Airport face-scanning robots switched off Facial recognition scanners at Manchester Airport have been switched off after an incident in which the robot guard let a couple through the gate even though they had swapped passports. An immigration officer stopped the couple after they got through the barrier. The UK Border Agency told the Beeb: "Following the incident, …
You mean our hugely expensive white-elephant automated passport gates are either broken or so unreliable they could be a plumber in their spare time?? NO - really? REALLY??
The chip doesn't contain the photo, it contains "biometric data" (which in reality is how ugly you are compared to the rest of the population)....I guess if two people were hit similarly with the ugly stick then it probably would let them through!
I say long live IRIS - it's never failed me, just a pity when you hand over a bomb for the non-working biometric junk, they take away your rights to IRIS....I'm told you can re-register, but I think they've moved the office to one of the remote Scottish islands to ensure you don't.
facial recognition algorithms use supposedly unchanging features of your face so your glasses will have confused the scanner because it makes your eyes look different to the digital image it has of you, this is purely because of lack of image enhancement available through the machines optics and processing compared to that of the original photo.
You shoould try to get through human security in Tel Avivi when your passport picture is bearded and you aren't. Security guard's gaze see-sawed between me and passport numerous times. She eventually called a colleague who started the same - look down, look up, loook down, look up. Eventually she nodded to her collague, who handed back my passport, leaving me with nothing to do but change my pants.
I'm not sure how these automated devices are supposed to reduce costs and improve efficiency as whenever I come through Heathrow or Gatwick there always only ever seem to be 2 or 3 agents on the gates, with a whole plethora of uniformed people standing around chatting in the background. It seems to me that they take a perverse pleasure in forcing people into long queues and then making them wait.
Rather than simply defaulting to installing unproved technology, I think the better way to improve efficiency and drive down costs at the border coalface is to employ a suitably qualified management consultant to drive through better resource and capacity management processes.
But hey, what do I know. I'm just one of the sheep right?
I got through one in Stansted last year, while my partner couldn't get it to recognise her. She was told to use a different gate, and I suspect the good old-fashioned biological security pushed a button to make it open.
At Heathrow in January this year (Terminal 4, I think) there were two, both out of action, while huge queues formed for the non-automated passport checks. (Only two people on the desks, of course.)
"I recommend that the UK Border Agency gives priority to evaluating the actual benefits intended by such technology."
They already did an evaluation, it's just that there are absolutely no benefits (that can be written down)* so the file was blank. It just looked like there hadn't been an evaluation.
I can't decide on which icon to use. They all look the same :)
*The actual benefits can't be written down for fear of getting in trouble. (Project visits to a villa in Portugal, business meetings in posh restaurants / theatres paid for by the supplier, etc...)
"Vine found gates broken at the airport five times in a week – four out of five times the damage was technical and one had broken down due to a lack of staff responsible for repairing the device. UKBA told Vine that maintenance of the machines was the responsibility of a company based in Portugal and machines were meant to be fixed within four working days."
So their response was basically "Yes, we know they're crap machines, but we've accounted for that by off-shoring the maintenance duties and setting really low standards for repair times"?
I've used then once each at Bristol, Brum and Gatwick without a problem in the last couple of years, and jolly nice it was too escaping the long queue for the wetware-scan. But the bloody things are almost never in operation. There's a nice set of them at Luton which must have been there for a year now and which I've never seen working, despite the tons of signage instructing you to use them.
The signage, and the ads in the inflight magazines, serve as an annoying reminder to me how much of the nation's hard-earned has been pissed up the wall on this one. One would think the whole point of the evaluation was not to splash everywhere before you knew the gadgetry was working.
Part of me, though, wonders whether the reason they are always off has more to do with border union relations than the tech. Mind you, they are Windows-based, so I'll give the unions the benefit of the doubt for now.
I used the face recognition feature in Picassa - it worked really well. Would pick out faces of family correctly even if they were in the background etc. What also suprised me is that it matched pictures of my parents now (both >80) with pictures from their wedding - some 60 years ago and scanned in. Interestingly - there were very few false positives.
Maybe someone in Manchester airport wants to have a look at Googles offering - can't see it being any more evil than the current one;)?
One of the the arrivals scanners at Heathrow failed to recognise me, comically making me look into successively lower screen until I was practically squatting. It still failed. I noted that there was a half-obscured PC Anywhere generic error message (of the sort that just says, "There has been an error") on the screen. Great. Which idiot implemented these?
So, you introduce a world-wide assault on privacy by RFIDing everybody's passports and putting in "biometric" data, and you just /assume/ the scanners will work right to the point that you don't even put people on them, despite this technology having trouble not breaking down nevermind recognizing anything. And you keep on assuming it works right despite clearly and utterly damning evidence to the contrary because... what, exactly?
That other "biometric" approach? Fingerprints? Turns out you can fake those with gummi bears. What's next, faking iris scans with a common or kindergarten variety marble?
I could reiterate all the arguments why this doesn't work, why in fact it simply cannot work. Why in fact it's entirely counter-productive to try and deploy biometrics, as well as a grave insult to everyone's humanity. But this is such a vivid illustration how that is just not an issue for whoever sets the standards with these things.
Why are those people still in charge? Is it the pork barrel kickbacks?
"Brodie Clark ... said: “There was no breach of security or immigration control. E-Gates are used in conjunction with manual checking by border officials ... , and the border was not compromised as a result of the incident. The gates have now re-opened and we will continue to monitor their performance to ensure they operate safely and securely. To date more than 3 million people have used the E-Gates system.""
This is a willful smokescreen that misses the importance of this failure. The staff noticed that these two had switched passports and got through (any bets that it was a couple of teenagers just seeing what would happen, and being really obvious about it?). However, that shows that it is possible to game the system, and that there has been an unknown number of false positives generated by the system, which may only be the two in this case, but with a sample of 3 million is likely to be higher.
OK, false positives are always going to be a problem with any workable identity system dealing with thousands of people a day (as someone else said above, I know someone that has gone through borders with the IDs of several different people). The only advantage I can see here is that there is a second level of security - the staff - that aren't there when there are human passport checkers. However, they are around to deal with negatives not positives.
This is a waste of time and money, and Brodie Clark clearly knows it.
A business partner who shares my dislike for mysterious government electronics has a 'neutered' passport (place mug of cold water in microwave along with passport and cook on high for a minute) that he knows to be a non-working chip.
He flew into the UK at Christmas and the machine accepted him as being who the passport (didn't) show to be.
Another useless government project.
4 working days is 6 hours in "Portugal Time (TM)"
Portugal - "1 hour and 30 years behind the rest of Europe."
In a good way, mainly, but fuck me the paperwork hangover from communism is unbelievable! Seriously, it takes more form filling to join a college evening class in Portugal than it does to get a passport in the UK. No joke.
Only used those bio-gates once, let me into Portugal no probs.
Beer cos they have cheapo booze.
Salazar and Estado Novo were right-wing.
You know, it's not just lefties who want the world made according to their desires and who kill until they get it; righties do it too.
Let's not try to blame Portugal's ills on a temporary step to the left post-Caetano. 40 years of right wing authoritarianism most certainly left its mark.
I spent hours poring over the form - multi-page - the first time.
To make sure I was OK, I took it to an official. "I don't want to get anything wrong here*"
She looked at it, it was OK and stamped it. Her passing remark was the equivalent of "Don't take this bollock*s too seriously".
I.e., the more papers they are forced to look through, the less they give a shit.
* I've heard disaster stories of folks who skive a couple of days on a KELA-organised training course, getting ALL benefit stopped for 90 days, including housing allowance. Stay with friends, or sleep on the street. As it's -31C at the moment, I wanted to be sure....
“There was no breach of security or immigration control. E-Gates are used in conjunction with manual checking by border officials and in this case both individuals were stopped by the Immigration Officer responsible for supervising the gates."
So this farcical recognition system is being 100% duplicated by...err.. the very people these systems are meant to be replacing!
It's obviously a nice contract to win as a IT supplier but, heck, this is coming from the public purse!
Sheesh!
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