Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding | Hacker News Reader

Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

nextgov.com

185 pointsus0r176 comments

The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing

Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%.

The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.

So at least they are clear that this is a cost-saving method for airlines, it has nothing to do with speeding boarding or making boarding more secure.

This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said. “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.

Oh wait, I guess it is about speeding boarding... but is boarding pass scanning really what slows boarding? I always seem to get backed up in the line at the plane door, waiting for everyone to stow their carryons and sit down. Most busy flights have two agents scanning and most people who have flown more than once scan their pass/phone quickly.... I'm surprised it's any faster getting people to stand in the right spot and stand still for a photo.

Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about.

In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases.

The real benefit to both this, and supermarket self-scanning, is another low wage employee can be canned. This isn't a very marketing friendly message so it's no surprise that this isn't the message that publicised loudest.

Per item? Sure. For small numbers of items, counting time spent waiting? Heck no, I regularly get through self-checkout much faster than people who get into a regular queue, in no small part because there's often a few times more self-checkout scanners than there are open checkouts.

When you have a full cart or two, the speedier scanning at a traditional checkout pays off. But usually both are available, not just self checkout, so you're free to choose when that isn't the case.

Not round here.

The big Tesco nearby has a single combined queue for all the 20 or so self-scan checkouts. They are rarely all in service. With a few items it is now always faster to go to an operator checkout unless you go in at 4am. The express lanes of "under 10 items" or "cash only" are a memory of a former, much faster time.

There is often an employee aggressively marshalling people to the self-scan checkouts at every available opportunity and trying to pull them away from the staffed lines.

In the local Pound shop they tried replacing all checkouts with self-scan, getting rid of all others. They had to reverse this a month or two later and put back half a dozen, now brand new, staff operated tills - ripping out a few weeks-old self-scanners to make space. They are again slower thanks to rarely having staff nearby to handle the steady stream of staff authorisations and errors, so there's a big delay every time someone wanders over from the back of the store to wave their bar code and immediately disappear again.

Sometimes it works though. At the Kings Cross Waitrose off peak there isn't a queue and the whole process is pretty quick. The good ones don't even bother weighing the stuff which speeds things.

Checkout queue optimization at a supermarket is pretty easy. It's all about time per scan. A good cashier (60-70 scans per minute) can be something like 50% more productive due to scan time savings. A slow cashier (10 scans per minute) is a drag.

Self-checkout is all about cutting labor hours, period. It is both slower and leads to much higher shrink (as much as 150% more) than a manned casher. Stores hope to make more money by keeping the store open longer. The hacks around the slowness of checkout without cashiers is for people optimizing for time is online ordering or shopping at midnight.

>> Self-checkout is all about cutting labor hours, period.

That is exactly the case. If you pay 10$ an hour for 3 shifts 8 hours each, this makes 3x8x10 = $240 a day. That is $7200 in 30 days per one checkout spot. To setup equipment for self-checkout and maintain it order of magnitude cheaper compared to self checkout. Another factor is eliminating managerial overhead while dealing with human beings, as one store manager told me referring to self-checkouts: "They are never sick, they do not have an attitude, they do not quit and they can't be rude to customers".

Oh they can be rude to customers all right! And their attitude - push this button! Scan again! Put that item back on the scale! Alert! Alert! I despise them with every fibre of my being.

Yeah, I think the "rude to customers" thing (I've heard it too) is far too focused on the act of rudeness rather than the effects (unhappiness / lower retention).

Self-checkouts trade one kind of unhappiness for another, and many (most?) are horrifying experiences. There are a few that are reasonably quick and user-friendly, but certainly not all. Most seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel in an effort to squeeze a few more $ off the purchase price.

60-70 scans per minute? A scan per second? Yeah I'm not buying it.

When I was a front-end supervisor at a market in high school, about 10% of the cashiers hit that. IIRC, they got a $0.15/hr bonus.

If you scanned less than 20/minute you had about a month to get to 30 before you were either canned or lost hours.

I’m guessing you’ve never been to an Aldi. They seem to have worked out high speed scanning.

I have in fact never been to an Aldi.

That’s not the right comparison. What you want to compare is how long it takes at a staffed queue vs an unstaffed one once you get to the front of the line (for the same purchase).

Things might be faster now with the unmanned ones, but the contention is that that’s only because they opened more checkout terminals. Granted, they wouldnt have done that with staffed ones because of the increased expense, but let’s not get confused about the real cause.

This seems like a faulty comparison. Space for registers is naturally limited. A single traditional register is replaced by 3 self-checkouts at my local grocery stores. Usually they opt for 6x self checkout replacing two traditional registers, manned by a single employee who can help with problems. In these cases it's not a question of staffing, but of space and the increase in space efficiency.

As always it depends on what you want to measure. Comparing total checkout time including queuing though for 'speed (items/s)' is going to naturally favor the self-checkout because the choice between normal and self checkout is heavily weighted by the number of items a particular person has. Anecdotally I've never seen anyone go through self checkout with a full cart but see it all the time with the normal registers. Additionally there's rarely the same number of traditional registers actually staffed compared to the number of self checkouts.

I agree. I would say that a better measure than items/s would be customers/hr (closer to throughput rather than speed) averaged across an entire store with and without self-checkouts. As you said, the optimal setup will depend heavily on the mix of customer types ("express" vs. full cart) a particular store gets. There's probably a good ratio for most stores between the two and I think that's what they're all converging on now.

Agreed that space is a part of the comparison, but what I've seen is that although they put 3 checkouts in the y-axis space of a single staffed lane, they end up having to use up almost 3 times as much space in the x-axis to allow people to pass each other, which simply isn't necessary to allow in a staffed lane. So I don't believe the amount of space is that different.

No, there really is a huge difference. It's more like 1.5 times the y-axis space in your example, they could get 6 self service checkouts in the space of 2 staffed ones:

    >|1|   |2|   <    >|1|      |4|<
     | |   | |         |2|      |5|
     | |   | |         |3|      |6|

Or similar. What does slow things down is elderly or people apprehensive of technology, and tourists or others encountering them for the first time...

Space comes with a price too. If you ignore all costs, a traditional checkout that is read when you walk up is probably faster most of the time vs an available self-checkout.

>What you want to compare is how long it takes at a staffed queue vs an unstaffed one once you get to the front of the line (for the same purchase).

Maybe if you're selling a checkout system. Personally I care how fast I can go from "got things" to "left building". (or maybe more accurately: left home -> returned home, but that has a lot more variables)

Even a small number of produce items takes a long time because of the time to look up the number or find the sticker to enter and then weigh.

The other benefit of self-checkout is you can fit perhaps 8 machines in the space that you used to use for 3 lanes, so even though an individual checkout might take longer, overall you can probably get higher throughput on the self-checkout.

> The real benefit...

It is possible for there to be multiple benefits. In fact this is the most desirable, since when there is an immediate economic benefit to both sides, it is incentivized to happen.

In the case of supermarket self-scanning, sure, the supermarket can reduce costs.

However, the benefit to the customer is in a shorter total time through checkout. Entropy causes customers to arrive at checkouts in spurts, rather than there being a steady flow. It is expensive for stores for checkout operators to remain idle (and would be passed on in higher prices). So customers have to queue instead of there being more checkout operators available during spurts.

On the other hand, the cost of maintaining extra self-checkout machines costs very little. So in practice, they tend to be available to handle spurts of activity, resulting in faster overall checkout times for customers too.

For the stores: yes, reduced costs. For the customers: reduced costs result in lower prices in healthy markets, and also time to traverse checkouts is faster.

The same can be applied to airlines. Fewer staff at the line at the gate results in reduced staffing costs: sure. But also: less standing around in lines and less juggling at the front of the line (especially for the infirm, or those with kids, etc) is also a clear benefit to passengers.

It is cynical to ignore the other half of the benefits and focus just on costs. And in any case, reduced costs for the company results in lower prices for consumers.

> On the other hand, the cost of maintaining extra self-checkout machines costs very little. So in practice, they tend to be available to handle spurts of activity

If only! At the (UK) Tesco metro near my workplace, the staff have this insane habit of keeping half or fewer of the available self-checkout machines in operation. The rest of them have a big symbol like a stop-sign and are unusable.

Only if a big queue builds up will the single attending staff member go round and laboriously make the other machines available, whilst simultaneously having to attend to the frequent weighing issues caused by the machines. By the time they're done with this the lunchtime rush is practically over.

I mentioned this to a work colleague who suggested the reason is that they want to reduce the amount of time counting cash out of the machines at the end of the day, so having fewer machines in operation is preferable.

That doesn't make sense - you would think the machines could track their cashbox balances perfectly, requiring dumping it in a bag, printing a status report/receipt/audit log, and attaching that to the bag. No counting required!

Aldi and Lidl - the discount supermarkets in the UK manage just fine with spurts without a self scan machine anywhere. They are constantly opening and closing checkouts as the people waiting varies. They seem to have a default to get staff off tills and back to the rest of the store when people waiting drops to some prescribed number.

Go in really early or late and there are no lines occupied until a customer waits - usually no more than a minute as they appear to have a strong focus on keeping an eye out.

I would say there's a shorter overall wait, and a far higher likelihood of getting out of the store in the shortest overall time than any of the alternatives at the competition.

So no, I haven't seen any of these much-touted speed benefits. Quite the opposite frequently.

The actual scanning might be slower, but the queues are much shorter for self-scanning at the stores where I by groceries.

Also, where I live we have portable scanners. You pick up a scanner when you enter the store, you scan all your groceries and put them directly in the bag (or under the stroller) and when you reach the exit you leave the scanner and pay at a terminal and off you go.

Man I hate these with a passion. I always forget one thing or so, and then every now and then you're selected for a random check, and you feel like a common thief and have to do the walk of shame to the actual register for re-scanning and paying.

Also, the self scanners require you to weigh your fruits & vegetables at the f&v section. Although it seems they're adding scales to the self checkout boots lately, so hopefully I can start using the in-store scanning the way I use Anglo-Saxon self-checkout booths soon - just load up in the shop, scan everything yourself at the end.

Portable scanners FTW! Once you get competent with them it's ridiculous how much time you save. Add to that bringing your own bags and you are scanned and out in little more time than it took to do the actual shopping.

Every now and then you get audited, but I'll happily pay that price in order to have the scanner.

Though the difference between a supermarket checkout and an airplane is once you're through the checkout, you're free to leave.

You don't walk out the supermarket door and have to wait for a hundred people to load their cars and make their way out of the parking lot. Which means that getting you through the checkout faster just means more time waiting to get out of the parking lot.

Here in the Netherlands (at Albert Heijn stores) one small change from the US system makes all the difference: they don't weigh the product after you scan it. No 'unexpected item in bagging area' etc. It goes extremely quickly.

If there's a cashier with more than one person waiting I will go to the self-scanners.

I think it’s much more convenient with self-checkout, because I’m not holding up the line. I can take my sweet time and pack my bags as I go. It’s really a lot of trust being placed with the customer, it’d be very easy to shoplift.

It's not easy (not any easier) to shoplift because there are random checks. People are much less inclined to put something extra in the bag if they know they can be checked. The ones that do shoplift are not using the bags with a lot of other groceries to do it, they likely hide items in their clothing. In such a mode, it doesn't make any difference how and whether they check out any actual paid items.

Identity checks are handled by TSA, not airline employees, so this scan has nothing to do with security. They check your boarding pass to make sure you have paid for the flight you are getting on.

Also "99% accuracy" can mean it has a 1% false-negative rate rather than false-positive, in which case they will just defer to scanning the boarding pass like normal.

No, for international flights the airline additionally checks your passport at the gate (at least in the US).

Correct. And they're essentially acting as outward immigration, since the airline's passport records are used to mark the unwanted/foreigners (like me) as departed.

But the system is quite flaky, my arrival/departure record is missing a few departures - and I think that's where CBP want to improve things, possibly so they can more legitimately claim that someone overstayed when their records are incomplete. (And I guess also to spot passport swaps.)

The airline checks passports on the way out as they are required to bring you back if you are denied entry at the destination. They try hard not to pay that cost, so they want to make sure you have a passport, all required visas, haven't been barred from the destination, and so on.

Normally they do not really pay tor that cost either as your return ticket is void after being denied entry. But it is indeed inconvenient for them.

Fair point, but it does presuppose you have a return ticket, which isn't always the case.

It should come as no surprise the CBP will cooperate with other government departments, i.e. ICE. What would be interesting is finding out how they got funding for this rubbish.

Judging from when they had these at SecTac in June, it just made everything much, much slower.

> It should come as no surprise the CBP will cooperate with other government departments, i.e. ICE

Considering the "C" in both agency acronyms stands for the same thing, it would be more surprising if they didn't work very closely together. Personally, I'm surprised they're separate agencies in the first place.

To make sure you can get into the country when they land. They don't want to fly you back.

They also scan boarding passes at the gate to verify that all checked bags have a corresponding passenger on the aircraft.

Plus they are required to know how many souls they have on board and who.

On most flights within the Schengen area your boarding pass is no more manually checked. That's unless you fly business or are a high value status customer.

Instead you just scan your boarding pass / smart phone yourself.

I can't imagine that this is in any way slower than a face scan.

I thought airlines or airports were required to check your identity to endure that the checked in luggages fly along the passenger who checked them in, in case there is a bomb or something. Granted this rule is a bit absurd in a world where most terrorist attacks are suicide attacks.

It depends on the airport.

Certainly when a borading pass, matched to a passenger who checked in luggage, is not used for boarding the luggage will be unloaded.

Identity check really depends on the airport and airline. Sometimes your identity is checked when you enter the secure area, sometimes at the gate and sometimes not all.

Even at airports that don't check identities airlines - notably budget airlines - may check id at the gate.

It may also happen that id is (spot) checked upon exiting the plane, but this is very rare.

That's only applicable for flights within the Schengen area. Passport checks upon leaving or entering the Schengen area are pretty strict. Essentially every piece of id is checked towards the SIS[1]. But within Schengen and depending on the airport there may be no checks at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Information_System

I believe this rule changed years ago when airports introduced 100% luggage screening.

I fly from Schiphol with great regularity and my boarding pass is definitely checked every time by a person (as is my passport) right before boarding the plane. Usually the same happens on the return leg, and the majority of my trips are within Schengen.

I'm actually surprised that Schiphol does that. My informal survey indicates that ex-Eastern European countries tend to check more as do the French.

In Zurich your id is virtually never checked on Schengen flights. Last time I flew through Vienna security wanted to see the boarding pass, but not the ID. Dusseldorf also didn't check when I flew through it last (alas, a few years ago).

I know at the Oslo airport it's fairly common to never show ID or your boarding pass to a person if you're flying within Schengen. --Check in at the automated kiosk, put on your own luggage tag, scan the tag at the bag drop, and you're done there. Passing through security means scanning your boarding pass rather than showing it to someone most of the time, and finally many of the gates have automated doors where you scan your boarding pass again to board the plane. The same applies to other Scandinavian airports as well.

From Schiphol on Schengen flights frequently (~50% of the time) no one checks anything in my experience outside of scanning the QR to get into security, and into the plance.

It can also depend on the airline - only some airlines check passports within Schengen (I've only heard of it being required by LCCs)

In my experience some airports check but most do not. At least Arlanda, Brussels, Chopin and Vienna did not check when I last was there.

Also a QR code would be a lot more precise IMO

Definitely not a time-saving measure. The time limiting factor is the actual getting-on-the-plane-and-putting-your-carryon-away-and-getting-out-of-the-aisle part. Often I get my boarding pass scanned and go stand in line on the gangway.

In fact a mathematical algorithm was developed for loading faster[1] but I'm not sure anybody tried that yet.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html

> if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%

Is this worse than the current security measures in place while boarding?

Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.

> if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent

The same place where you literally already have to have your passport scanned, your face photographed, you're recorded in every area that isn't a restroom, where if you're not a US national your fingerprints taken, and they literally scan you beneath your clothes? You're worried about your privacy _there_?

A federal agency does that passport scanning and id check, I didn't expect them to share the same information with every airport agency in the country.

I'm fine with the TSA scanning my passport, and the airport filming me. What I'm not so fine with is the airport also having my photo and identity, so now they aren't just filming me every place I walk in the airport, but they are also correlating that to my identity.

Just wait till it gets mapped to you when you enter the airport, and then they build a profile of your airport shopping behavior.

It’s not like there aren’t CCTVs in airports. They have your face on many records that they keep much longer.

They have my picture, but they don't have my name. But when the airports get the passport photo database to implement this photo check-in, then they'll have my name too.

>> The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing

>> Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos

I think what they mean is that they carried out laboratory tests where a test subject stood facing the system's camera and the system tried to match their face to a database of pictures of peoples' faces, then decided whether the subject's face matched one in its database.

There is a lot that one can do to make this kind of testing give much better results than it should (e.g. use a small database, rather than the entire US passport photo database plus photos of visiting foreigners). This does not presuppose malice- a bit of sloppiness or choices dictated by budget restriction are plenty enough to "spike" the results.

On the other hand, even assuming 100% accurate evaluation one can expect a machine vision system's accuracy to fall way down when it's deployed in the real world, where conditions can no longer be as strictly controlled as in the lab.

So as a rule of thumb, we can probably assume that a 99% accuracy in the lab translates to ~75% accuracy in the wild.

> e.g. use a small database, rather than the entire US passport photo database plus photos of visiting foreigners

Doing so would be wildly inefficient. You need your passport to check in for your flight. When boarding the plane, you don't need to check someone's face against the entire passport database, only against the passports which have been checked into the flight, which is particularly important in terminals with shared domestic/international departures where entry is possible without a passport and the passport can be transferred to somebody after check-in.

But the main reason why it's anyway infeasible is because flights are rarely full of people of a single nationality; scanning peoples' faces against a wide-ranging passport photo database effectively means scanning their faces against some kind of global database of the faces of everybody from around the world. Assembling a database like that, apart from the ethical issues, is politically infeasible.

Remember - this system doesn't advocate for people to not need their passports at all when traveling. They still need them - just not after check-in. The question is whether the system is more or less accurate than a human being at matching passport photos to faces, and based on what we know about racial bias, the answer to that is probably that facial recognition is more accurate by now.

Well, the description of how the system works, in the article, makes it sound like it has a database of passport photos for US citizens, and a database of photos taken on entering the country for citizens of other countries:

>> The new veriScan system developed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority—with guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection—scans the faces of travelers approaching the gate. The system then compares the photo to a gallery that includes images of that person—either their passport photo for U.S. citizens or the photo taken of foreign nationals when they entered the country.

So that's definitely not just the passports that have been checked into the flight- foreign nationals in particular may have entered the country at any time and place other than before boarding a flight at Dulles.

Which is why there are privacy concerns in the first place- because it can be used to track the movment of people across multiple trips.

  you don't need to check someone's face against the entire
  passport database, only against the passports which have
  been checked into the flight

Even simpler than that, some UK airports have 'epassport gates' * [1] where you present your passport on a scanner and your face is photographed at the same time, so it only needs to compare your face against your passport.

Sadly the gates are still slow and unreliable, even at that seemingly simple task.

* Admittedly for immigration rather than boarding [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPassport_gates

99% accurate doesn't necessarily mean 1% wrong identification. It can merely mean the 1% is a "don't know" indeterminant result that doesn't meet some specified confidence level, for which you fall back to the paper scanning method.

It's not about protecting anyone.

No terrorist organization is going to re-attempt 9/11, because why would you? Repetitions of the Mumbai attacks (notably in Paris) will be the norm, along with mass violence at a low intensity as Muslim radicals simply migrate in huge numbers into Europe and North America.

I agree that we just need to keep a secure level on flights, although I've come to a conclusion over the last few years. That conclusion is that either Terrorists are not smart enough or they just have an agenda that is being pushed by someone specifically on a specific target for whatever reason.

I'll expand a bit. For the past 5 years I've been travelling every 2 weeks using an airplane. Thats mainly within Europe. I've been to airports within Europe, specifically Santorini Airport, Mykonos Airport, Chania Airport where I've seen things going on that really doesn't make sense, nor it makes sense to my on why terrorist groups wouldnt prefer those kind of airports for their attack. On Mykonos airport 2 years ago, Security check was handled by 2 young police officer in their very early 20's, no supervisor, no metal detectors no nothing. A wheelchair went ahead and they were trying to help the wheelchair to get front and they completely disregarded security. I wasn't searched or anything and I got boarded to a flight going to London. Someone could easily pass any kind of weapon in there. (The airport has since got renovated and prolly it goes with the European standards nowadays).

Santorini Airport 4 years ago to London, again flight going to London, there were so many people waiting and there was only 1 police officer in his late 50's trying to do security checks for hundreds of people. You understand how that system can fail. Again I got no checks on me or anything. Bare in mind both airports I am speaking of had no way to check cabin luggage for anything suspicious, it had to be done by the police officer looking into the bag, and that only was done if he thought that you could be carrying something. I saw him performing it once. (Again this airport has been renovated prolly keeps the European standards now)

Chania airport 1 year ago to Athens, they had around 5 security personel and 1 police officer. A friend of the police officer rocks up with a small hand bag, police officer silently asks him infront of me if he is carrying any firearms with him. He replies yes, gives him the handbag, passes through security and I saw his id he wasn't a police officer but a civilian, the police officer passes the bag behind the counters and proceeds giving it to him after the security check... (Nowadays I dont see police officers around the security but it did happen a year ago)

Thats only 3 airports I've been on and I've seen how easy it is to pass anything in an airplane and 2 of those airplanes were headed to London which is one of the big city capitals and targets. And I am pretty sure there are other places around Europe and other countries that the same thing is happening security wise. And if a civilian like me without resources can see those massive security breaches in a few of the airports he's been to, I am pretty certain that big terrorist groups with massive fundings and people everywhere cause they do have people everywhere, know about those security breaches. It still remains a question to me on why they never used those entrances.

P.S those 3 examples are from Greece, and well thats where I am from and thats where I use to travel a lot (back and forth to London) so thats why my examples are from here. Pretty sure other people have such examples to give.

I’m skeptical of the faster boarding claim. My perception is that it’s the physical loading of the plane cabin, rather than the scanning of boarding passes, that wastes time. Also, having dealt with the face scanners at the border entry points I’m also skeptical that self service face scanning will be faster than just scanning a boarding pass. Not to mention that security, not boarding, is the painful part of the process anyway. And 99% accuracy is not actually great...

Yeah the scanners for tickets are basically ... put ticket on scanner, beep ... now wait in a new line while people load up stuff.

It depends a bit.

On smaller flights, there may only be one gate agent and scanner. If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. Sometimes that takes several minutes, and the smaller flights are often the ones with short 20-30 minute turnarounds scheduled.

Had this happen on a flight I took a few weeks back.

>If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out.

And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition.

The only time saved is scanning a ticket vs scanning a face. And people are pretty much guaranteed not to lose their faces.

> And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition.

Not if it's an automated gate.

I just got back from Australia, and the passport gates there are automated facial recognition; they look kinda like the gates in a subway where you scan a travel card.

A reject heads over to the desk to get sorted. Everyone else keeps going through the automated gate.

> “This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said.

Lufthansa got on the PR train perhaps. Who knows? 20 doesn't sound a lot, but over many flights it starts to add up.

I think it is mostly about the international travelers just like the first sentence says:

> Some international travelers can leave their boarding passes and passports in their pockets when flying out of Dulles International Airport

They check the passports at the gate making sure you didn't swap boarding passes with someone else. For domestic travel it is usually just as you said - scan the bar code and move on.

This smells of a staged PR stunt. Or, maybe "boarded" means people were all through the gate, but not necessarily on the plane?

That last has to be it. Every flight I've ever boarded has been bottlenecked at the jetway by people getting themselves and their carryons loaded and situated, not the speed of scanning the boarding document.

At best, it means they boarded an A380 through multiple doors in parallel instead of all through a single scanning location. This only matters for planes big enough to have multiple entrances.

They always board A380s through multiple doors. But they probably had a flight full of Germans - Americans tend to take a lot longer to get themselves sat down than most Europeans do, and spend a lot more time faffing around with their bag and belongings while blocking the aisle.

The Japanese are still the most efficient at boarding though.

Do you have data for this? I've never seen a study on airplane boarding efficiency by ethnicity.

There's also the difference of airlines. Airlines that charge extra for checked bags will have more people messing about trying to fit in a carryon, not finding room, etc. And U.S. carriers tend to have some of the worst policies. (in other places LCCs have the same policies but they also tend to have smaller planes)

They did this at SecTac in June. Of course, it didn't work right and caused us to leave 45 minutes late. And you still had to show your boarding pass + passport. It was a complete clusterfuck.

>> “It doesn’t matter,” Maryland resident Kim Meekins said of not being informed ahead of time. “You go to different airports and they do different things depending on their technology. If it’s another safety measure to make sure everyone has a safe flight, I’m all for whatever. I didn’t need to be notified ahead of time.”

"I'm all for whatever"! The hell does one engage rationally with that?

Frequent fliers are business people, professional people. They fly all the time to get things done. Very unlikely to care about privacy issues. They most likely use several cloud services with no worry at all.

These are the majority of people in the world. HN is a bubble.

> Frequent fliers are business people, professional people. They fly all the time to get things done. Very unlikely to care about privacy issues. They most likely use several cloud services with no worry at all.

> These are the majority of people in the world. HN is a bubble.

Yep. We're past the point of caring. The frog has been slowly boiled.

By being so used to the security theatre everywhere that is just doesn't even register anymore. They could start doing automated anal probing at passport gates and at least some part of the population would go "meh, if it makes it safer than I'm all for whatever".

I hope that comes with Facebook integration.

She's trusting. It's not irrational to trust other people.

I can't remember a time when I boarded a plane that I didn't have to wait in a queue on the jet bridge. How does this help with that? Also, I'm constantly seeing people accidentally end up in the wrong row or seat because they misread the label up above. Invariably, everyone takes out boarding passes to sort it out.

Reeks of a trojan horse to get more pervasive face scanners in place.

I've only been once in Washington, and it was ages ago. But they have this incredible system where they put you in a massive bus (At first I didn't even realise it was a bus, it looked more like a room), and the bus goes to the plane, lifts ups, and docks to the plane door. So, it's very important they can cram the people in the bus as fast as possible. Do a google image search for "Dulles buses", you'll understand what I'm on about.

But this benefit (of accelerated boarding) would apply to any airport where you don't go into a jet bridge but have to take the bus to go to the plane.

They have not used the "mobile lounges" for normal boarding since the 80s. That said, occasionally when there is a fuckup they still have to use them, but it's rare. Almost every flight uses either the jetbridge or the stairs (for tiny commuter flights).

Ah yeah, I've done bus boarding before (although not the Dulles thing), wasn't considering that. Still seems like you could time that boarding of the earlier vehicle to just start earlier.

This is a great time to remind everyone to buckle their seatbelts tomorrow. You have a much greater chance of dying in a car wreck tomorrow than you will in your cumulative lifetime risk of dying in an aviation terrorist incident.

Also don't mind the giant pile of cash someone got paid with public funds to address this crisis via government contacts.

Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.

> Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.

The TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of a threat of terrorism against aviation in the US[0].

[0] https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...

It was true before the new measures as well. Even 9/11 only matched the death toll from one month on American roads.

Basic security measures definitely help. The rate of hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s was absurdly high, and dropped fast one basic screening was put in place. But there’s little evidence that anything beyond that helps.

>For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security.

I suppose that's one unfortunate way to look at it.

I mean, technically it's true. Data and pictures are already there and aggregated. We're already past the non-return point. It just took 17 years from this day in 2001.

Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge.

“What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?”

“I was at home all night.”

“You’re lying. We have confirmation your face was recognized at the gas station, grocery store and bank between the hours of 7 and 9pm.”

That sends a shiver down my spine.

Is this situation any different from security footage already at gas stations and the like? I suppose automatic aggregation of said data is more problematic.

I'd like to think so. A grainy, CCTV at a gas station with ZERO FACIAL RECOGNITION is not correlated and crossed check with my passport photo or physical movements.

CCTVs don’t have to be grainy and low-res anymore. Recording 4K video and storing a finite amount of it is getting cheaper every day.

And is this situation any different from location logs based on mobile phone? It's obviously easier to leave s phone than a face at home, my point is that we have already pretty much agreed to be tracked most of the time.

This doesn't really change anything other than just being more damning evidence against you slightly easier to obtain.

If you carry a phone of any kind, it is already betraying your movements. All it takes to paint you like a game of Snake is a subpoena to Google (for GPS history) or your carrier (tower associations), assuming they don't pull your location history out of the device itself.

Hell, even cars are starting to get in on it with self-reporting telemetry even if you manage to avoid all the commodity ALPR scans.

Your privacy is already dead. You're objecting to death itself at this point.

The crucial difference here is that phone and vehicle data is something you can control - Between disabling location history, moving to a non-apple OS, and turning off your connection, there's a range of steps you can take currently to reduce or eliminate your trackable history. Ubiquitous facial identification is not something we can manage, however, and should be considered deeply concerning.

Privacy is only dead for those who allow it to be.

> moving to a non-apple OS

Sadly, by all measures Android with Google Play Services is worse for privacy than iOS. Presumably, non-Googled Android (e.g. LineageOS w/o Google Play) is better than that, but that's not the majority use case of Android.

Oops, I meant to say non-Google OS, but had a bit of a brainfart. I agree wholeheartedly that Google's Android is generally an abysmal choice with regards to privacy - significantly worse than iOS, IMO.

Really?

Do you regularly lie about your whereabouts to the authorities? Or just feel that you should have the right to do so without being found out"

Maybe don’t lie to the police...

False positives are a thing.

Sure but with 99% accuracy across 3 different locations, the chances are, the suspect is lying.

1) Those tests results would be highly correlated, so you wouldn't necessarily be much more than 99% accurate still.

2) If the prior probability of someone committing a crime on a given night is low, you are in the classical example of false positives doing harm via Bayes rule.

> “The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.”

But you can hold accountable an airline or customs gate agent who doesn’t have access to a library of images forming a signature of your face and who may be bound by policies or laws regarding privacy and identity that could be nearly impossible to enforce or even verify with a digital system.

> “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.”

Yikes, this sounds like Idiocracy to me. I frequently am the befuddled dad traveling with kids and bags, and I can tell you that apart from very exceptional circumstances or special needs, this is not at all any kind of serious inconvenience that requires more surveillance culture. (And for truly special needs situations, there are many parsimonious solution possibilities that don’t use a bazooka to swat a fly like this face recognition system is doing...)

> > “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.”

> Yikes, this sounds like Idiocracy to me.

Yeah, or one of those ludicrous infomercials. ‘Are you tired of dealing with hoses? Try new Stretch-Hose™ the only hose made from rubber bands!’

More seriously, I guess since we’ve already given up our privacy when travelling internationally (since the Great War, anyway, when passports were generally instituted), this is probably not that much of a change. And I guess it’s marginally more convenient. Just … seems like a solution in search of a problem, really.

I mean, from a security and safety standpoint it fails. From a financial standpoint it makes perfect sense, especially if CBP is picking up the tab.

Not having to dedicate an employee to each gate that is currently boarding is a huge labor saver for airlines. From CBP's standpoint, they get to use fancy new technology while also furthering mission creep. It's win-win.

I’m super skeptical that it’s actually a financial cost saver. The data infrastructure and sunk costs are quite high for systems like this, and the non-zero defect or failure rates mean you still generally have to employ most of the same staff. They just do something else on the computer or deal with other gate check issues, stuff they generally still had to do already while scanning people onto the plane.

Face recognition systems are notoriously difficult to implement in a way that actually saves money.

Even if boarding huge flights happens faster, the limiting factors are usually runway traffic delays and other problems anyway.

All this infrastructure only so sometimes on a few international flights, when no special issues pop up, they can possibly save a small amount of money (relative to other costs involved) by boarding slightly faster (a matter of a few dozen minutes, max) and potentially depart sooner if there’s no other type of hold up.

It doesn’t add up.

  The data infrastructure and sunk costs are quite high for systems like this, and the non-zero defect or failure rates mean you still generally have to employ most of the same staff.

Right, which is why one could reasonably speculate that CBP is picking up the cost of the system. Without the capital costs it could easily make sense.

The clincher would be how edge cases are handled. Is CBP paying for a human behind the scenes to remotely override rejections? Is it acceptable customer service for falsely rejected passengers to wait at the gate until shortly before departure when an airline employee can show up to double-check their documents?

So after the 20 to 30 minute procedure of handing your ID and boarding pass to a TSA agent, taking off your shoes, belt, emptying your pockets and having a full body scan done, adding a facial scan at the gate is somehow going to improve both boarding time and security. Right that makes sense. This shit needs to stop.

Note - this is only for international flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway.

Data retention period is 14 days for pilot testing, 12 hours for some unspecified "short term", and zero after that.

> Note - this is only for international flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway.

Not typically on outbound flights, only inbound as part of customs.

And inbound is only because they have installed kiosks that they guide everyone to. Otherwise if you go to a CBP agent they don't take your photo if you're a US passport holder. The kiosks are an end-run around tradition/rules about how CBP can treat Americans.

> they don't take your photo if you're a US passport holder

This is very much in the "you don't have to go through the body scanners" at the airport category. By default they take your photo and fingerprint, even if you're a US citizen; the specific language on CBP's website is:

"At this time, CBP does not require U.S. Citizens to have their photos captured when entering or exiting the country. U.S. Citizens who request not to participate in this biometric collection process may notify a CBP Officer or an airline or airport representative in order to seek an alternative means of verifying their identity and documents."

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/biometrics

> By default they take your photo and fingerprint, even if you're a US citizen

Photo, yes; fingerprint, no. Every customs station I've been through when re-entering the US has taken photos but not fingerprints. (They do require fingerprints from non-US-citizens.)

I've had my fingerprint taken (also US citizen)

Taking your photo and having gate agents inspect your ID and appearance is an entirely, categorically different thing than having a facial recognition system that can be dynamically fine tuned on small numbers of photos to automatically detect your face in digital sources.

I could agree there are legitimate purposes to collect photo identification. I can’t see any useful reason that comes anywhere close to outweighing the risks for feeding photos into a recognition system like this.

The speed of boarding pass checks is rarely the limiting factor for loading a plane. Perhaps the A380 is different? Are they comparing a single human boarding pass checker vs multiple facial scanner lanes?

I can see the number of scanning lanes (which is usually 1) being a bottleneck on large aircrafts with lots of doors, like the A380 example they have given.

I've very rarely seen the case where there isn't a queue after the boarding pass scan and before the boarding door(s) and seating area of the airplane.

This suggests that downstream of the boarding pass scan is already the true bottleneck of the system.

i believe that's why he (and the article) mentioned the A380 which can have something like 4 simultaneous embarking points (probably double that if they board from both sides of the plane).

I’ve only flown the A380 twice. Both times that still had a bottleneck in economy of people getting settled despite boarding through multiple jetways.

The bottleneck is at the seats, esp in coach/economy. On a single-aisle aircraft, this typically backs up onto the jetway, but even multiple door/aisle, the slowest agent can scan tickets and check IDs faster than people can get settled on average even when some of them can settle in parallel (perhaps one per aisle per very few rows).

> Officials touted the additional security the system provides—meeting a Congressional mandate to include biometric screenings—

Said someone who clearly doesn’t understand security. The entire point of adding biometrics is that it is in addition to the passport, not instead of. All they’ve done here is trade something you have with something you are. Sigh.

To say that a boarding pass is “something you have” in a security sense is absurd. I can print your boarding pass merely by knowing your name and where you’re going. A biometric check (backed by a paper ID check) is a dramatic security upgrade over that.

Passports are printed similar to currency. There are many features in them that are hard to replicate. It can be done but not easily, so it does fit the bill of "something you have" to authenticate. Not nearly as secure as a yubikey or an rsa token, but oh well.

Again this isn’t at passport control, it’s to board the plane after security.

Where your passport is again checked on most international flights. Or your driver’s license / photo ID on internal flights in many countries.

You’re right, a biometric check with a passport check is in fact more secure. But what they’ve done here is replace the passport check with a biometric check.

But people have similar faces called eigen faces in Mathematics. This is not Secure because faces are not unique. Similar to finding a similar to you looking face on the street/internet. Humans have an average faces and then diverge from that.

Eigenface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface

Nope. This needs to be protested.

The system then compares the photo to a gallery that includes images of that person—either their passport photo for U.S. citizens or the photo taken of foreign nationals when they entered the country.

So those of us with dual nationality, who enter the US on our US passports and leave on our foreign passports, are going to get screwed. Lovely.

I don't see why. You don't show either passport to anyone when leaving the country. Instead they take your photo and compare it to the ones they have on file, which for a dual nationality citizen will include at least your passport photo.

I'm more surprised they don't want to physically stamp your passport. Even though they already have a record of you entering and exiting the country, they've always liked to have physical passport stamps. And losing those makes a material difference in the case where another country cares where you've been.

If you are a US citizen, it's illegal to enter or leave the US with another country's passport anyway, even if you're a dual citizen.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185

I am not a lawyer but I don't read that as you have to present your US passport to enter or leave. Only that you must have a valid US passport with you when you do so.

>(b) Citizens

>Except as otherwise provided by the President and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may authorize and prescribe, it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport.

17 years after 9/11, my question is: we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that? Or is it a false causality? Can we even establish causality between the enhanced security and the lack of large-scale airplane attacks/hijackings?

we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that?

We never had a comparable event before 9/11/01. OK City, one ham-fisted attack on WTC in the 90s, British burned down the White House in the 1800s, but nothing of that scale prior. And 18 years ago, all you did was walk through a metal detector (whose sensitivity wasn't set all that high), and on the plane you go.

The technology is really just being piloted here in a low-risk application.

Everyone commenting here is right that it really doesn’t save that much time when boarding a plane, but think of where else it could save time.

(I probably shouldn’t go into details even though I never signed an NDA, so I guess I technically could talk about it)

Is the scanning of boarding passes really the thing that slows down boarding? They rarely pause between groups because of a line of people getting scanned. It's more often that the line of people waiting to get onto the plane has stretched too far down the jetbridge.

I'm really surprised they were able to cut boarding time in half with this, my experience is that the gate isn't the bottleneck, it's little old ladies with 50lb carryons struggling to get them into the overhead bin and blocking the aisle.

On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat.

And if identity actually mattered (hint: it doesn't), well it's already been "screened" via the purchase and TSA checkpoint tests.

Planes flew for decades without any matching of passengers to tickets, and tickets were frequently resold (especially unused legs) via classified ads and later eBay. The airlines were delighted when the government (without any evidence to justify it) told them to start matching people to tickets.

> On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat.

Well, but that's an assumption and an edge case.

Planes also flew for decades without locks on the cockpit doors, but that doesn’t make it a good idea in the modern world.

How many tragedies have been enabled by suicidal pilots + the locked doors? I know of at least one case in the Alps and pretty sure there was another in India recently enough?

I'm not sure they come out that far ahead really, though obviously the incidents they were designed to counter are bigger and more headline grabbing.

There's a parallel comment to this one talking about some of the drawbacks (though TBH I think it's a reasonable risk/reward tradeoff).

But I haven't seen any actual justification that the no-fly list is actually useful, and worryingly the regulations around it are classified.

It seems like this system has been designed with privacy in mind, after the pilot program, they won't store your image after the comparison. The only question is will it remain that way?

According to the Geneva Convention, refugees don't need a visa or travel documents like passports to travel (to make it purposefully more difficult to mess with persecuted people, like Germany did by stamping a "J" in the passport of Jewish citizens so it would be easier for countries who didn't want them to refuse them). I have fears that widespread adoption of systems like this could make air travel for refugees inaccessible if governments really want to.

> For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security.

Conditioning works.

I wouldn't be too cynical. "privacy was not a major concern" might just mean that she still thinks it's a privacy violation, but it's not such a big violation to warrant boycotting trips to the US. That is, she knows she's sacrificing privacy to visit the US and has already accepted it. Consider an alternative story:

headline: "china blocks all access to all foreign media websites"

> For John Smith of United States, censorship was not a major concern, as the practice doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from Chinese censorship.

Doesn't mean that the same John Smith isn't going to be up in arms if the FCC starts censoring news websites in the US.

> They take your picture any time you go to America anyway, so I don’t really mind.

Things not being different is a good reason to not be concerned.

Tangent, but I thought Dulles Airport's "moon buggies" felt super weird to have to go onto after a long international flight. It felt like I was loaded into an armored personnel carrier or something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge

> The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.

Do they really do that? I mean in most airport? And in Dubai (dxb) you just scan the barcode on your boarding pass and board the plane. No one checks your identity.

Domestic U.S.? No one checks passports. International? Probably. Scanning a boarding pass takes very little time, so I don't see this as a big benefit to travelers.

I don't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing a facial recognition scanner where the camera first physically moves up/down to match the height of the person (which takes a few seconds), and then takes a photo. Quite a ridiculous system if you ask me.

Sounds like EU passport control.

Most European airports only scan your boarding card for flights within Schengen and do not check any ID, and many of them let you scan it yourself.

As long as false flags get sent to a human gate agent standing right there who can make manual approvals, I fail to see why anyone traveling internationally would object to this. I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph.

From a legal standpoint, domestic travel is different (and there should be open debate in Congress before they make a decision there). But I fully support facial recognition for international travel and other immigration benefits.

  I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph.

Why? I'm sure there's nefarious activity that could be prevented, I'm just struggling to identify activities that would make be feel (let alone actually be) unsafe on an airplane as a practical matter, and without doning a screen writer's hat.

I'm assuming weapons are already adequately checked. And if not I'm not sure how facial recognition would appreciably help in this regard. Sure, maybe 12 bad guys enter the system though 12 airports with lax security, then all board the same flight at a major hub in a manner that circumvents analytics that searches for suspected bad guys flying together. But that already makes some dubious assumptions, such as the degree of efficacy in the system looking for suspected bad guys traveling together.

For most of air travel hijackings and bombings were incredibly common. We all but solved that by the 1980s by physically screening for weapons and suspect material, not by pretending we could predict people's behavior.

IME questions like this typically come from people who don't deal with the bureaucracy of applying for visas very often, if at all.

You assume fear of being bombed or hijacked, but it's really to make international travel easier and more efficient.

Lack of a reliable way to verify identity is a major reason why applicants for admission (or applicants for a visa) are assumed "guilty until proven innocent", and a ton of people are denied visas (or denied entry) every day on the slightest reasons as a result.

Being able to verify someone identity biometrically makes international travel and immigration more trustworthy, which makes it politically more palatable to make the lives of travelers and immigrants easier.

And doing this on outbound flights is no different from doing it on inbound flights - from the host government's perspective, they need to know when people enter and leave.

But this has nothing to do with ports of entry or consular offices. It has to do with boarding at the gate. 99% accuracy is not remotely accurate enough to even begin replacing personnel at sensitive entry points.

And consider that to the extent you automate security you permit automating measures to subvert the system. The reported accuracy of these solutions describe efficacy for typical use cases; they're not a measure of resilience to attack, which is what people often assume.

Again, I'm not saying these things don't have their uses. Security just isn't one of them unless they're merely part of a larger, cohesive system (e.g. used to verify efficacy of auditing and reporting systems). In fact, they may decrease security if you rely on them as strong security measures.

Outbound and inbound verification are sides of the same coin, as you need both in order to reliably track overstays. Congress has recognized this since 1996 when they first passed legislation requiring biometric entry-exit, and multiple times since then. The exit part of that has never really been implemented except for small trials.

It really isn't about replacing personnel (that another strawman you've made up, after the strawman about weapons). Rather - instead of humans (TSA agent + gate agent), it's now a human and a machine. It helps that the kind of mismatches made by CNN's are generally different from those made by humans.

> And consider that to the extent you automate security you permit automating measures to subvert the system.

I'm not sure what you mean by automating measures to subvert the system - there are financial and physical barriers (you'd need to get a hundred people or more into an airport, and buy them all plane tickets) If you have that level of resources, you're better off bribing CBP officers[1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/customs-border-agents-mexica...

> I fail to see why anyone traveling internationally would object to this.

If I'm understanding correctly, the new system is implemented on the departing side of the flight, and done (at least partly) in the name of security. So, to support this system, even more effort and equipment would be required in foreign airports for flights to the US.

I was at ATL 2 weeks ago. Many Delta's boarding gates were also equipped with facial recognition boarding cameras too.

Creepy.

There is no way in hell this is a good thing for US Citizens. First it's good for doing your boarding pass but then it will be used for identifying people on the street, maybe at a protest and then locking them away if they disagree with the political party in power. FML

It's incredible how eager people are to give away freedom and privacy in exchange for a little convenience.

This is sort of “hurry up and wait”; every time I feel like I got through the gate quickly, I just end up in line on the jet bridge or waiting 2 minutes for someone to fish every variety of item out of their overhead bin while the whole plane waits for them.

The cause of slower boarding is BAGGAGE FEES. Airlines are penny-pinching, people bring everything on board to compensate, and struggling with luggage is slow as hell.

People take bags onboard to avoid fees, yes, but mostly because airlines lose hold luggage (or send it to the wrong place) and even if they don't you have to go and wait for it at the carousel.

The last flight I took, there were too many people taking onbord luggage and mine got taken off me and put in the hold :(

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