TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

There might be problems with the laws still. I.e. Polish constitution has 'Public authorities shall not acquire, collect nor make accessible information on citizens other than that which is necessary in a democratic state ruled by law.'.

There are many techs out there that are quite dystopian (face scans, mass surveillance, etc.) or outright evil (alleged organ harvesting of death row inmates in China) but yet the governments aren't doing it. Even that article in Polish constitution smells (to me personally) like it came due to secret police back in communism collecting 'dirt' on people, that required 0 tech, just secret informants with small monetary incentives or who were blackmailed with dirt already collected, telling little bits of 'innocent' things and yet I can't imagine many (if any) countries Western democratic doing that.

> The tech is there.

This is why comments such "but spy agencies have always been spying, it's their job" have always pissed me off. The spy agencies will continue to encroach on our rights the more "tech is here". We now have "smart" devices with mics and cameras in every room, so they're going to use that.

If 30 years from now we'll use some kind of "bluetooth headset" that actually interacts directly with our thoughts, then they'll use that, too, to screen out thoughts and arrest you for "extremist thoughts". There's no limit for how far these people are willing to go - just because "the tech is here".

And the sad part is the vast majority of people don't understand new tech, so they aren't even aware what's happening until it's way too late. And then it's already "normalized" and the government agencies cry about "how much they need it" and do slight of hand tricks with "look over here, this tech helped us save a kid from kidnapping!" -- "but don't look over there, where we abused it in 95% of the cases for our own twisted and vengeful interests."

The tech is not there, actually. Facial recognition is absolute garbage. It borders on being completely useless even in ideal circumstances. Airports might have a slight advantage since they have a list of people they expect to be present (people with upcoming flights) and such, but in my experience systems like what the TSA uses are obstinantly terrible. They most likely have a commercial product purchased from some vendor deployed in ways it was never meant to function with management types forcing everyone to ignore the utter uselessness of the solution. They're going to make their career on deploying the system regardless of whether it works or not.

Ok, so it's fine 'cause everybody else is doing so. A perfectly mature statement, furthermore supported by anecdotal evidence.

Why on earth every single time the US government does something that is, err regretful, there's always a bunch of white nights ready to point out something of the sort 'but all the other kids do it'? Sounds like a recipe for societal disaster indeed.

What we should we at the very least considering is whether this is what we want as a society. Who knows, maybe we do - but not because somebody somewhere is/would/might do the same.

I'd argue the spinner is a nice addition, explicitly reminding people are being filmed and to stop them from doing stupid shit while entering the country.

When arriving, if you have an EU passport you don't even need to go through human immigration/customs. They have a turnstile which scans your passport, then a camera which compares it to your face before letting you through.

I get the dystopian flavour of surveillance in general society -- but I don't really get why it's specifically dystopian that you are recorded by a camera while you stand in line to hand over your government issued photo ID to a government agent with pretty broad discretion to make your day pretty awful.

I'm pretty sure those cameras at Gatwick are supposed to track how long the waiting time is, not to "surveil" you in any meaningful sense.

Might as well just link directly to the manufacturer as these ‘features’ are the selling point of this hardware:

http://www.hrsid.com/product-mflow

Those immigration turnstiles at gatwick are terrifying. I went through it recently and the person beside me put their passport in the wrong way (they put the wrong page in) and an alarm blared out, everyones turnstile locked and armed guards came over to the person only to tell them to put the page in the right way.

The UK have gone bonkers with mass surveillance. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a TV series called "Motorway Cops". The whole point of the series was to showcase all the neat mass surveillance gadgets that even low level police officers have access too.

Pretty sure they will be leveraging the tech casinos already use for face tracking.

> Their current excuse is so thin it hurts.

It's thin to the educated few. But for the uneducated masses, they think government is doing this to help them.

The easiest way for a government to get people to accept tyranny is to scare them with a threat ( external or internal ) and then claim the government is taking away rights in order to protect the public.

The power of fear and propaganda is central to government overreach and control. Whether it is nazi germany's fear mongering over the international jewry or the soviet fear mongering over capitalist west or the fear mongering of communist china, north korea, britain, saudi arabia, israel and of course the US, all governments follow the same script.

"If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid." - coelho

To be fair, they improved slightly over the past 2 years:

> The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret teams from the DHS found that the TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop inspectors from smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.

Are you sure? I was made to take off my fish fur ushanka once on an European airport even though it had no metal in it and didn't cover my face, they were just overzealous (and it only happened once out of 3-6 checks in airports I wore it through).

Also - how forcefully? Just asking firmly or taking your things off? And what about religious hats, like the Sikh headwraps?

I remember something similar in Taiwan in 2008. The ostensible reason was that they want to have a thermal camera pointed at people's faces so that they can see if someone has a fever. I don't expect that face recognition was the real reason at that time.

Also, what do they do with people wearing lots of makeup?

those are sensors for measuring forehead temperature to detect visitors having a fever fever; part of the post SARS measures. http://www.info.gov.hk/info/sars/en/boundarycontrol.htm

having said that, the immigration department recently launched the opt-in self-check-in with facial recognition though

> if it means I can keep my shoes and my belt on going through security, I'm all for it.

The option is already there for this - TSAPre

You can get excited then, because you can be sure this will be used to supplement vs supplant any existing US security theater.

We couldn't lay off the nearly 250,000 active employees of the Security Theater arm of the US Government just because we had an actionable technological solution that reliably worked. We have votes to think about!

You’ve fallen into the trap. Here’s what happened:

1. Add a bunch of ineffective, but annoying so-called security procedures. Truly annoy people. Take off your shoes and belt!!

2. Offer a way out of that nonsense, in exchange for trading away your privacy.

3. Win.

What you really going to store permanently? The fact you travelled is already there, either in your passport or in one of hundreds of databases.

They've had this for a while in immigration at least. Second time I visited (about 2003) I was greeted with a picture of my first visit through immigration there. Shown on a flat panel with a camera on top. Might just've been a tech demo though.

It already is, isn't it? I didn't have to talk to anybody as I went through immigration a couple of months ago, I just scanned my passport, and looked at the camera, and they let me in. Same story for New Zealand.

Or do you mean you wouldn't even have to scan your passport?

CV Dazzle did a good job of making a face look like a not-face a few years ago, but I'm not sure how well it would work today.

I don't think there's any kind of make-up that would be visible to a camera, but not obvious to the naked eye, and still be able to defeat face recognition.

My plan would be to create a new religion in the United States that makes the wearing of face masks and veils in public an essential tenet. After the traditional new-religion battles over tax status and state recognition have been won in the US, shame the European countries into reforming their enabling laws using the mallet of religious liberty.

The downside is that you would likely have to actually believe--or at least convincingly fake--that showing your true face in public is taboo, and that being forcibly unmasked is a horrifying violation of your privacy and personal dignity.

I recall reading a short story that might be useful as basis, wherein everyone wore a mask at all times, and never spoke without providing musical accompaniment from one of a variety of instruments. The economy was based upon reputation and character rather than money, such that you could get most valuable things just by asking for them, but the shopkeepers had to decide that you were good enough to bear them first. The low-status masks were somewhat standardized and uniform, such that you could be "red goblin" for a day, and only play your pocket xylophone, and thus achieve a measure of public anonymity. Then, the next day, you could be "glorious fiery phoenix" and play your double-stringed lyre with brass resonators, and everyone would know you to be a really special and important person, because the craftspeople would never give away their best work to just anybody. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the title and the author, and web searching is turning up nothing.

And unfortunately, that is a very long-term strategy, which would take many years and a lot of cooperation to pull off. Right now, anything you are likely to do to defeat automated facial recognition is likely to get you additional attention from human cops. And depending on where you are, that "attention" may also include extrajudicial punishment for non-conformity.

Honestly? You can't. Even if a perfect spray did exist you wouldn't be able to get even close to half of the population to use it. It would actually be a small minority. There's actually quite a large group of people out there that support things like this.

Since you could only ever get a small group to attempt this it would only draw more scrutiny onto yourself and make your life harder. It wouldn't be enough of an inconvenience for the authorities to care.

The largest group I've heard of is the opt-out of scanners group who refused and always demands xrays. It even made the media. It faded away and now the one or two people that care take an extra few minutes in security getting a pat down. No real change happened.

Hmmm. A few years ago I was talking with a guy who worked on a system that pointed IR cameras at hands and did gesture recognition on them.

They were doing user testing, and one of the folks they tried it out with happened to be a wiring contractor who was in the building at the time. It didn't recognize his hands; the IR cameras could not see them. Turns out that the lubricant he was using to pull cables through conduit was blinding them.

I don't know what the lubricant was, but hopefully this reduces your search space dramatically :-)

I have only ever heard of painting actual shapes on to your face with makeup. I imagine that, whatever your technique, you will get noticed and stopped by security. Especially if the makeup obscures how your face looks compared to your photo ID.

I believe it's automatic with human oversight. In the UK there's always an officer or two watching the feeds from each of the electronic gates. Whether they're actually confirming each match, or just checking for outliers, I don't know though.

I'm glad you quoted the second point, as it combined with this part is what I think the EFF finds concerning:

> These agencies aren’t just collecting biometrics for their own use; they are also sharing them with other agencies like the FBI and with “private partners” to be used in ways that should concern travelers.

This is be big crux of it for me - that the data gets shared outside of the Government, and I'm honestly a bit iffy on it even within Government agencies. Already the false positive rate for many of the identifying methods used in such investigations is too high; a lot of research is being done as to the validity of most forensic analysis regarding fingerprinting (as well as other traditional forensic evidence) and how the justice system is not doing due diligence in their case research, is not being honest with their findings when presenting to court, and public belief in such myths created by TV dramas has dramatically altered jurors' understanding of such evidence.

Basically, such data getting shared out that makes it that much easier for law enforcement to concoct a case is disconcerting, to say the least, and I'm not even part of the population that would be most heavily affected by it.

If this was just being used in one agency or area of focus (Border Control/TSA), it would be a little less disconcerting. It's not great still, but I suppose it's better than the current passport system for figuring out who you are. (As an expat, my biggest fear is losing my passport and proving who I am in a completely foreign country, much less returning to my own country). To be able to shift my means of identification to something I cannot lose or have stolen from me would be very reassuring, as long as it required multiple live samples to verify.

But the fact that this information leaks out by design into a very dangerous world of Law Enforcement that doesn't care to make sure they've got the right guy is frightening. I've dealt with this indirectly as a certain State in the union decided that I was overdue for multiple vehicle violations, even though I had been out of the country for the last 3 years when the incidents took place; it just so happens I share the same name as someone else who is not a very good driver. It took a lot of talking on the phone and finding a way to fax flight information and passport stamps to convince them to stop bothering my parents with letters and phone calls, since their address is my mailing address. I was lucky enough to be able to tell them to "go fuck themselves" with indisputable proof that I was not in the country; others would not nearly be as lucky, that that's pretty frightening.

> Is their theory that someone is going to use a mission impossible face mask to impersonate me and then get me put on a terrorist watch list?

Biometrics are basically useless, but they're useless in two separate contexts.

Using them for access control is useless because of this:

> Last time I checked anyone can take my picture any time I am in public.

Lifting someone's fingerprints or face/iris scan is easy, and fooling an automated scanner is not very expensive. Which makes it terrible access control any time gaining access is worth more than e.g. $50.

> If anything the machines will be more accurate

That is definitively false. Face recognition is one of the things humans evolved to do as a prerequisite to survival. We're really, really good at it. The only reason anyone wants to use machines at all is that they're cheaper and scale better. They are not more accurate. At best they may become as accurate, but that is only a headache because it makes their false positives undesirably convincing.

Which brings us to the second context in which biometrics are useless. Trying to match random people off the street to people on some kind of watch list. Because the false positive rate is a few percent, which is several orders of magnitude higher than the ratio of people on the watch list to people in the general population. So the vast majority of people the machine flags will be innocent.

Worse, the people the machine thinks look like someone on the list, it always thinks that. So you implement something like this and it ruins the lives of anyone who looks enough like someone on the list for the machines to consistently flag them.