If they want to entice us with convenience, the facial recognition should allow you to just stroll through without talking to anyone.
The facial recognition is based on the biometric data collected when you got your ID, the ID you presented to pass through security. The ID with your name, address, date of birth, and uniquely identifying number on it. The ID which is associated with your boarding pass. The ID they scan (or they scan the boarding pass which is associated with your ID) prior to letting you through security.
Using facial recognition changes nothing, absolutely nothing, except that it reduces the amount of time spent at the checkpoint.
It does not grant anyone access to any information they do not already have.
It does not impede the traveler in any way.
It does not change, at all, any aspect of one's privacy whatsoever.
"But I don't wanna..." doesn't seem like a defensible position.
Comparing an ephemeral photo taken of you to your government credential at the TSA checkpoint is a temporary formality. At some point, the government credential presentation will be unnecessary.
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/clearing-cbp/passenger-name-recor... (Control-F "What information is collected?")
When I got my license, which I can use to board a flight in my country I did not give fingerprints or an eye scan. They have my photo, DOB, name - not more.
This "it changes nothing" attitude is unproductive.
It also doesn't improve anything:
An agent comparison of you vs the id is still considered to be the gold standard. When this system fails, you have to default to the agent's comparison. This is a slow down compared to the previous scenario.
The time for an id comparison isn't the bottleneck in security. It's the physical actions used to go through the TSA and the built in inconsistency to prevent people from speedrunning the screening.
They make it opt out because there are always a few people who object[1], so this is a safety valve.
If everyone opted out ("I am Spartacus") then it would stop and they would have to switch to less efficient means. (If it weren't less efficient then they wouldn't need this one.)
As John Gilmore points out at http://new.toad.com/gnu/ :
"If you politely decline to show ID whenever someone asks (or demands) it, and continue politely declining regardless of how they escalate, you will discover what your rights are. You'll be surprised. You'll get away with it. Most of the people who were asking for it have no right to demand it. They've been relying on your voluntary cooperation. They forgot to tell you that part; but you just found it out for yourself. Sometimes you may discover that you didn't have the right to live, move around, or do business in your own country without government-issued documents. That's very interesting knowledge to acquire first-hand too. If you haven't recently tried exercising your right to exist and live without government permission, are you sure you still have that right?"
[1] In one of the author Robert Heinlein's biographical accounts he walks out of a hotel because they demand to see id at registration. He went to another hotel which did not.
Every state id picture is run through facial recognition, and that data is processed to detect duplicate people and other issues. Every passport has a picture which is digitized for facial recognition.
This is a good thing, as it potentially disarms the stupid RealID fiasco with respect to ID and airports.
There is no privacy benefit to document validation.
When I opted out of the scanner once, I had to wait about 20 minutes, and then the TSA agent comes over to do a "pat down" instead, but is going inappropriately slow and squeezing my body, and saying things like "I'd bet you opted out because you like this." I regret not immediately calling them out and filing charges.
I had a phase where I would always wear this "cease your investigators" shirt, never had any comments but yea stood by the machine for 5 minutes or so, never considered the machine would be radiating outward as well as inward, but yeah, mostly did it as a small protest, thought it worth demonstrating you don't have to comply.
https://neongrizzly.com/products/cease-your-investigations-i...
https://preview.redd.it/travel-safe-for-thanksgiving-v0-i3ja...
They're trained to operate in an unethical way.
The amount of agents who act like that and then start to get shy when you smile and go through with a patdown is pretty comical.
https://www.flysfo.com/about/airport-operations/safety-secur...
"You're damn right I like it, usually I have to pay for it."
The GAO found that the ability for people to understand that Americans are not required to go through the biometric exit was non-existant and the experience of opting out was very poor.
What this means is signage was not posted that indicating for Americans this is an optional process and people forming the "requirement" were not educated that it is optional for citizens.
Yet, the experience is that people forcefully push people into to posing for the camera with markings on the floor, the lack of opting in/consenting to it, and prevent people from being aware of what's going on. (Yes: You can opt out .. walk up to the board area with your passport open to your photo page)
We’ve known for over a decade that DHS, FBI, CBP, and local police buy location data.
https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how...
One reason I left Facebook early on was that I didn’t like getting tagged in photos the next morning after everyone would get home from parties. Too bad for me, as long as you have a friend who don’t value your privacy, there is nothing you can do about it.
Add to this any public event, where they are well within their rights to take your picture and match it against known threat actors and the only way to not play this game is to be a hermit
I hated this too, but there was an option to disable it. I know because I used it for that very reason. I don't know if they removed it; I left Facebook probably around a decade ago and it was there when I left.
So you need to be in TSA PreCheck, and you gave them your photo and fingerprints when you voluntarily enrolled in that program. They are probably using your passport biometrics if those are available as well.
https://www.tsa.gov/biometrics-technology/evaluating-facial-...
2. If people stand up for decency, they might get it.
And then letter is correct. I had a guy retaliate for declining. He said I was making his job harder and that he'd make my life harder in return. I'm still waiting. Surely, as a TSA employee, he's got lots of connections in government. A lot of these people are unstable.
> They already have a little data, I fail to see why I shouldn't let them have everything.
Either that or they took a page out of the big tech playbook where the plan was to boil the frog all along.
And the senators’ letter quotes a talk given by TSA Administrator David Pekoske in 2023 in which he said “we will get to the point where we require biometrics across the board.”
Sibling comment covers this well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228984
There was a time when America's security forces did not routinely surveil its own peoples' movements.
In the 1990s the airplanes jumped at the opportunity to have required id checks so they could take control of the secondary market.
It was still possible to buy a ticket like "E. Smith", but that option was cut off a few years later.
Ask IBM what becomes of databases full of people's names associated with their movements.
Germany is still facilitating an alleged genocide. The only thing that has changed is the profile of the victims. The situation now is even worse, given that practically everyone in the world knows what’s happening but life is going on as normal.
Convenience won, though, it seems.
Its just how things work there. It feel more malicious to pretend its not happening
It's a long, but interesting talk.
secondly, if people surviving a literal genocide in Palestine can resist the most technologically sophisticated, surveilled, and completely enclosed death camp ever constructed by the U.S. and Israel, you can figure out how to deal with cameras.
> you can deal with cameras
Still rather not.
It is about the belief that you "don't give Mr Rogers any power you wouldn't give to Hitler." Basically no matter how great you think your current leader is, you recognize that they will not be in power forever (or that they may not be good forever). Democracy, autocracy, oligarchy, whatever your system of government, there is a singular truth: all men die. All things change. Obviously this policy can go too far, but personally I think it is worth considering not just how good a policy or power can be, but how much harm it can do if abused or misused. It is easy to ignore this part because we want to believe people are good and have good intentions. Because we see the advantages and get excited about them. Because it is harder to think about abstract scenarios. But it is an important thing to think. You need not think your government is evil or nefarious to still be concerned with turnkey tyranny. In fact, the more faith you have in your government, the more you should be concerned. Because it is at that time that people are less likely to keep their guards up, and it is that same time that hostile actors look to take over. There is no absolute defense against malicious leaders, so it takes constant care.
High degree of separation of powers (unlike most other democracies, the executive is separate from the legislative and there are two independent legislative bodies). High level of agreement across multiple bodies before a law can be passed (House, Senate and President).
I thought Scalia's explanation was a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0
The point is to be highly distributed. Many keys to power. It makes it hard to get shit done when people are unwilling to work together (read partisan hacks). Which is what makes it strong against takeover, even getting half the keys will still grind your takeover to a slow roll. That’s petty robust to adversaries.
I have a hot take. My faith in the system strengthened with Trump and especially the stupid coup. Because I saw a man try very hard to take over and despite having a coalition that was practicing party over country, he still couldn’t. Though how many keys does he have now and did he do the legwork to make it work a second time? That we’ll see. But even then, I think it tells a successful story of robustness. That it took a few hundred years of growing power and extreme partisanship to break it. Clearly it can be and needs to be improved but clearly it’s got something of value. Something to learn from and iterate from rather than rework from scratch. I’m not aware of any country that’s survived under such extreme circumstances, but I’m not knowledgeable enough here. Please correct me but cite so I can learn more. Defining what is a country, let alone a continuous empire is very messy business with a lot of national narrative tied in (we can even argue the US’s fragmentation would disqualify, but the constitution stayed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
I think a better way of phrasing it might be "a continuous system of government". Germany certainly existed before the late 1940s, but the system of government was obviously very, very different.
But if you didn't complain about the trains, maybe because you didn't take them, you didn't get killed. It was fine.
Maybe things are actually kinda bad, but you're just not willing to admit it to yourself because you aren't complaining about the trains.
In the US, we complain about the trains. And if the gov't is spying on us with facial recognition, we're going to stop them.
I wish I still had this childish optimism.
Taking a photo and fingerprint is pretty standard everywhere.
Travel by plane/DMV applications normalized fingerprinting.
What’s next? Semen and blood samples as well?
The terrorists have won. Fear has ruled the major powers of the world. And the current major power of the free world is a puppet and an all around idiot.
Maybe I'm misremembering the iris scan. If it did happen, it could be because there were loads of Mongolian students about to embark on their next semester of studies in China.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_System_for_Travel_A...
[1] https://www.yvr.ca/en/passengers/navigate-yvr/customs-and-im...
How many shoe bombers does the TSA catch in a day? 0. In a month? 0. Since the only shoe bomber? 0. We still take off our shoes. Same with underwear bombs. 0. We still partially undress and do the nude-a-tron.
The point is, we could already ditch the lines, we don't want to.
There's nothing magical about setting off a bomb on a plane as far as terrorizing a populace goes. Bombs in the mazes before "security" would be effective, as we learned at the Boston Marathon.
But it's still a valid concern as to whether or not this new system is at least as secure and privacy-respecting as the old one.
All this thing does it speeds up process of you getting through TSA.
Except, quoting https://www.marketplace.org/2016/08/11/pros-and-cons-privati...
> Contractors provide a more flexible workforce for his airport, and on top of that, it’s easier to show people the door, he said.
> “If employees are not performing, they can be dealt with appropriately, better or more effectively on a contract side than a government side,” Sprenger said.
> Labor unions say the real reason airports want to go with contractors is simple: to cut costs. James Mudrock is the president of AFGE Local 1230, the union representing TSA workers in Sacramento, California.
People needing a job?
This type of take almost looks like a virus.
(During the pandemic, I had a job that let me--I mean, a friend of my choice--do my own e-verify/I-9 form. When you enter your passport number, the e-Verify system spits out a digital copy of the photo you sent it to prevent counterfeit or altered photos.)
I just don't understand how one more potato quality still capture of your face, that by definition is very similar to those they already have, changes the equation much.
People started complaining about cameras, and airport id checks, and facial recognition, and REAL ID, and incentives like PreCheck to support mass fingerprinting for a decade or three.
At some point the rubber band breaks, or at least one of the ropes snap.
For example, President Elect Trump has plans to reinstate Schedule F and require loyalty tests for all government employees. If you post liberal content on your facebook, or maybe you fail the test even once, boom - you can't get a government job ever, because your face and identity is linked to your political leanings and those political leanings are now the Enemy of the American Government.
Or you could use this technology to automatically sort people, putting the ethnically-vague looking people into camps while they await rulings to see if they're illegal or not.
Of course this is all extreme, like fascist extreme. Suppose this doesn't come true, which is what we're all hoping for. Are you confident there will never be an evil government from now until the end of time?
If your answer is anything other than a resounding yes, then you should be opposed to these advancements on principal.
Additionally you threw in a false equivalency: But a ton of things are going on..you're useless in fighting it. On top of that you threw in an accusation that "if you don't then face longer lines".
The cameras that are above aren't good enough to do a confident identification of an individual. They're great for tracking where unique blobs go.
The picture they are doing a comparison against is a profile picture and consistent lighting. Additionally the old picture that is on your license is a much older photo. The thread here is that the people who are taking your image now are updating their models and maintaining the models of what you look like. With that they are able to retroactively and perform future lookups on different visual datasources about what you did. (Gas stations, stores, weed shop, adult toy store, walking down the red light district, being on a train, etc)
Flying privately requires none of this. Which is how you know they're not serious about security but about control of the masses.
Also, the thing you're ignoring, and perhaps why you fail to understand the problem, is you haven't bothered to ask what the false positive rate is. Would you enjoy being stopped and arrested by very cocksure police simply because a computer made a mistake and they refuse to believe that?
In Germany, there is no way you'll get on a commercial airfield without going through security, and if you're not a passenger but an employee or a pilot, you'll need a comprehensive background check.
Only exemption for now is ultralight aircraft because these are about as dangerous as a car (or if you just compare kinetic energy, even less dangerous because they're barely half a ton in weight.
Your "commercial airfield" may actually be two airfields in one. This is not uncommon. There is a "commercial" side which is where public carriers usually work and there is a "private" side which is where individuals and often cargo works.
Aside from this there are plenty of private airfields in Germany.
> ultralight aircraft because these are about as dangerous as a car
The cool things about vehicles is you can put things in them. Things like explosives. The incredibly low tech version of this is currently in use in some parts of the world, and that is where you attach a mortar to a drone, then go drop it on a target.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Something like six “final deadlines” have passed for this to happen, and every time it’s kicked years down the road. It’s an unfounded mandate with real end-user costs (in my state an REAL ID costs twice as much to obtain) that no longer seems to have a base of support in Congress.
Hard to think of their intentions as anything more than theater for their voter base.
You then hold a committee meeting and hopefully that solves it.
You finally change federal law and usually that solves it.
If it doesn't you have to start arresting people to foment change.
This is not a gentle tool.
Government _is_ the people. It's inappropriate to use it as a tool to bully the people.
I hate this. Feels so wrong and dystopian. They need to abolish this. It’s so unnecessary.
You have to say no.