Kennedy, Merkley introduce bill to end TSA facial recognition (2023)
kennedy.senate.gov
kennedy.senate.gov
It disallows the TSA from using facial recognition and requires that the TSA disposes of all facial recognition biometric information, including images and videos, obtained through facial recognition, no later than 90 days of the enactment of the act. Congressional acts prior to the enactment of the act are invalidated with regards to TSAs authorization of facial recognition use, and the TSA can use facial recognition only if authorized in future congressional acts. In section 4, it modifies law to exclude facial recognition for pilot licenses, those deemed threats to air security, and prevents the TSA from using the $20mm DARPA defense research grant for researching facial recognition means of defense. Additionally in section 5 it prevents the TSA from using facial recognition in implemented pilot programs, it prevents the TSA from cooperating with airport operators on the use of facial recognition, and prevents the TSA from issuing guidance to identify airport employees & law enforcement via facial recognition.
Cynic criticism:
1) The invalidation of former Congress acts with regards to TSA authorization of facial recognition use seems too polemic; would this pass as is?
2) Airport operators can still use facial recognition.
3) It does not define biometrics; nor what disposing means, and this may render this part ineffective, especially if derivatives of these data are not considered biometrics.
Overall what I'm reading this bill as, is that the government does not want the TSA to directly participate in this type of surveillance, but I think it leaves open the possibility of contractors to do so. It is still a good bill in my opinion.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/336...
I like that people can’t accidentally bring a loaded gun onto my plane and are deterred from doing it on purpose.
A committed attacker can probably get by TSA, but a committed attacker will also likely flag other parts of the layered defense system that TSA is only one part of. The intelligence apparatus can and does flag specific threats to TSA, which is way better than FBI having to figure out ad-hoc how to screen millions of travelers whenever they think there’s a specific credible risk.
I have no reason to believe this got any better since then. So they accidentally caught a bunch of dudes who don’t read the fine print. Any determined adversary would have no issue at all bringing guns or explosives onboard whether or not I “remove my shoes and put my laptop in the bin”. It’s only a matter of time. Don’t like it? Stop funding genocide in the Middle East.
I don't know if you're familiar with guns, but you actually don't have to be a sophisticated committed ideologue to be dangerous with them. Especially on an airplane.
You ever seen a drunk asshole on a plane? Now add a couple loaded firearms to the mix, held by drunk person or by person annoyed by drunk person. Sufficiently dangerous for me to be thankful TSA intercepts thousands of them every year.
> Any determined adversary would have no issue at all bringing guns or explosives onboard whether or not I “remove my shoes and put my laptop in the bin”. It’s only a matter of time. Don’t like it? Stop funding genocide in the Middle East.
Yet, stunningly, the number of times someone has brought a bomb or a gun through TSA and committed a terrorist act with it since 9/11 is exactly zero times.
I will leave it to the sibling comment or to describe in detail how wrong you are about guns specifically.
The same argument can be used for almost any risk reduction techniques, including air bags and seatbelts, and it's wrong there too.
That said, the TSA is in some respects the lesser concern. Don't get me wrong, the TSA not having free rein with facial and biometric technologies is a good thing. But when companies like Clearview AI (https://www.clearview.ai) sell their facial recognition technologies to local police departments – technologies that were built on illegally obtained data and have a history of substantial racial bias – we have bigger issues. It's opaque, unregulated, invites a wellspring of social injustice, and doesn't past muster under any ELSI framework.
Government regulating government is important. But we, as a society, need to stop giving private companies like Clearview AI a pass on harmful, exploitative behavior – especially when they're run by founders like Hoan Ton-That who offer post-hoc rationalizations that amount to (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'Well, if we hadn't done it, someone else would have, so why not us?'
We need a bigger bill that enshrines and elevates privacy for the modern world.
>Undercover tests conducted by the Department of Homeland Security have shown that the TSA's failure rate frequently ranges between 80% and 95%.
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...
>An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
I'm not saying that the TSA is a cost effective deterrent, but I do think that that even with those odds there is a deterring effect. And its a jobs program! The US Gov spends money in worse ways.
Edit: and TSA is funded by airline fees, so not only is it a jobs program, it is paid for by a tax on the wealthy.
There are plenty of people who don't fear death, but I think there are far fewer who don't fear getting disappeared by the CIA.
In theory...
Bad faith to even argue it when the we all know the word CIA is generally used colloquialy as a catch all for "feds" or "intelligence". We all know what they meant by CIA. Also, the FBI is just as scary as the CIA and its not like they won't make you disappear literally, or via a dark 10x10 cell in the Colorado desert.
What would happen is that the TSA tells local law enforcement who tells the FBI and all sorts of very normal "law enforcement" happen to you. In comparison to the CIA, the FBI is pretty impotent and generally has to deal with the bill of rights. There is no 10x10 cell in the Colorado desert. Nobody "disappears" from the TSA. Nobody is "disappearing" at all in the US.
The worst thing that happens to you is what the DoJ has been doing to the Jan 6 arrests - you get kept in solitary for a year before your trial or until you complain that your rights are being violated.
You're not wrong to point out that it does _something_, but the thing we need to balance the negative effects, and I don't think we've done that.
Therefore, the TSA is not an effective deterrent.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
That seems prima facie absurd, or in need of heavy qualification. Even if the probability of being caught is 100%, a sufficiently low punishment might make it still worthwhile. If we always caught murderers but the punishment were only a month in jail, do you really think the murder rate would be lower?
If you lived in a country where that kind of thing actually happened, you would not be writing on the internet about it.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
But at the same time, since this is America... it's absurd to suggest someone could be illegally detained if they are suspected of bringing a bomb on a flight?
Even though people who fly are on average richer than people who don't, the vast majority are still normal people who get a W-2, and not Jeff Bezos or a trust fund kid. It's still an incredibly regressive tax because it's a flat per-trip fee rather than a percentage.
Taxes on airplane flights can never be more than slightly regressive because the bottom 50% very rarely fly anywhere. A tax on what is fundamentally a luxury service would have to try really hard to be even a little bit regressive.
It's at best slightly regressive—the fee is $5.60, so it's not like it's substantially raising the price of a ticket for someone who can already afford one in the first place. And the fee does scale with income to a small degree in that the higher your income the more frequent your flights tend to be.
Could it be a percentage of the ticket price? Possibly, though I'm not sure that would elicit fewer complaints. But it's already in the bottom quartile of regressiveness in how we do taxes in this country, so calling it "incredibly regressive" is either a clear exaggeration or a sign that you have no idea how bad the tax situation is here.
Seems like a fine trade off to me.
I agree that the TSA is a jobs program. I don't think that necessarily justifies its existence, but I have accepted that employing people is the TSA's only functional purpose and anything else is just propaganda.
The TSA only really exists at this point because the flight attendant unions are scared someone might be able to hurt them while they enforce increasingly absurd rules mandated by their airlines meant to extract money from passengers
Now consider the size of the crowd gathering at these "security" checkpoints, and ask yourself: why would a terrorist bother with passing it?
Second point. It is no longer necessary for a terrorist to board the plane at all. Suicide bomber on a busy day at the security check point could kill far more than a plane load of passengers.
As opposed to what odds if they blow themselves and a plane up?
Or rather, they would just blow themselves up anyway in the middle of the crowded security area if they got found out. So you're looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds of blowing up the security area rather than the plane.
“[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.
Good ol security through obscurity
“The pen-testers know exactly what our code is. They can create and devise attacks that not even the best hackers would be able to create”
Just fire this guy already. Shameful that he can’t spout out these pathetic excuses with a straight face
It seems reasonable to tailor your defense to the threats you're realistically likely to face.
Because that’s who typically commits terrorism.
It's not as if they'd make their patsys obvious.
Zero.
Because other countries adopted similar security protocols and still MH370 and Germanwings Flight 9525 happened. And the 2004 Russian bombings.
You do have a point insofar as that 9/11 changed the game: previously a hijacking just meant you'd get an unscheduled vacation and would likely be released unharmed. Now the assumption is that it's a suicide mission so passengers will fight back.
This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.
To think overwhise is "my magic rock keeps away heffalumps" levels of reasoning.
Because there have been zero heffalump attacks since 9/11.
Zero.
> This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.
There are plenty of aspiring terrorists who are perfectly fine dying during their attacks... obviously...
Thankfully he's no longer at the TSA and the president of a university now.
>John S. Pistole (born June 1, 1956) is the former administrator of the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[1] He is currently the president of Anderson University.
The facial recognition doesn't actually seem to save much (if any) time; the TSA people still run my ID through their little scanner thing. I don't have to scan my boarding pass, but I'd usually do that while they were dealing with my ID, and be done before they were anyway.
Clearly this is just a surveillance play. Or they think the facial recognition is going to weed out people using someone else's ID. Or it's a "cute" way to funnel tax dollars to whoever manufactures this tech.
Probably by design. One of my favorite memories is after defcon (can't remember which), I arrived at the airport at the same time as some several hundred other attendees not going to other security conferences that week, and the sheer volume of people rejecting going through the lemme-see-your-genitals machine, requesting pat-downs, or simply refusing to show ID (this is allowed for domestic flights), utterly overwhelmed TSA causing a many hours line that also trapped the hundreds of normies heading home after their vacations.
If I sound like I'm blaming the hackers I'm not - it's the fault of TSA for being unprepared to handle a situation where every traveler exercises their rights. Much like the justice system, which would utterly collapse if everyone exercised their right to a trial by a jury of their peers, the TSA would collapse if everyone exercised their rights to not be subjected to any more search than is necessary to determine they aren't a threat to the airplane (the mission statement upon which TSA's authority is derived). This worries me because it means our government agencies and branches are incentivized to convince people to not exercise their rights, or restrict people's rights.
There's a procedure for people who don't have a valid ID with them--but I'm not sure it is legal to use it otherwise. Presumably it requires making some statement to the effect of "I don't have an ID with me," or "I forgot my license at home," etc. which could be subject to the incredibly broad 18 USC 1001 statute if they really wanted to try, or more likely, they would mail you a civil penalty notice or put you on a list for additional questions in the future.
Of course you could say you didn't realize the statement was false because the ID is so small that you can't even feel if its in your pocket, or you could conveniently put it in your checked bag by mistake, etc. But still, it's probably not a great look if they manage to find it somewhere when you said you forgot it.
First of all, I love Boston, but this was probably the most stereotypically Boston experience I've ever had. Second of all, it's really gross that he felt ok with trying to intimidate me into giving up my rights because it posed a minor inconvenience to him.