Senate bill introduced to ban TSA use of facial recognition in airports
papersplease.org
papersplease.org
The only thing I can figure is the people with power who get to flash credentials and walk through, or skip the terminal all together, don't want their face automatically recognized and recorded. If these Senators were really concerned about privacy they would force the TSA to dump all records after 3 months, not just biometric
Can you provide a citation for this requirement? I.e. a law, not an administrative decision made unilaterally by the TSA?
Which provision, specifically, are you referring to? The REAL ID pdf you linked does not contain a "provision for an ID" in airports separate from 202(a)(1), which is not yet in effect, and will likely get snoozed for a few years again in 2025. Furthermore, even if it were in effect today, it would not require the checking of IDs; it merely prohibits the checking of non-REAL IDs.
Yes you will be.
I did it. Me. Personally.
If you show up at the airport and your wallet is 200 miles away and your flight is in 45 minutes they will, unquestionably, irrefutably, let you onto your flight.
Step 1: Go to the counter and tell them you don't have your ID.
Step 2: They typey-type on their computer and print out some stuff.
Step 3: You take that stuff to TSA and they ask you some questions like "what is your address? what is your date of birth? and things like that"
Step 4: They wave you through and you go to your gate and wait to board.
I was told that it is not uncommon for people to forget or lose their IDs.
Further validated by https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification....
I find it pretty funny that the top of the website says "Adult passengers 18 and older must show valid identification at the airport checkpoint in order to travel." Yet later in the page it says you can still travel without it.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/frequently-asked-questions/i-forg...
For someone concerned about mandatory face scanning, there is a good argument against permitting the TSA to do voluntary face scanning, which is that the voluntary often becomes the mandatory. As an analogy, consider doing business with the government. Many government agencies will only do business with you if you have a phone number (increasingly an app) and pay with credit or debit card, all practices that started out as voluntary conveniences but morphed into requirements.
You could describe this process in a variety of ways, depending on how much agency and malevolence you want to ascribe to the decision makers: "ratchet effect", "slippery slope", "boiling the frog", etc. Regardless of name, the process tends to look like this: first give people the option to do B instead of A. Then give people an incentive to do B. Then, once most people are doing B, deprioritize A (which makes it inconvenient). Finally, remove option A when there are only a few people left to complain. The TSA is already pushing the envelope with PreCheck and adding more categories to the No Fly List.
It works very well. Consider your comment: "but for better or worse, the TSA inherently has to use facial recognition because they're required right now to check your ID" (emphasis mine). Your logic isn't wrong, but it's starting from the premise of how to better serve what is being done right now rather than what should be done. Consider that the US only started requring airlines to check IDs a few years before 9/11, and personal identification is only indirectly related to the security of an airplane (why there's all those people checking your shoes despite knowing your name and face). The effect of airport IDing is mainly as a tool for law enforcement interdiction and to bolster airline profits by preventing ticket switching. Similarly, after the TSA has built a national database of face models, there is no reason this data has to be used primarily for airline security.
The California DMV can intercept your tax refund if you haven't paid your registration.
Or if someone hasn't made a child support payment, the courts can ask the DMV to prevent registration of a vehicle.
I'm using this as an example of how the lines get blurred between different government functions.
So why not explicitly authorize it instead with a bill, with the desired guardrails?
Personally I'll take the grope. In fact I MAKE them grope me by opting out of their silly scanners. (I also wear a kilt often, which used to be fun before they all got training on how to deal with that...) If everyone did this it would bring the TSA to its knees and make a strong statement about just how much security theater we're actually willing to tolerate.
You may find yourself living in an authoritarian dictatorship in the future and be thankful for all the practice.
Ill never forget asking a TSA guy if he was sure mmwave was really just sound. "Yes! Its just sound waves, completely harmless," he assured me. "Less than your phone makes in your pocket!"