Not Ready for Takeoff: Face Scans at Airport Departure Gates
airportfacescans.com
airportfacescans.com
Before there would be a very short wait, you'd walk up to the border guard (one of three or four on duty typically), put your passport on their desk, they'd look at it for three seconds and swipe it, then you'd be on your merry way 10 seconds later. Now you wait for 10 or 15 minutes (if you're lucky), insert your passport into the machine, wait for the silly glass doors to close, have your passport spat back out again, repeat the whole thing, find that you were looking a bit too low, so re-do that and so on until finally the second set of silly glass doors opens and you can move on.
It's a complete failure from a usability point of view.
That's not what it is for.
It's simply to verify that what your passport says about you picture wise matches your face, and to be able to detain you in case you have an outstanding arrest warrant or open traffic fines.
I’ve lost a significant amount of weight since my passport photo was taken. Several human border guards in other counties suggested I get a new passport. One required me to show a second form of ID. The camera system had no issue.
The last time I arrived at Schiphol, I had plenty of time to compare the relative throughput of the gates and manual checks. At best two automated gates have around half the throughput of one equally wide manual desk for EU travellers.
Schiphol's big problem, however, seems to have been using the gates as an excuse to cut back staff too far.
The result, at least, on the D pier, is regular queues of passengers through the passport hall and back up to the main concourse.
From what I read it's the combination of cutting back immigration staff together with airlines (KLM) not sharing their expected passenger numbers anymore plus a significant increase in passengers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa..., Schiphol grew by 9%, year before by 6%
I quite like the automated gates. Per line is more inefficient but total throughput seems higher. Plus, seems quicker to go through.
The EU machines just scan your passport, including RFID data, and take a photo of your face. All of this is then sent to a border guard in a booth who manually matches your face to your passport.
The “efficiency” boost comes from allowing a single border guard to check 4-5 passports simultaneously, without having the delay that comes from waiting for the next person to walk forward and present a passport.
In Heathrow, London, the digital gates process people much faster than normal gates, and have half the staff. Unfortunately they are a little confusing for non-tech literate people who often get stuck.
The US already has a variety of digital gates to _enter_ the country - similar to the digital gates that Heathrow has at immigration - but this article is talking about special electronic gates at _exit_ which I've never seen at any LHR terminal.
However Heathrow T5 (and T2 I believe) have face scanners on departure, for domestic travellers. Passengers on a flight from Heathrow to Glasgow don't need a passport or any other form of photo ID (it's a domestic flight), but they mingle with international transiting passengers who have not immigrated into the UK (say flying Delhi to Heathrow to New York)
To ensure passengers can't bypass immigration by swapping boarding cards, they take photos of domestic passengers on entry to security (either post immigration for Int-domestic transit, or post check in for domestic-domeatic). This is then compared with the passenger actually boarding the flight at the gate, and it's mostly automated (with manual override).
My idea would be when you approach the immigration hall there are 50+ first-step machines where you slide in your passport, it does just enough to detect if you're going to need a grilling or likely to pass through with no questions, then takes your biometrics if required, and then it prints you a number and you head to either an automated gate or low grade desk operator or high grade desk operator for the more thorough processing. It could potentially also discriminate against old people - you don't want a 70 year old queuing for long after a long flight so they get priority etc...
Then again nowadays I'm quite good at figuring out which lines will move faster, it might sound racist, but if a flight from Ethopia has just arrived at KL then I'm going to choose the line with less passengers from that flight as they mostly get grilled or havent got right documentation or completed formalities properly. I also avoid Chinese on exit immigration in BKK as they almost always miss out details from their departures form (perhaps due to no Chinese instructions) and don't heed the advice to move out the way whilst they complete the form. Children can be a problem too, and a short line might be masking a few brats hidden in the leg space of adults, always take a side scan of the line, because 1 child = 1.25x adult time - lifting the brat up for photos etc... Avoid Indians/Pakistans/Bangledash on check-in as they travel with the kitchen sink and 9/10 there going be at least one argument over excess luggage. Sometimes you can't really tell and just look for preparedness - do these people have their passports in their hands ready to go, or buried in the handbags, have they removed their cap or will they wait to be told. grumpy traveler
Why do 300m people have to suffer for the boogeyman terrorist? I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Where does this stop?
This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with control and mass surveillance. It's pretty depressing.
It was already well out of hand when congress approved the patriot act as a knee jerk reaction to terrorism. That was the proverbial straw and everything since has just been gravy for the MIC and other companies milking the government teat.
People are willing to curtail the right to keep and bear arms (and it is a right, whereas there is no official right not to be surveilled in public) for a threat which is within an order of magnitude of it; and we can only really tell what the rate is like with the current countermeasures. If the rate climbs after removing countermeasures, will your opinion change? I'd still be against pervasive surveillance if the rate went up maybe tenfold.
In other words, having a gun as last resort protection against a tyrant isn't hurting anyone the way an extra hour of unproductive scanning and associated privacy intrusions are.
Other than that, you're right.
These are two very different situations. If you fail to understand the difference then I hope you never go out into public armed, and maybe you should consider never owning anything primarily used as a weapon at all.
(In fact, the NRA itself wasn't all that upset about gun control in the fairly recent past.)
And "mass surveillance" would have meant something very different 200 years ago. Why bother writing something into the Bill of Rights when no government could possibly afford to do what they can today?
So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
It's only awkwardly-phrased if you try to read it with 2017 Standard Coastal American English and without the context of the complete document (as it is supposed to be read, evidenced by the rather broad definition of speech and the press applied to the first amendment), the intent of the drafters, and a deep understanding of the writing style and cultural influences on interpretation which affected the drafters' choice of words.
> could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today
The NRA construes the second amendment to the U.S. constitution as the Supreme Court interprets it. If you have a disagreement with the Supreme Court's interpretation and standards regarding the second amendment to the U.S. constitution, state them in terms which thoroughly challenge the painstaking review of evidence which informed their interpretation. I recommend going to the wonderful folks at Oyez, they have recordings (the official transcripts have glaring errors, including literal binary flips of meaning) of hearings and briefs for you to review and couch your disagreement in.
> designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today.
This is false, don't rely on pundits to understand and accurately convey a history of the design and manufacture of arms. There were semi-automatic firearms (handguns and rifles) of arbitrary magazine capacity in manufacture at least 40 years prior (and if you include the Kalthoff repeater [which may have not been commonly known in the colonies, and requires two actions to fire], 155 or more years prior) to the drafting of the second amendment (December 1791). Furthermore, the amendment actually makes no attempt to define the type of arms covered, not even defining that they be firearms or specifically rifles or handguns or guns (cannons) or shotguns.
> So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
The right to keep and bear arms is a natural one, because the purpose is self defense, and the common defense. Humans are defined largely by their capacity to design, build, and/or use tools, so it is obvious that access to the tools which have become essential to the natural right to defend your person would themselves warrant the same recognition.
It is a natural right to use appropriate and proportionate means to defend your property (including your life), and to retain those means in advance of such an occasion.
Governments are fallible just like human beings. I suppose in some sense it is arrogant to believe the US will always remain a democracy and certainly other countries have much more tumultuous histories.
I still like the idea of a totally open and transparent society but without something totally incorruptible and unbiased taking the role of government it does not seem practical.
for instance, see the Stasi.
...however, if intelligence gathered were all open-access, and classification abolished, I'd be into it.
Let's say I visit a church regularly, and someone who later turns out to be a terrorist was often there at the same time. Not surprising, since houses of worship often have predictable schedules of events.
How do I prove I wasn't collaborating with the terrorist?
Interestingly merely paranoia of surveillance results in self muzzling and self imposed restrictions.
In the end the results are not conducive for societies progress.
My dad got me paranoid about surveillance. Once I grew up old enough to look more than 2 years ahead I started censoring myself because the internet never forgets and I don't want to give a dossier full of potentially incriminating data when/if we slide from democracy to dictatorship.
The upside is that social media is ruined for me forever ;). In light of recent commentary, links to depression and addiction it looks like it turned out healthier for me.
Nonetheless I'm fully aware of the level of self-censorship I tend to sustain.
The Panopticon™ claims you robbed the bank. You know you were at work, in a meeting, and your coworkers vouch for your alibi. But the Panopticon™ is "always" right, so you get fast-tracked through the courts (saves taxpayer money not to have the case dragged out) and sentenced to ten years for a crime you didn't commit (your public defender was a huge help at sentencing). Because after all, if you couldn't trust the Panopticon™, then why the hell did they spend $600 billion of taxpayer money building it?
American society was founded on the bedrock of a few principles: you're innocent until you're proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, crime is prosecuted and not prevented, your reputation can be reset by moving somewhere new and making a new beginning, and trust, faith, and forgiveness are more worthy aims than proof, evidence, and justice, for the latter can only really obtained with great difficulty and cost through the courts. Panopticons go against all these principles.
Is that really the point of terrorism? Is there even such a thing as a general "point" to all terrorism? I would assume there as many different goals as there are terrorists, or at least terrorist organizations.
Rather, what's more interesting is what the people in power do to take advantage of terrorism. The policies they implement, programs they put into place, etc. Terrorism (and other external threats) can act as a convenient cover for domestic actions that would otherwise be scrutinized.
And then there are the more mundane issues. Sometimes the changes that become visible to the public come from relatively low-level managers and officials, who simply enjoy playing with a bigger budget and new toys. It's not all conspiracies in dark rooms at the top.
We have to give democracy its due as well. Just because people can vote doesn't mean we inspire the most desirable behavior in our leaders, because the masses aren't rational. Who wants to be the politician responsible for having weakened security before the next terrorist attack? It's similar to being "soft on crime." The public will hold you responsible, right or wrong.
Getting the victim to raise its defenses doesn’t have to be a goal, but it can.
How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors?
Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem.
The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right?
[I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process].
DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable.
I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too?
Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement.
If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points.
Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?
There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged.
Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?'
The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.
We're not talking about corporate surveillance we're talking border control. Emotionally these things are connected, practically, the system is just trying to validate the eligibility of people to use travel documents.
What do you expect people are doing at country entry and exit points and do you want them to do something that works or not?
I think it's valid to say that for ideological reasons you don't really want travel documents matched against travellers properly but you do need to understand your own position properly and how that plays out politically to be able to effectively fight that battle.
Firstly, we are talking about corporate surveillance. Maybe not today, but certainly tomorrow. The Australian government is already gaging private sector interest in their facial ID database, which was quietly sneaked through legislation as an anti terror measure only 2 years ago.
Secondly, these records, and all records, inevitably reach the hands of government, corporate, and finally criminal actors - usually in that order. This is again only a question of when, not if. And with access to all that data? That goes back to my original point - we haven't even thought about the implications of having such data available. But we have had a glimpse with e.g. feds getting caught looking at data of love interests.
This isn't just 'border control'. Border control is merely one of hundreds of facets in everyday life where people are being stripped of this privacy by actors who ultimately do not represent their interests.
Are you seriously going to claim that this removal of privacy and systemic logging of everyone's life is a reasonable way to tackle border control so we can stop some terrorists from being one of America's least significant causes of death? More people die to lightning strikes every year in the US than to mishaps at border control resulting in terrorism or such.
Bearing in mind that you don't need to hook up to any external databases to do this (all the data is on the chip)
Like seriously, why would you NOT do that?
Who is this really going to stop?
I don’t see how this works.
Edit: Remember, it can’t be a valid passport that actually looks like you in this case or it defeats the point of the disguise. Remember, this only makes sense if you’re trying to evade detection, and it makes no sense to evade the camera by standing out like a sore thumb to the humans.
Not a hard thing to have that happen to you these days considering the "pre-flight interview" they're now doing.
DHS needs to justify the benefits and costs of creating such a system. That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system, and what failure rate is acceptable?
If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.
While many people overstay their visa, the vast majority are not going to get someone else to depart the country on their passport, which is what this system is supposed to prevent.
Remember, even 10 seconds per passenger adds up. There were 243,195,022 international passengers in the year ending March. Figure 1/2 of them were departures. That's 121 million people.
At 10 seconds per passenger that's 38 years of additional waiting. If we figure everyone's time is worth $7.25/hour then that's about $2.5 million of additional wasted time.
How much fraud do we need to stop to make this time and money worthwhile?
I'd rather spend that money on reducing a much bigger sort of fraud - the tens of billions in wage theft each year.
Well, it's probably not really for safety or security, and they clearly don't give a hoot if you're inconvenienced or not.
Consider instead:
- Government contracts routed to political constituents (follow the money -- we know the millimeter scanners were corruptly funded)
- Tons of ground-truth data for further development and deployment. It'd be interesting to find out if they correlate against images captured by vanilla airport security cameras, as well as the cameras on the roadways or public transportation to the airport, and in rental car lots. This helps answer the question of "do we have to upgrade all the crappy domestic cameras to get ubiquitous surveillance, or can we get away with what's out there now?"
A billion or two spent to catch one or two terrorists isn't the point; actual bad guys are utterly optional, and maybe even a distraction.
Not sure how this applies specifically to visa-overstays? A visa overstay need not check your facial identification. It just needs to check that your document + visa overstayed the alloted time period or whatever rule it's comprised of.
Sounds like a business rule a code-monkey could implement within a couple programming hours.
That's the only justification given for the program.
It's not simply visa overstay. Sidebar 2 explains it as:
> “Visa overstay travel fraud” refers to a situation in which a foreign national wishes to remain in the United States undetected past the expiration of his visa and, to do so, arranges to have a conspirator leave the country in his place using the visa holder’s credentials. This creates an “exit record” in the visa holder’s name, fraudulently leading the government to believe that the visa holder has left the country, when in fact he has remained past the expiration of the visa, or “overstayed.”
That requires some sort of comparison between the documents and the body of the person leaving. It cannot be done in only a couple of programming hours.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, just observing.
Specifically it was always used as a sharp contrast with the policies of the Soviet Bloc which did not allow people to freely leave their countries.
Robeson declared that it was “rather absurd” that he was
not “allowed to travel because of my friendship - open,
spoken friendship - for the Soviet people and the
peoples of all the world.”
citation needed. First off, it does, but it only becomes visible to passengers when they violate the conditions and try to re-enter. Second, this is not the definition of a 'free country'. Third, by modern definitions of a 'free contry' (1) the USA should not be considered 'THE land of the free'.
(1) https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-...
I can't think of any other ways to leave the UK than by boat, train, and aeroplane, and I've been checked at all of them.
UKBF checks passports on departure at the Eurostar. At manchester airport at least, there are no routine outbound passport checks by UKBF
On travelling to the continent by boat (hook of holland) checks at the far end. Eurostar checks at re near end. Flying checks at the far end.
I assume that Americans get exit stamps at the first check. Most countries that stamp passports give entry and exit stamps, whether you have a visa or not. More and more counties rely on computers to keep track of you though - Israel used to stamp you at Tel Aviv, now you get a piece of paper that you return on exit (you still et stamped at Erez when going in/out of Gaza). In 2015 Australia stamped when you use the manual system, but not the automatic system. I don't recall if the US stamped my passport last time on the way in, I don't think Canada did. Hong Kong stopped in 2013 I think.
It's a shame, I like stamps. Plenty of them at Lagos last month though - 2 stamps on the way in, 2 on the way out, as well as the full page visa.
The bigger issue is that Congress hasn't issued a specific mandate for this collection (by a private entity) and spending authority for the apparently ~$1B program. The article's concerns are for a more intrusive security state without congressional authority.
DHS’ current face scan-based program also may not comply with federal law. The program may exceed the authority granted to DHS by Congress because Congress has never explicitly authorized biometric collections from Americans at the border.26 Even if DHS has sufficient legal authority for the program, DHS has failed to complete a prerequisite public rulemaking process for the program, as mandated by federal law.
Coming back the same day, there was a line to drive back into the US that took several hours. Luckily, I was allowed back in with a driver’s license by the agent.
*I was dropping off 2 American friends who were taking a day trip to visit Tijuana, but the road signs were terribly marked and I crossed over unintentionally.
Reentry theoretically shouldn't require a passport, as long as you can prove citizenship.
Posted about this 200 days ago.
"The first legislative mandate for an automated identity check on departing foreign visitors dates back to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and since 9/11 Congress has passed three laws requiring the Department of Homeland Security to set up a biometric exit system."
Doesn't address the citizen part but they'll sell it as "national security" and of course citizen data is immediately discarded </s>.
https://www.fedscoop.com/cbp-will-implement-long-mandated-bi...
Edit: Apparently they responded to this report a few days ago: https://www.fedscoop.com/cbp-biometric-and-face-recognition-...
https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/1674/~/report-d...
The cameras do just that. The problem is that it is done poorly.
And yet you already have to show an ID and a boarding pass to a DHS agent as part of security in order to get to the gate in the first place.
If only those clowns could focus on making the absurd bit of theater they currently have even just the slightest bit more efficient.
Maybe efficiency is not the goal. Cui bono? We got all those nifty body scanners in part because Michael Chertoff, right after serving as director of DHS, went around promoting scanners on behalf of his consulting client, body scanner manufacturer Rapiscan[1].
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/airport-scanner-...
http://news.delta.com/delta-opens-first-biometric-self-servi...
Less pleased about stuff like "we need your passwords". That's invasive bullsh.
There's been some rumblings of the "uniqueness" of fingerprints being far less than you'd think. Fingerprinting everyone who flies would just produce more false positives. The people that's bad for overlap a lot with the people who stand to benefit from invasive security theater.
As a child I recall an antique book on criminology which spoke glowingly of the reliability of fingerprints in investigations, and cited the unsuccessful defense of one convict who claimed (sometime in the late 19th century) that fingerprinting was a 'hazy and fallacious method imported from France, where many innocent men have been convicted by it." It is true that juries have an unfortunate tendency to believe in the first order results of any technical procedure, from ducking stools to DNA matching.
Google couldn't help me find the original source.
I'm ok with the idea of an opt-in program like GE. With that you understand that your data is being scrutinized and that you're voluntarily giving them your image data+your biodata. I'm not cool with this new introduction of an exit verification as that it's not a formal thing and it's just being pushed on the populous.
This kind of thing really makes you wonder when the American people became enemy combatants. (This has been happening for years)
The card is for crossing the border via car. You can use Global Entry at the NEXUS (when arriving from Canada) and SENTRI (inbound from Mexico) lanes, and the procedure there is you are to wave your RFID card across a reader as you approach the agent's booth.
As for Mexico, you just need to register your vehicle on the GOES/TTP portal to use your Global Entry card in the SENTRI lanes. (The vehicle inspection requirement was dropped recently.)
It isn't "opt-in" for non-US Americans, one of the reasons why I will probably never visit the US.
> This kind of thing really makes you wonder when the American people became enemy combatants. (This has been happening for years)
As opposed to everybody who just wants to visit the country? At this rate, I wouldn't be too surprised if 10 years from now they gonna require the full biometric program from foreign visitors: DNA, retina, face, fingerprints, speech samples and whatnot.
I do understand the need for security and proper authentification, I just think these are often used as an excuse for building some kind of police state with a vast database of people with all their attributes from physical (biometrics) to mental (crawling social media).
The last part might seem quite "out there", but it's quite real [0] and has already been for a while [1].
Also doesn't help that all of this reminds me way too much about biometric data programs the US military conducted in Iraq, still sitting on that data and using it [2].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/us-approves-social-media-b...
So it makes it pretty easy to fly once, twice a year at most. Between the CO2 output of a cross-country flight and all the responsible parties making flying as unappealing as possible, if I never step foot on a plane again it would be fine by me.