, the DHS is going to be scanning everyone's faces as they board/disembark international flights.". Because they're doing it at disembarking rather than passport control, it will necessarily include all travelers.
DHS claims they will later discard US citizen's images ("The DHS swears it won't be retaining face scans of US persons, but apparently never considered limiting the collection to foreign travelers. Instead, the DHS will "collect them all" and supposedly toss out US citizens' scans later."). But in order to identify those people they will still have to do the facial recognition and so will need to have image information on the citizens already. So if you're a US citizen, they'll either identify you via comparison with other data or leave you in the database of scanned information because they could not positively identify you as a US citizen. So indeed it applies to all travelers in some form.
That threat is enough to disturb me.
So if interviewed by Congress, or newscasters, or anyone, they'll say "We follow appropriate procedures" all day long and never reveal exactly how those procedures work.
1. Unverifiable.
2. Immediately hedged by speech that suggests a long term change in policy.
3. Difficult to establish anyways.
Your opinions of the Executive branch are entirely immaterial to this discussion (and it's telling that you think they are germane), this is about data collection on citizens. Any plan to mandate bulk data collection on international travel must address the impact on citizens in a legal way.
I get that you have a political agenda but I wish you could at least soldier through the article before deciding to discard it purely to avoid potential cognitive dissonance.
> I get that you have a political agenda
Not everyone who disagrees with you is a shill, and personal attacks remain unconvincing.
> but I wish you could at least soldier through the article before deciding to discard it purely to avoid potential cognitive dissonance.
Like the dissonance needed to yell about something the government isn't actually doing and ignoring the obvious attempts to be reasonable (throwing out citizens' data, making sure they properly figure out privacy before proceeding)? If you read the article without bias it's not really alarming; it's an agency trying to do its job and even trying to minimize privacy issues for citizens.
You then didn't read it again, but said you did.
Goodbye.
So everyone will be scanned. They just say that they will delete the US citizen scans after 14 days. I'm sure they have backups though, will they be deleting those as well?
US courts have held that while international travel can be restricted, there must be due process involved. For instance, there's case law that forbade the president from preventing international travel by members of the Communist party.