TSA now wants to scan your face at security. Here are your rights
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
After a little while we'll hear how "too many" bad people are escaping justice, and they'll start comparing the photo with people who have warrants, everyone on bail etc. And because they're only comparing with those people, several of them will be close matches. The rent-a-cops at the TSA checkpoint will then detain you.
There are lots of PoC in the criminal justice system. The odds of getting a false positive will be high. But noting will be done to fix it. 'Its the algorithm.'
> opting out too many times puts you on a watchlist
Except you can't.
The many people who have SSSS on their boarding passes for 'extra scutiny' as part of some cryptic TSA process seem a good enough example of the Govt keeping secret lists of undesirables. A random selection of SSSS tweets:
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1097895615479144448?t=y2yY...
https://twitter.com/DoualyX/status/1029128870996324352?t=Jn9...
https://twitter.com/SheRoamsAbout/status/1056946018229669889...
Tell me these people are security threats.
I once flew from Montreal to Washington, DC and there was secondary screening at the gate. I held up the flight because airport staff didn’t know the procedures on how to handle my SSSS flag.
I called DHS about getting off the list and after getting bounced around a few times I was told:
- I was not on the no fly list, which DHS does actively maintain
- DHS manages and publishes selection criteria which is pushed down to airlines. What the airlines do with it and when they do it is their own process independent from DHS
- I could submit my driver’s license, proof of address, address history for exclusion, as well as any additional information requested after the initial submission.
- DHS would review and update the parameters, but it would be 6-12 months before the database update fully took effect with the airlines.
I stopped flying that one airline 16 years ago.
You can try this yourself - get some old shoe trees with metal posts and fold one of them at 90 degrees so the scan machine flags it as a firearm. If TSA can't figure out the puzzle you made for them, they leave the bag in the tunnel, and it doesn't move until the actual police take it out and look inside. Yes, I experienced this.
Also, I opt out every time. It has been hundreds of times. No big deal.
You tell the agent you want to opt out. They scream “Opt out!” at the top of their lungs.
Then another agent takes you through the plexiglass door beside the metal detector.
That agent recites a brief script about how they’ll pat you down and then do so.
Pat down complete, they check their gloves for residues in a machine. Once that’s done, you’re free to go.
It generally adds 5-10 mins to the security line. Sometimes, if they really backed up and you say opt out early enough, it can actually be faster.
You have the right to opt out and can exercise it.
'We don't keep your data, except we do keep your data for 2 years' is pretty awesome doublespeak, and leads me to believe you can't trust anything else Lim said in this interview.
I opt out of the scanner every time, receiving a manual pat-down instead, making the bin process no longer rate-limiting for me.
The ID check is to help airlines prevent sale of frequent flier award tickets. It's not about security it's about airline revenue/loss prevention.
January in Chicago.
Everyone pays $20 per person to go to the party - its a couples party and is themed for the tropics. You're to show up in the god awful Hawaiian shirts, fruit punch and mai tai cocktails... and have your backs packed.
At midnight, there's a drawing and the lucky couple is given a pair of plane tickets to Hawaii - the flight leaves from O'Hare in 2h. The room in Hawaii are already booked too.
This was back when you could just have a plane ticket as a physical thing and with it, get on a plane.
The interesting thing is, they almost always subtly modify the procedure in some way. Sometimes I can keep my shoes on. Sometimes the laptop can stay in the bag. In some cases, two agents in the same exact line give contradictory instructions.
Indeed the rules seem to vary arbitrarily by time of day, by airport, by passenger volume. It just proves that most of what the TSA does in airports is is really just security theater.
I'm copying this information here because I want to make sure you see it and the other thread was a few days ago.
Let me fix the above. It’s time to dismantle the DHS. Gut it.
It seems like for the Republicans, it _should_ be a prime example of overreaching big government invading ordinary peoples' privacy. And for Democrats, it _should_ be a prime example of Islamophobia and racism against Middle Easterners inextricably linked to their second-most-hated (and also, perhaps not coincidentally, the second-most-recent) Republican President, and also a police force that can be safely [1] [2] defunded.
The fact that it hasn't been done is understandable if the votes aren't there. What I don't "get" is why no one ever brings it up. There were eight people on the Democratic presidential primary stage in 2020. Why didn't one of the trailing candidates with nothing to lose pound the table and demand getting rid of the TSA? It would certainly have made headlines.
[1] Obviously if you get rid of the police that are protecting people from theft, rape, murder, etc., things will quickly get pretty bad. If we actually got rid of the police, it would be like the dog that caught the car.
[2] The things that actually keep people safe from terrorists are (a) reinforced cockpit doors and strict procedures to keep passengers away from the flight deck in flight, and (b) post-9/11, passengers and crew will assume hijackers are plotting suicide attacks, and as a result will now quite likely resist the hijackers at all costs. (Pre-9/11, hijackers were assumed to care about their own lives, so complying with the hijackers' demands until the plane is safely on the ground was the normal policy.)
I would say there’s a pretty big difference between 1:1 facial recognition for authenticating someone with their travel docs and 1:n facial recognition for dragnet surveillance.
In philosophy, that's distinction without a difference. Both cases are surveillance, period. You can argue one is more limited, but reality and human nature has shown over and over again that once information is collected and stored in a sufficiently performant manner, it will tend to grow to be cross-ref'd over time.
I fly often for work and have only seen this once out in the wild.
Besides having to insist that it was optional, there was no additional screening necessary.
Not sure if this is the same program, but that experience was quite jarring.
Reasonable people can agree that taxes are painful, or that the funds are misspent, but blanket claims that taxes==bad do not advance the debate at all.
An honest debate about taxes starts with an honest accounting of where the money is really going, and where it is really coming from, neither of which is ever going to happen in countries like the US.
All that withstanding, I think you're right. The cabin filters are obviously dirty. /s
I just wish I knew who are these people that vote yes on these things. They’re completely foreign to me.
( ). Your rights are inside the parantheses.