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Unrelated to facial recognition: I'm a brazilian, flying from Casablanca, Morocco to Lisbon, Portugal, and I dropped my passport while on the plane. The minute I descend from the plane I realize it and inform the crew and airport security. They tell me to wait. Nobody goes to the plane to try and find my passport. I get detained in the airport prison with mostly illegal migrants. The plane flies away to Madrid. I can't leave without a passport. There's a small 8 square meter room where more than 10 people sleep, including someone with a contagious respiratory disease (this was pre-covid). Couldn't sleep and was up all night reading The Process, Franz Kafka, which was funnily available in prison hall. Had to bribe the police officer with a collector's plastic Clipper lighter for him to allow me to smoke a single cigarette. Was able to get out after 24h, but only because my brother had a friend who worked on the plane operator company, and was able to detect my passport inside the plane at Madrid, and arrange it to be given to a pilot who would be flying to Lisbon the next morning. It was so traumatic that when leaving they asked me if all my belongings were on my backpack (which had been confiscated upon arrestal) and I didn't realize police officers had actually stolen my sunglasses and an iPhone. It's not exactly a techno dystopia. It's a full on dystopia turning to tech.

Holy shit. Growing up in a super small border town between Texas and Mexico, I've seen, heard, and been part of some crazy and terrifying stuff, but nothing compares to this. I felt terrified just imagining what you went through.

Obligatory glad you made it out, but seriously- had any one thing gone wrong, who knows what could have happened in the end.

I used to sit and wonder about the future. As in how wonderful it will be and what amazing things we will accomplish. I used to fear dying because I wouldn't get to see any of it, much less the end of the story. Somewhere along the way I began to fear the future, to the point I didn't want to have children, I felt it unethical to knowingly bring an innocent life into that kind of terror.

Professor Farnsworth said it best- 'I don't want to live on this planet anymore.'

Edited to add- when I was young I caught wanderlust pretty hard and traveled most of the US, some of Mexico and Canada. I dreamt of visiting other countries and continents and was hugely disappointed to not find a way before having a family and obligations. All that went out the window about the time I started watching Locked Up Abroad. Brokedown Palace had nothing on those stories.

> "but she wasn't willing to disagree with the computer"

This mentality is far too common among modern humans. I've suffered these people at banks, bill pay stations, travel situations, etc. It's especially annoying when you're facing them with undeniable evidence that the machine contains mistaken data and they still respond with "I'm sorry, sir. There's nothing I can do. It says right here that you owe {$random-money}." Machines can be wrong, and even more commonly, the people who enter data into those machines can be wrong. But then you get these people who can clearly see that something is wrong, but they refuse to refute what the machine tells them? Why?

I swear, when the machines finally decide humans are obsolete, we'll happily line up and willingly march into the kill-box…

Unfortunately it's turtles all the way down (up?) - should they ignore the computer and make a mistake, they no doubt will face their employer confronting them with 'the computer told you so and you flagrantly ignored it'.

The recently uncovered UK post office accounting scandal goes to show that the computer is assumed correct by default!

It is because no one has to take responsibility for the machine. If you then overwrite the machine, then you have the responsibility of the decision.

This is my biggest problem with working in the video security / FR industry: the industry completely ignores end-user training and the obvious necessity for the operators of this class of software to be screened for A) computer literacy to the degree they understand this is just software and NOT an authority, and B) operators of video security software need to be screened for Racial Blindness - if a person cannot tell the difference between near age siblings or cousins of an ethnicity other than their own, and specifically the ethnicity they police, they need to be legally regulated as ineligible to operate such software.

It starts young; in grade school. I saw it with my son and his peers with simple graphing calculators and their math homework. They'd punch in some numbers, get a result, and that was that. Try as I might, I couldn't convince them that garbage in leads to garbage out. In their minds, the machine was infallible.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair

The problem is a lot of people who work these roles are so demoralised, they see themselves as a kind of almost-robot when it comes to fulfilling their job duties. They don't feel they have the autonomy to apply common sense.

It's a weird mixed feeling of annoyance and pity when you run into one of these folks.

To be fair though businesses havd always used these 'buffer' tactics. Where now it's software, the all-knowing never-wrong magical boxes that cannot be reasoned with, before it was District Managers who were never available, secretaries as literal gatekeepers, 'company policy' which is nothing but some garbage some department decided on, but they make sound like a law. On and on, round and round. :(

I had a similar situation crossing the US border coming back from Toronto. I got flagged because I pulled past a yellow line during the wait. Incidentally, I just followed the pattern of the person in front of me who flew through.

The thing that resonated with me was the approach the officers used. These types of jobs attract people who like the power trip. You are considered guilty unless you can prove innocence. There was no probably cause, no need for a random search. I know people in LE and I can only imagine how these people would react to similar treatment if "flashing their badge" didn't get them a wave through. I think this is the thing that people don't fully get about the surveillance state and encryption back doors in addition to facial recognition. If there is ever a "hit" on any of these things, you are guilty. LE will stand on you to try to get you to crack because the tech can't be wrong. There are going to be so many innocent people in jail in the future dystopia.

> This is not really a personal complaint. My situation is still quite privileged.

It should be a personal complaint. You had precisely 0 privilege.

For some reason everyone who isn't born into crushing poverty, and/or didn't move here without speaking the language or looking and sounding like a natural-born citizen, and/or doesn't come from an underfunded inner city as an obvious racial minority feels the need to acknowledge some ephemeral privilege that made everything easy for them.

I don't have a problem with this per se, and at times it's even a good exercise from an intellectual standpoint, but it's at about a 12/10 at the moment.

2/10 and 12/10 seem to be the dials people get set to after reacting to news/experiences

I thought his privilege was beeing an US citizen, if not the option of beeing deported would have a high propability. (technically a US citizen cannot be refused entry AFAIK)

Technically, a US citizen can get sent to a secret prison via secret court orders and have no recourse. Or just be murdered.

How often are people remanded to secret prisons and/or are just murdered because the computer says their passport photo doesn't match their face? Why bring it up?

Technically, a previously unknown near-earth object could wipe out most life on earth at lunchtime. Odds are, I'll still have that 2 PM meeting, though.

Atrocities are committed but my sense is a photo mismatch won’t be the catalyst. I’d go further and say it happens less often then you might think.

Did you know CBP agents are trained to get you emotional, piss you off, and treat you like shit? It’s an effective and quick way to get someone on edge and maybe reveal something to be investigated. Nervous behavior. CBP officers go through therapy to deal with this.

Fight fire with fire. I would make it clear (respectfully) the situation is ridiculous and push for resolution in my favor.

I was once asked for a second photo ID at the border and I didn’t have one. The officer found this very suspicious. I did get kind of pissed and asked him what kind of idiot takes every photo id they have abroad. What if it’s lost or stolen? I was waived through.

Buddy of mine from college flies with his US passport at all times, even for domestic flights, because he's of Arab decent and constantly gets hassled for it.

So one time we're flying domestic as a group to set up some equipment for a research project. He gets pulled aside by a couple of white TSA agents as part of a "random inspection", out of a line of about 20 people, mostly white or light complected.

He starts getting questioned about where he's flying, why, etc. Then they ask to see his ID and boarding pass. Hands them his passport, state DL, and boarding pass, and they start going off on him as to why he's got his passport for a domestic flight, how that looks suspicious and such.

He responds with "Well, I get stopped for looking Arab every time I fly, so this is a much easier way to prove I'm a US citizen." They stop for a moment and look around at everyone watching, tell him to have a good day and walk away. I'll never forget that encounter.

sighs in "all the damn time"

Privilege is real, a little anecdote.

I'm black, I've had quite my shares of DWB stops and bad cop experiences (I detailed some of them on Twitter and in this subsequent interview). That Twitter thread blew up because so many black people chimed in (from college students to famous journalists to famous musicians) detailing their ridiculous experiences with cops.

https://www.boredpanda.com/ridiculous-reason-black-people-st...

One of the more "interesting" one was I was stopped by a cop in a suburb of Boston, I think it was Newton or Newtonville). The reason given was that "I was adhering too strictly to the rules" which made me suspicious. This was a read that had a 35 MPH limit and I was strictly observing that limit. So the fact that I was following the law made me suspicious. But the reason I was following the law (even when other drivers were speeding) was because cops will use any ridiculous reason to pull me over. Can't win for losing.

Privilege is real and I see it every time I compare how I get treated with how my white friends (who share the same socio-economic profile and other markers to me) are treated. I dumped a white acquaintance I was giving a lift to Manchester NH on the side of the road when he pulled out a joint as I was driving and got belligerent with me when I got mad at him for endangering me and refused to put it out or throw it out. He just could not get it through his head why I, a black person at much higher risk of getting stopped by cops would take umbrage at his stupidity.

I'm 47. I have never done weed, not because I think there is anything wrong with it, but because given how often I got stopped by cops (driving or even simply walking), all it would have taken was for me to have a joint on me for it to ruin my life. My white friends had no such fear.

When I was younger and in college I used to work security, and sometimes I'd do security for concert venues. I saw how the cops treated predominantly black patrons vs white patrons. With black patrons, the cops felt their role was to intimidate and they tended to escalate situations and just generally be rude and aggressive. With white patrons, they went super easy (I worked security at the Fleet Center in Boston for a Fish New Years Concert (1995 or 1996 I think) (the band put on an amazing show and made me a fan of theirs that night)). White concert goers were walking around openly smoking pot (I drove home in the morning with my uniform reeking of weed) and the only things the cops would do was to occasionally ask patrons to put them out. Totally different from when the crowd was predominantly black (no black person in Boston at that time their right mind would even THINK! of lighing up a joint in front of a cop).

The facial recognition issue is particulary vexing/scary for me (Netflix has a great documentary called "Coded Bias" about this) because there are 2 things that are true 1: Facial recognition systems are incredibly terrible at telling black faces apart 2: Any rule or perceived rule violation is going to be enforced much more harshly against POC. There is wiggle room and entreaties about being mis-identified are likely to fall on deaf years

A good example of this confluence is the black girl who was put out of skating rink (at night, thereby putting her in danger) because the facial recognition system mis-identified her. The only saving grace is the venue did not call the cops (I'm pretty sure that things would have gone badly for the teenager) https://www.newsweek.com/black-teen-barred-skating-rink-afte...

> Did you know CBP agents are trained to get you emotional, piss you off, and treat you like shit? It’s an effective and quick way to get someone on edge and maybe reveal something to be investigated. Nervous behavior. CBP officers go through therapy to deal with this.

Are these fishing expeditions a demonstrably effective way to prevent terrorism/trafficking/whatever?

Yes. It’s time effective. Unlike criminal psychology where you build comfort, rapport, etc over hours.

I brought it up because the person I responded to said “technically”. So technically, a US citizen can be refused entry.

>interrogated me in a way intended to get me to incriminate myself (questions I wouldn't answer to police on the street, but wasn't in a position to deny them)

If you are a U.S citizen, they legally can't deny you entry into your own country. Nor can they force you to answer any questions beyond the most basic ones that establish your citizenship and ID. They can intimidate you and make you feel you should divulge more, but this is just bluster, and you have rights that are well worth exercising. The ACLU confirms this by the way: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encounter....

Such an incident occurs in Singapore often and police detain people and later release them as the facial recognition tech is defective not reliable.But such surveillance is done by the scared governments like china also

> I was detained for an hour because the computer said that my face didn't match my passport

The "excuse du jour". Always blame the computer and you will have a free pass to do anything as you want without being blamed for it. I had seen a similar pattern other times in airports.