
Land of the free you say?
Move along citizen, nothing to see here.
America's Transport Security Administration, better known as the TSA, has been testing facial recognition software to automatically screen passengers flying across the country in 16 airports. And now it's looking into rolling it out nationwide next year. Flyers will be able to pass through security checkpoints by scanning a …
By their own admission, they plan to send the data they collect to somewhere else in the DHS system for unspecified purposes. The only step necessary to do this perpetually is to not end the "evaluation" period that allows them to do it. I doubt they're currently planning anything particularly nefarious with it, which doesn't matter because as soon as someone comes up with a way to use the collected data, it will all be right there. Facial recognition has proven in many tests, conducted in a lot of countries and a wide range of environments, to be crap at getting useful results and great at creating privacy violations, overreach, and artificial discrimination. It is not needed here and is likely to cause significant harm.
There have been similar setups at International airports, where you feed the machine your passport and stare blankly at the camera until it lets you though the gate (or not), for years, Shirley?
"Staff are still on standby, however, for final verification."
Half the queues quickly get gummed up, waiting for an overworked member of staff to override the fault. Just like at Sainsbury's self-checkout.
What a load of BS. The fastest part of the whole "TSA experience" (it's like a bad Disney ride) is getting your ID checked. And what about your boarding pass - are we scanning that too? This is guaranteed to cause even more misery at TSA checkpoints, so it's clearly about eliminating staff. Besides, I thought one of the supposed benefits of the ID check was forcing interaction with a human being who might spot nervousness, evasiveness, etc.
Much agreement.
so it's clearly about eliminating staff and not (gotta gag first, one mo *gag*) "yield[ing] a more streamlined passenger experience"
If it were you'd release your pos/neg hit rate, so as to improve travellers' confidences. No stats = no confidence.
Lemme guess: releasing those stats would compromise the security of the system/nation/Disney [1]? Erm, ever heard of security by obscurity? We have.
I'm very pleased to have been to the Left Bank of the Pond ('80s) - the people are so hospitable, the food is astounding and there was imported beer! (US beer... well! Happy for you that you have the micro-breweries now!) You wouldn't get me back there on an extradition.
[1] credit: TaabuTheCat :)
Someone/thing altering the link between images and names/numbers. Meaning your mom is recognized as some businessman from New Jersy, a CIA agent shows up as Terry Wrist, Madonna shows up as a dog without it's rabies shot. Maybe add 50 years to everyone's birthdate too.
I am so looking forward to this, it will shutdown airports due to "we don't know how to look at an ID and tell who it is, that tech was forgotten" lol
Still, our overlords are getting much more efficient at managing the cattle, er consumers, er people. I'm sure Xi is proud of the US following in his footsteps.
Big Brothers everywhere want to use facial ID as the universal world wide identification media. No ID card necessary, no language barrier, no touching. You can't lose your face, and can't change it (normally), etc. Luckily, or regrettably, the technology doesn't fulfill the fondest hopes, happy ending dreams dreams and deepest wishes of despots and thuggish autocracies everywhere just yet. Indeed, face ID can be beat in a matter of seconds by those in the know. Various disguises, like a pair of glasses, work well sometimes.
Looks like TSA will be using ID mainly to build up the data base and a test bed for USA police, government agents and big brother. Just because they can. And, they will. They might even thwart a terrorist attack some day. Despite their current record.
It's for you own good you know.
Not every one has a unique face, though.
https://www.today.com/health/mom-rare-identical-quads-reflects-sons-1st-year-amid-pandemic-t219944
So either the technology must be able to distinguish between identical individuals using finer distinctions than humans can, or be a composite technology, eg. combined with gait analysis. Since facial recognition pretty much sucks at the mo, the former is not happening in the foreseeable future.