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.
Because automated iris-at-a-distance systems that can track and identify non-cooperative human targets scale a lot differently than tetchy border guards. Pervasive CCTV is one thing if it's mostly not watched (and only used to piece together what happened after incidents), pervasive facial/iris-recognition that is watched by computers 24/7 and tracks every single human's movements is a whole other thing. Also frankly, given you recognise the ability of customs/border/immigration personnel to make your day awful, why do you seem fine giving those people even more power and methods to pervasively surveil and track people?
> I'm pretty sure those cameras at Gatwick are supposed to track how long the waiting time is
Even per publicly-available information, this is flagrantly false. Queue management does not require enrolment of the passenger's face/iris data with their boarding pass, as indeed happens at Gatwick. This is explicitly for tracking passengers through every area of the airport:
http://www.professionalsecurity.co.uk/news/press-releases/mf...
http://www.planetbiometrics.com/article-details/i/1850/desc/...
Then they did a really good job of making me feel like I'm in the opening scene of Half Life 2.
airports that operate common departure lounges[2] must comply with
UK Border Force conditions that are necessary to prevent any
circumvention of UK immigration controls.
This includes a requirement to capture a facial biometric for each
domestic passenger on entry and exit of a departure lounge in order
to verify their identity.
[2] AIUI what they mean by "common departure lounge" is a lounge accessible to international and domestic passengers without having to pass fully through to arrivals and re-checking in on another flight, but I could be wrong.
I strongly concur that civil aviation needs to be protected from malfeasance. However, all this fancy iris/face-tracking machinery is only useful for, well, tracking and identifying people and doesn't do anything to prevent people from artfully concealing explosives through security checkpoints. Furthermore, it's possible to hide on-body contraband from full-body imaging devices: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Afaict, there's too much development/use of methodology that has secondary uses for mass surveillance (and isn't even good at detecting explosives), and not enough focus on detecting energetic materials. Large-scale automated iris/face detection on noncooperative human targets is a dangerous tool in the wrong hands and it is frankly disingenuous to develop it (and make its use socially-acceptable) in the name of improving civil aviation security.