We have these in NL. They malfunction frequently, people don't understand what is going on and the people staffing them are unable to do much to improve throughput. It was just a cost savings measure so that fewer border guards can process more people but from the point of view of the travelers it is a net loss.
Before there would be a very short wait, you'd walk up to the border guard (one of three or four on duty typically), put your passport on their desk, they'd look at it for three seconds and swipe it, then you'd be on your merry way 10 seconds later. Now you wait for 10 or 15 minutes (if you're lucky), insert your passport into the machine, wait for the silly glass doors to close, have your passport spat back out again, repeat the whole thing, find that you were looking a bit too low, so re-do that and so on until finally the second set of silly glass doors opens and you can move on.
It's a complete failure from a usability point of view.
The machines you find around the EU are completely different from the ones in the article.
The EU machines just scan your passport, including RFID data, and take a photo of your face. All of this is then sent to a border guard in a booth who manually matches your face to your passport.
The “efficiency” boost comes from allowing a single border guard to check 4-5 passports simultaneously, without having the delay that comes from waiting for the next person to walk forward and present a passport.
In Heathrow, London, the digital gates process people much faster than normal gates, and have half the staff. Unfortunately they are a little confusing for non-tech literate people who often get stuck.
Where in Heathrow are there digital gates to exit?
The US already has a variety of digital gates to _enter_ the country - similar to the digital gates that Heathrow has at immigration - but this article is talking about special electronic gates at _exit_ which I've never seen at any LHR terminal.
OP was taking about passports on the way in to country (schengen had passport checks on the way out, but UK doesn't)
However Heathrow T5 (and T2 I believe) have face scanners on departure, for domestic travellers. Passengers on a flight from Heathrow to Glasgow don't need a passport or any other form of photo ID (it's a domestic flight), but they mingle with international transiting passengers who have not immigrated into the UK (say flying Delhi to Heathrow to New York)
To ensure passengers can't bypass immigration by swapping boarding cards, they take photos of domestic passengers on entry to security (either post immigration for Int-domestic transit, or post check in for domestic-domeatic). This is then compared with the passenger actually boarding the flight at the gate, and it's mostly automated (with manual override).
I just went through a similar system at Hong Kong. It worked well and I breezed through the automated gates while a long line of people were backed up at the traditional line. Perhaps they just did a better job of designing the system, but you scan your passport at one station and then step forward into a scannner with a sign telling you where to look. A gate closes behind you. If it fails, it flagged a human to that lane but kept you locked in the box. In my case, it beeped and opened the door into the terminal.
I’ve lost a significant amount of weight since my passport photo was taken. Several human border guards in other counties suggested I get a new passport. One required me to show a second form of ID. The camera system had no issue.
It's worth noting that the US does not have exit immigration, so this wouldn't be a "step up" in the same way, but of course your comments about how well it works stand.
Now that you mention it, I did scan my fingerprints. Don’t know what they compared them with - I literally crossed the border an hour before by car and didn’t scan my fingerprints there.
I've been to the one in Amsterdam more than once and they work just fine. I've also tried a few other ones and so far they've all worked better than border guards. The reason is because you can fit more scanners on the same surface area than border guards. Even if one is not working "perfectly", I'm pretty sure the rate of people going through is higher regardless.
Amsterdam isn't a great advertisement for the passport gates. As a regular traveller through Amsterdam for 17 years (including right now, my flight leaves in 40 minutes...), I have never seen worse queues or longer delays for incoming passengers.
The last time I arrived at Schiphol, I had plenty of time to compare the relative throughput of the gates and manual checks. At best two automated gates have around half the throughput of one equally wide manual desk for EU travellers.
Schiphol's big problem, however, seems to have been using the gates as an excuse to cut back staff too far.
The result, at least, on the D pier, is regular queues of passengers through the passport hall and back up to the main concourse.
> Schiphol's big problem, however, seems to have been using the gates as an excuse to cut back staff too far.
From what I read it's the combination of cutting back immigration staff together with airlines (KLM) not sharing their expected passenger numbers anymore plus a significant increase in passengers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa..., Schiphol grew by 9%, year before by 6%
I quite like the automated gates. Per line is more inefficient but total throughput seems higher. Plus, seems quicker to go through.
I feel that I want a border guard more than this. This isn't going to catch someone doing something funny. (Like smuggling drugs out of the country, or smuggling other people out)
> This isn't going to catch someone doing something funny. (Like smuggling drugs out of the country, or smuggling other people out)
That's not what it is for.
It's simply to verify that what your passport says about you picture wise matches your face, and to be able to detain you in case you have an outstanding arrest warrant or open traffic fines.
That “border guard” is an immigration agent, all they care about is if you’re legally allowed in the country. The customs agents are usually after you clear immigration, and they only care if you’re in possession of something illegal.
Even if the human operator is faster, you can buy many more machines. Airport immigration is extremely inefficient, e.g. Malaysia being one of the worst, but I think there's much that can be improved if the space was disrupted.
My idea would be when you approach the immigration hall there are 50+ first-step machines where you slide in your passport, it does just enough to detect if you're going to need a grilling or likely to pass through with no questions, then takes your biometrics if required, and then it prints you a number and you head to either an automated gate or low grade desk operator or high grade desk operator for the more thorough processing. It could potentially also discriminate against old people - you don't want a 70 year old queuing for long after a long flight so they get priority etc...
Then again nowadays I'm quite good at figuring out which lines will move faster, it might sound racist, but if a flight from Ethopia has just arrived at KL then I'm going to choose the line with less passengers from that flight as they mostly get grilled or havent got right documentation or completed formalities properly. I also avoid Chinese on exit immigration in BKK as they almost always miss out details from their departures form (perhaps due to no Chinese instructions) and don't heed the advice to move out the way whilst they complete the form. Children can be a problem too, and a short line might be masking a few brats hidden in the leg space of adults, always take a side scan of the line, because 1 child = 1.25x adult time - lifting the brat up for photos etc... Avoid Indians/Pakistans/Bangledash on check-in as they travel with the kitchen sink and 9/10 there going be at least one argument over excess luggage. Sometimes you can't really tell and just look for preparedness - do these people have their passports in their hands ready to go, or buried in the handbags, have they removed their cap or will they wait to be told. grumpy traveler
Totally different form factor but software wise I would expect them to do the same thing. The passport photographs taken here are definitely spec'd with biometric intent, the list of what to do and what not to do runs to 15 items or so.
One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand...
Why do 300m people have to suffer for the boogeyman terrorist? I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Where does this stop?
This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with control and mass surveillance. It's pretty depressing.
>One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand...
It was already well out of hand when congress approved the patriot act as a knee jerk reaction to terrorism. That was the proverbial straw and everything since has just been gravy for the MIC and other companies milking the government teat.
> I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat?
Is that really the point of terrorism? Is there even such a thing as a general "point" to all terrorism? I would assume there as many different goals as there are terrorists, or at least terrorist organizations.
Rather, what's more interesting is what the people in power do to take advantage of terrorism. The policies they implement, programs they put into place, etc. Terrorism (and other external threats) can act as a convenient cover for domestic actions that would otherwise be scrutinized.
And then there are the more mundane issues. Sometimes the changes that become visible to the public come from relatively low-level managers and officials, who simply enjoy playing with a bigger budget and new toys. It's not all conspiracies in dark rooms at the top.
We have to give democracy its due as well. Just because people can vote doesn't mean we inspire the most desirable behavior in our leaders, because the masses aren't rational. Who wants to be the politician responsible for having weakened security before the next terrorist attack? It's similar to being "soft on crime." The public will hold you responsible, right or wrong.
Devil's advocate: What is so bad about everyone being tracked and accountable for where they are at any point in time? It would seem a lot of mistaken identity, fraud, and he-said she-said issues could be removed if we can locate people at any point in time.
False positives. No system is 100% accurate, but the closer that systems get to 100% reliability, the more people confuse those systems with 100% reliability.
The Panopticon™ claims you robbed the bank. You know you were at work, in a meeting, and your coworkers vouch for your alibi. But the Panopticon™ is "always" right, so you get fast-tracked through the courts (saves taxpayer money not to have the case dragged out) and sentenced to ten years for a crime you didn't commit (your public defender was a huge help at sentencing). Because after all, if you couldn't trust the Panopticon™, then why the hell did they spend $600 billion of taxpayer money building it?
American society was founded on the bedrock of a few principles: you're innocent until you're proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, crime is prosecuted and not prevented, your reputation can be reset by moving somewhere new and making a new beginning, and trust, faith, and forgiveness are more worthy aims than proof, evidence, and justice, for the latter can only really obtained with great difficulty and cost through the courts. Panopticons go against all these principles.
The problem isn't with the ideal scenario, the issue is when systems fail or are used outside of the ideal scenario. Generally this will be in a muzzling and controlling capacity when it comes to surveillance.
Interestingly merely paranoia of surveillance results in self muzzling and self imposed restrictions.
In the end the results are not conducive for societies progress.
> Interestingly merely paranoia of surveillance results in self muzzling and self imposed restrictions.
My dad got me paranoid about surveillance. Once I grew up old enough to look more than 2 years ahead I started censoring myself because the internet never forgets and I don't want to give a dossier full of potentially incriminating data when/if we slide from democracy to dictatorship.
The upside is that social media is ruined for me forever ;). In light of recent commentary, links to depression and addiction it looks like it turned out healthier for me.
Nonetheless I'm fully aware of the level of self-censorship I tend to sustain.
Facial recognition will not make a dent in "mistaken identity, fraud, he-said she-said issues" without displacing something like "the entire military budget," which is not going to happen. Facial recognition also doesn't work.
Maybe not facial recognition, but why not chip everyone with RFID and GPS and track people? Require biometric auth to use computers or enter buildings? Stop using cash and require all transactions to be electronic. I'm just asking the questions about what is so awful about massive transparent surveillance? We're never getting this back in Pandora's box so we might as well acknowledge it and make it a part of our existence.
Your argument is against fundamental freedoms that humans have granted one another, which have allowed civilization to improve over time (with "bad times" alongside). Anyone against dictatorial (not the benevolent kind) powers would never argue for everyone to be micro-chipped and tracked, disallowing all cash, etc. Even in democratic setups these kind of additions and restrictions tweak the power asymmetry significantly, and are causing a lot of human suffering. In short, these moves aren't great for humanity as a whole.
unless the entire government is as transparent as your massive surveillance, no thanks. our democracy is extremely fragile. if information collection goes into a black box it's a turn-key solution for totalitarianism.
for instance, see the Stasi.
...however, if intelligence gathered were all open-access, and classification abolished, I'd be into it.
As long as we can stop dancing around the fact that most of us drive faster than the speed limit, smoke dope, and/or have unconventional sexual relationships at some point in our lives.
Fair points. What if everyone else's information was open and accessible so that nobody could hide anything from anybody thus removing potential asymmetric knowledge?
Worse still, a government comes to power in your country and changes the law so you get the death penality, and it's retroactively enforced by looking through everyone's location history.
Yea, this is a troubling one. I brought up my original post as a thought experiment and I think some arguments presented were better than others.
Governments are fallible just like human beings. I suppose in some sense it is arrogant to believe the US will always remain a democracy and certainly other countries have much more tumultuous histories.
I still like the idea of a totally open and transparent society but without something totally incorruptible and unbiased taking the role of government it does not seem practical.
It would also be a great help in controlling dissenters and subversives. Once we have the infrastructure in place, it's there for anyone with enough power to use for any reason...
Let's say I make frequent visits to mosques, and there's a government unfriendly to Muslims in power, as one of many hypothetical scenarios where this could be a real problem.
Looking at data storage rates and 'digital permanence': we should be equally concerned that such a government may one day be in power and retroactively use that data against you.
Sure but all your activities and everyone else's activity would be tracked. Assuming rule of law continues to be upheld and we don't devolve into something worse it should be pretty easy to show innocence if needed.
Let's say I visit a church regularly, and someone who later turns out to be a terrorist was often there at the same time. Not surprising, since houses of worship often have predictable schedules of events.
How do I prove I wasn't collaborating with the terrorist?
It's just technology: Some will use it for good and some will use it for evil. Isn't that the mantra we've been repeating since forever within the hacker community?
> It's just technology: Some will use it for good and some will use it for evil. Isn't that the mantra we've been repeating since forever within the hacker community?
Suppose your job was to work out whether the identity of people entering or exiting your country matched what was stated on their travel documents.
How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors?
Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem.
The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right?
[I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process].
DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable.
I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too?
Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement.
If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points.
Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?
There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged.
Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?'
The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.
I agree it's obviously a political problem but you're sort of deflecting the point.
We're not talking about corporate surveillance we're talking border control. Emotionally these things are connected, practically, the system is just trying to validate the eligibility of people to use travel documents.
What do you expect people are doing at country entry and exit points and do you want them to do something that works or not?
I think it's valid to say that for ideological reasons you don't really want travel documents matched against travellers properly but you do need to understand your own position properly and how that plays out politically to be able to effectively fight that battle.
I feel like either you're not understanding the implications of the logging aspect in particular, or you're being disingenuous.
Firstly, we are talking about corporate surveillance. Maybe not today, but certainly tomorrow. The Australian government is already gaging private sector interest in their facial ID database, which was quietly sneaked through legislation as an anti terror measure only 2 years ago.
Secondly, these records, and all records, inevitably reach the hands of government, corporate, and finally criminal actors - usually in that order. This is again only a question of when, not if. And with access to all that data? That goes back to my original point - we haven't even thought about the implications of having such data available. But we have had a glimpse with e.g. feds getting caught looking at data of love interests.
This isn't just 'border control'. Border control is merely one of hundreds of facets in everyday life where people are being stripped of this privacy by actors who ultimately do not represent their interests.
Are you seriously going to claim that this removal of privacy and systemic logging of everyone's life is a reasonable way to tackle border control so we can stop some terrorists from being one of America's least significant causes of death? More people die to lightning strikes every year in the US than to mishaps at border control resulting in terrorism or such.
Yeah I'm gonna go ahead and claim that automated matching between the headshot on the passport NFC chip and the natural person at the gate is totally reasonable.
Bearing in mind that you don't need to hook up to any external databases to do this (all the data is on the chip)
You're dismissing everything I said because you 'don't need' to do the logging. That's not much of an argument even if we ignored the fact that governments will 100% certainly be collecting and storing and correlating and ultimately selling that data even though technically they don't need to do that in order to just make the border control aspect work - as I have shown with the AU government doing literally that with facial ID data.
> To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat
People are willing to curtail the right to keep and bear arms (and it is a right, whereas there is no official right not to be surveilled in public) for a threat which is within an order of magnitude of it; and we can only really tell what the rate is like with the current countermeasures. If the rate climbs after removing countermeasures, will your opinion change? I'd still be against pervasive surveillance if the rate went up maybe tenfold.
It could be argued that all the lawful gunowners together are causing less harm and/or hassle than all the TSA combined.
In other words, having a gun as last resort protection against a tyrant isn't hurting anyone the way an extra hour of unproductive scanning and associated privacy intrusions are.
It could also be argued that having a gun and not using it is, in terms of societal effects, precisely the same as not having a gun to begin with. So the comparison of potential force on the part of gun owners with actual force by the TSA is a bit disingenuous.
When you’re unarmed you have no option to use a weapon to defend an innocent life. When you’re armed and have the option, you need to determine whether the risk of using a weapon is worth the potential risk of unintended side effects causing unintended damage.
These are two very different situations. If you fail to understand the difference then I hope you never go out into public armed, and maybe you should consider never owning anything primarily used as a weapon at all.
It's a "right" by way of an awkwardly-phrased amendment that could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today, designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today.
(In fact, the NRA itself wasn't all that upset about gun control in the fairly recent past.)
And "mass surveillance" would have meant something very different 200 years ago. Why bother writing something into the Bill of Rights when no government could possibly afford to do what they can today?
So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
It's only awkwardly-phrased if you try to read it with 2017 Standard Coastal American English and without the context of the complete document (as it is supposed to be read, evidenced by the rather broad definition of speech and the press applied to the first amendment), the intent of the drafters, and a deep understanding of the writing style and cultural influences on interpretation which affected the drafters' choice of words.
> could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today
The NRA construes the second amendment to the U.S. constitution as the Supreme Court interprets it. If you have a disagreement with the Supreme Court's interpretation and standards regarding the second amendment to the U.S. constitution, state them in terms which thoroughly challenge the painstaking review of evidence which informed their interpretation. I recommend going to the wonderful folks at Oyez, they have recordings (the official transcripts have glaring errors, including literal binary flips of meaning) of hearings and briefs for you to review and couch your disagreement in.
> designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today.
This is false, don't rely on pundits to understand and accurately convey a history of the design and manufacture of arms. There were semi-automatic firearms (handguns and rifles) of arbitrary magazine capacity in manufacture at least 40 years prior (and if you include the Kalthoff repeater [which may have not been commonly known in the colonies, and requires two actions to fire], 155 or more years prior) to the drafting of the second amendment (December 1791). Furthermore, the amendment actually makes no attempt to define the type of arms covered, not even defining that they be firearms or specifically rifles or handguns or guns (cannons) or shotguns.
> So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
The right to keep and bear arms is a natural one, because the purpose is self defense, and the common defense. Humans are defined largely by their capacity to design, build, and/or use tools, so it is obvious that access to the tools which have become essential to the natural right to defend your person would themselves warrant the same recognition.
It is a natural right to use appropriate and proportionate means to defend your property (including your life), and to retain those means in advance of such an occasion.
Ignoring false positives for a second, isn't this easily fooled by putting on a prosthetic nose or something? Or plastic surgery? Hollywood makeup is pretty good at drastically altering someone's appearance in a few hours at the most. I don't know why a motivated terrorist can't just change their appearance before bombing a plane.
The problem with the disguise is that people are pretty good at seeing through, and the more prosthetics and make up you have on more obvious it is. It works in the movies with an editor and the lighting director and cameraman, but not so much in real life. Worse you’ve now given people a very good reason to stop you and question you further, because after all you’re wearing a disguise! You also have to consider that the disguise to fool a person, and the disguise to fool a computer might be very different, especially if the computer isn’t just using the visual spectrum to analyze you.
That depends on the makeup artist, the face one starts with, and the degree of work involved. Source: working in film for a decade. The closer someone is to an average, the easier it is to make them look like someone else. This is one reason (among others) some actors 'disappear' into a role and others always look like themselves.
I have faith in the power of makeup, but now let’s take this actor off the set. They can’t touch it up, they’re going to sweat, and they’ll be in real life and not on film. On the screen makeup is basically magic, I’ll totally grant that point, but life has limitations when you can’t yell “cut!” Still, this is very much IMO and I lack your experience in film.
You'd be surprised at the changes that are possible with interior prosthetics alone. Alos, consider that about half the adult population can wear makeup without being considered remarkable for doing so. You might figure out a dude with a fake beard easily, but have less success at assessing the wrinkly old lady behind him.
It’s true, but by the same token it is subtle makeup that wouldn’t even begin to fool facial recognition, even if they don’t use Near-IR/UV. Do you think you could toe that line of fooling the camera and the human? If so, I’ll buy it, as I said you’re experienced in this field and I’m not.
Right now there's no in-person scrutiny upon exit, so I don't see how this would cut down the costs.
DHS needs to justify the benefits and costs of creating such a system. That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system, and what failure rate is acceptable?
If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.
While many people overstay their visa, the vast majority are not going to get someone else to depart the country on their passport, which is what this system is supposed to prevent.
Remember, even 10 seconds per passenger adds up. There were 243,195,022 international passengers in the year ending March. Figure 1/2 of them were departures. That's 121 million people.
At 10 seconds per passenger that's 38 years of additional waiting. If we figure everyone's time is worth $7.25/hour then that's about $2.5 million of additional wasted time.
How much fraud do we need to stop to make this time and money worthwhile?
I'd rather spend that money on reducing a much bigger sort of fraud - the tens of billions in wage theft each year.
> If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.
Well, it's probably not really for safety or security, and they clearly don't give a hoot if you're inconvenienced or not.
Consider instead:
- Government contracts routed to political constituents (follow the money -- we know the millimeter scanners were corruptly funded)
- Tons of ground-truth data for further development and deployment. It'd be interesting to find out if they correlate against images captured by vanilla airport security cameras, as well as the cameras on the roadways or public transportation to the airport, and in rental car lots. This helps answer the question of "do we have to upgrade all the crappy domestic cameras to get ubiquitous surveillance, or can we get away with what's out there now?"
A billion or two spent to catch one or two terrorists isn't the point; actual bad guys are utterly optional, and maybe even a distraction.
I agree with your assessment. But I don't think that's a terrible outcome. Certainly we want to minimize hassle at the airport, but it's easy to imagine biometric solutions for some current sources of hassle -- carrying passports and checking passengers against the no-fly list, for example.
>"That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system"
Not sure how this applies specifically to visa-overstays? A visa overstay need not check your facial identification. It just needs to check that your document + visa overstayed the alloted time period or whatever rule it's comprised of.
Sounds like a business rule a code-monkey could implement within a couple programming hours.
Because the article says: "DHS says that airport face scans are designed to verify the identities of travelers as they leave the country and stop impostors traveling under someone else’s identity." and "DHS now claims the program is designed to detect a particular type of fraud defined in this report as “visa overstay travel fraud”"
That's the only justification given for the program.
It's not simply visa overstay. Sidebar 2 explains it as:
> “Visa overstay travel fraud” refers to a situation in which a foreign national wishes to remain in the United States undetected past the expiration of his visa and, to do so, arranges to have a conspirator leave the country in his place using the visa holder’s credentials. This creates an “exit record” in the visa holder’s name, fraudulently leading the government to believe that the visa holder has left the country, when in fact he has remained past the expiration of the visa, or “overstayed.”
That requires some sort of comparison between the documents and the body of the person leaving. It cannot be done in only a couple of programming hours.
If you read the article, it's about someone else using that passport to create an exit record, even though the original person is remaining in the country.
This isn't speeding up an existing process, it's adding a new one. My understanding is that you still need a TSA person to look at your ID when you go through security
I feel like even a mediocre TSA agent is going to be suspicious about the heavily bearded man with a serious bruise on their face. I mean, unless that matches your passport!
What, exactly, are they going to be suspicious about in this hypothetical of yours? Humans are pretty good at matching up facial features naturally, a black eye and beard aren't going to trip up anybody looking at you.
Again, this assumes your passport matches, and humans are trained to spot the unusual. Guy with a massive beard he did’t have on his passport, plus a bruise sufficient to fool he camera is suspicious don’t you think? Once again, this also assumes that being recognized is a problem, which is why you’re evading the scanner.
I don’t see how this works.
Edit: Remember, it can’t be a valid passport that actually looks like you in this case or it defeats the point of the disguise. Remember, this only makes sense if you’re trying to evade detection, and it makes no sense to evade the camera by standing out like a sore thumb to the humans.
Unlike what border control thinks, you are allowed to look different after 10 years, the picture on the passport is only there for reference and should not be used to identify people reliably.
I've often wondered why the us does not have any exit passport controls. It is the only country I've been to that only checks incoming and not outgoing.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, just observing.
Many do have exit checks (EU, most of Asia), but many don't (US, most of the Americas). I'd assume some of it in the US occurs when you buy the ticket... however, in some places you could still enter Mexico without a passport (returning is a challenge!).
The bigger issue is that Congress hasn't issued a specific mandate for this collection (by a private entity) and spending authority for the apparently ~$1B program. The article's concerns are for a more intrusive security state without congressional authority.
DHS’ current face scan-based program also may not comply with federal law. The program may exceed the authority granted to DHS by Congress because Congress has never explicitly authorized biometric collections from Americans at the border.26 Even if DHS has sufficient legal authority for the program, DHS has failed to complete a prerequisite public rulemaking process for the program, as mandated by federal law.
> The bigger issue is that Congress hasn't issued a specific mandate for this collection (by a private entity) and spending authority for the apparently ~$1B program. The article's concerns are for a more intrusive security state without congressional authority.
Posted about this 200 days ago.
"The first legislative mandate for an automated identity check on departing foreign visitors dates back to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and since 9/11 Congress has passed three laws requiring the Department of Homeland Security to set up a biometric exit system."
Doesn't address the citizen part but they'll sell it as "national security" and of course citizen data is immediately discarded </s>.
I accidentally* drove past the US southern border into Tijuana from San Diego without passport control, there was only an automated plate reader managed by US CBP. I also did not have my passport or passport card on me.
Coming back the same day, there was a line to drive back into the US that took several hours. Luckily, I was allowed back in with a driver’s license by the agent.
*I was dropping off 2 American friends who were taking a day trip to visit Tijuana, but the road signs were terribly marked and I crossed over unintentionally.
I've always wondered how re-entering the US is without a passport. You should be able to do it, and you should be scrutinized about it heavily.(Sounds suspicious)
I can testify to the process for something similar since I had a passport stolen when I was traveling in Spain. I went into the consulate, told them what happened and they asked me a few questions about my hometown (high school I went to, favorite restaurant, previous address). They noted my answers and had me fill out the normal passport form (including new photos) and assured me it would be ready in just under a week so I wouldn't miss my flight home. It was pretty painless, though I'd bet that just appearing American (accent, skin color, etc) might've helped.
Well, it's the same authentication problem of validating US citizenship without documentation. And the passport I was issued was in no way a backup, it was valid for the normal 10-year period and, apart from the note that said it was issued at the US embassy in Madrid, identical to one I would have been issued through the normal process inside the US.
There are 1000's of kilometers (miles if you prefer) of unsecured border in the North. You could leave and re-enter the US without being aware of it, much easier still on the lakes.
> It's literally the definition of "a free country"
citation needed. First off, it does, but it only becomes visible to passengers when they violate the conditions and try to re-enter. Second, this is not the definition of a 'free country'. Third, by modern definitions of a 'free contry' (1) the USA should not be considered 'THE land of the free'.
You can have your rights to leave the country stripped away by being accused of felonies, a judge can take away your PP, and even renewals can be rejected if you owe the government money.
The definition of "free country" is not zero passport controls on exit, and:
Robeson declared that it was “rather absurd” that he was
not “allowed to travel because of my friendship - open,
spoken friendship - for the Soviet people and the
peoples of all the world.”
The second "stamp" allows them to track how long you were in the country and which country to left through (which may not check on exit either). For visas (especially EU) this is a big deal, because you (as a US citizen) are not required to apply for a short term business/tourist visa, but you can't stay more than 30days. If you exit through the UK, however, you may not receive the exit stamp (e.g. EuroStar). They may then deny you re-entry due to the apparent violation.
If you Eurostar out from schengen to the UK, you pass through schengen exit check, then a few yards later Uk entry check.
I assume that Americans get exit stamps at the first check.
Most countries that stamp passports give entry and exit stamps, whether you have a visa or not. More and more counties rely on computers to keep track of you though - Israel used to stamp you at Tel Aviv, now you get a piece of paper that you return on exit (you still et stamped at Erez when going in/out of Gaza). In 2015 Australia stamped when you use the manual system, but not the automatic system. I don't recall if the US stamped my passport last time on the way in, I don't think Canada did. Hong Kong stopped in 2013 I think.
It's a shame, I like stamps. Plenty of them at Lagos last month though - 2 stamps on the way in, 2 on the way out, as well as the full page visa.
I think the Eurostar is the only port of exit in the U.K. where I _have_ had my passport checked - at least at my airport, exit passport checks are only random
By airline/train or UKBF staff? There’s a difference as airport staff won’t check visa validity etc or do the entry checks that are the subject of this chain.
UKBF checks passports on departure at the Eurostar. At manchester airport at least, there are no routine outbound passport checks by UKBF
No, that's actually French border control. On the Eurostar, you clear the destination border when you check in, so that when you arrive you simply walk out.
I got into a bit of trouble once in a flight to Switzerland before it was in the shengen. I took the train into Italy, flew from Italy to Berlin, and on the flight back, the exit visa agents wanted to know why I didn’t have an entry stamp (they do random checks on the train, so no stamp).
Catching wanted criminals and suspects as they try to leave the country. Flagging people who have overstayed their visa when they try to leave so that they can't come back. If someone tries to leave on a stolen or fake passport, it is cheaper to catch it before they exit than when they try to enter somewhere else.
I can see the "before they leave the country" part. This isn't as big of problem in the US as we only have land borders with two countries, and those borders are far away from most people. If the police are looking for you they can find you when you book/board a flight out of the US, even without exit controls. Heck, they're likely sharing that list of people of interest with Canada and Mexico so that they can be caught by the entrance controls at those land crossings.
Criminals in Panama typically hide in Parliament. They're even passing laws to ensure they can't be prosecuted for their crimes by creatively changing the statue of limitations. They make Romania look good.
Yet the onus is on visitors to prove that they did not overstay their visa, if leaving by land/sea, or if by some airline/airport fluke the departing passenger list didn't make it over to the DHS.
Is there currently no possibility of opt-out for this - what happens if you refuse on legal grounds? Will DHS not allow US citizens to leave the country unless they consent?
>For its part, DHS says that airport face scans are designed to verify the identities of travelers as they leave the country and stop impostors traveling under someone else’s identity."
And yet you already have to show an ID and a boarding pass to a DHS agent as part of security in order to get to the gate in the first place.
If only those clowns could focus on making the absurd bit of theater they currently have even just the slightest bit more efficient.
> If only those clowns could focus on making the absurd bit of theater they currently have even just the slightest bit more efficient.
Maybe efficiency is not the goal. Cui bono? We got all those nifty body scanners in part because Michael Chertoff, right after serving as director of DHS, went around promoting scanners on behalf of his consulting client, body scanner manufacturer Rapiscan[1].
If DHS stops doing this, there’s still lots of companies that will including Delta. I think if they fix the failure rates they could make it a much more efficient system and perhaps turn it into a form of preclearance for supported countries.
Who makes the rules about how long these records can be stored and so on? Do citizens have a say? I feel I’d be ok with this as long as the data was used once for a quick criminal check or whatever and then discarded. Of course, we need strong verification that the data is really deleted.
Absolutely. This is the real problem. It's not bad that they came up with such a system. It's that they haven't thought it through so it's ripe for abuse. There definitely need to be safeguards in place before it's actually implemented that spell out what can and can't be done with the data, who has access, how long it will be retained, etc.
That would be much harder to fly under the radar because fingerprinting is what you do to people who are arrested. People wouldn't put up with that so easily.
There's been some rumblings of the "uniqueness" of fingerprints being far less than you'd think. Fingerprinting everyone who flies would just produce more false positives. The people that's bad for overlap a lot with the people who stand to benefit from invasive security theater.
I'd be very interested in any source material you have detailing these 'rumblings', both from the first hand experience of having been fingerprinted (which is oddly misrepresented in TV and movies) and from a general interest in forensic history.
As a child I recall an antique book on criminology which spoke glowingly of the reliability of fingerprints in investigations, and cited the unsuccessful defense of one convict who claimed (sometime in the late 19th century) that fingerprinting was a 'hazy and fallacious method imported from France, where many innocent men have been convicted by it." It is true that juries have an unfortunate tendency to believe in the first order results of any technical procedure, from ducking stools to DNA matching.
Some guy from IIRC Texas got arrested in connection with some letter bomb terrorist stuff. IIRC the only connection was the fingerprint. His lawyers basically assumed he did it until some other law enforcement agency finger printed some guy in North Aftrica who fit all the other evidence (i.e. he was known to them as the kind of guy who would be involved in that stuff) and his prints matched as well. I saw it mentioned as a small anecdote in a paper/article/blog about the "rigor" of the forensic "sciences".
They do for GE. I'm not sure why they gave me a RFID card for it. I've always used my fingerprints and passport to get back in via that.
I'm ok with the idea of an opt-in program like GE. With that you understand that your data is being scrutinized and that you're voluntarily giving them your image data+your biodata. I'm not cool with this new introduction of an exit verification as that it's not a formal thing and it's just being pushed on the populous.
This kind of thing really makes you wonder when the American people became enemy combatants. (This has been happening for years)
> I'm ok with the idea of an opt-in program like GE.
It isn't "opt-in" for non-US Americans, one of the reasons why I will probably never visit the US.
> This kind of thing really makes you wonder when the American people became enemy combatants. (This has been happening for years)
As opposed to everybody who just wants to visit the country?
At this rate, I wouldn't be too surprised if 10 years from now they gonna require the full biometric program from foreign visitors: DNA, retina, face, fingerprints, speech samples and whatnot.
I do understand the need for security and proper authentification, I just think these are often used as an excuse for building some kind of police state with a vast database of people with all their attributes from physical (biometrics) to mental (crawling social media).
The last part might seem quite "out there", but it's quite real [0] and has already been for a while [1].
Also doesn't help that all of this reminds me way too much about biometric data programs the US military conducted in Iraq, still sitting on that data and using it [2].
>I'm not sure why they gave me a RFID card for it.
The card is for crossing the border via car. You can use Global Entry at the NEXUS (when arriving from Canada) and SENTRI (inbound from Mexico) lanes, and the procedure there is you are to wave your RFID card across a reader as you approach the agent's booth.
Only if you have passed the screening for NEXUS. Because NEXUS involves being interviewed and checked by authorities from both sides of the Canadian/United States border, and Global Entry doesn't, the benefit only goes one direction automatically. NEXUS members are also cleared for Global Entry but the reverse isn't automatically true.
I don't think I have NEXUS or SENTRI endorsements. Also, I haven't gotten my car inspected for it either. (Another caveat to those, everyone in the car has to have a GE if you're going to do a land border crossing in a car with that)
The NEXUS endorsement is for expedited entry into Canada. But without it, Global Entry still works for expedited re-entry back into the US.
As for Mexico, you just need to register your vehicle on the GOES/TTP portal to use your Global Entry card in the SENTRI lanes. (The vehicle inspection requirement was dropped recently.)
A proper fingerprint scan is labor-intensive. It's more than just putting palms down flat on a scanner, individual fingers need to be rolled. You could use some sort of mechanical assistance if you really wanted to automate it but people would naturally be rather reluctant to put their hands into a machine that was going to apply any sort of force to them.
'Traveling broadens the mind.' Some people never leave their hometowns, either. I can't speak for you in particular, but generally, staying in our home countries greatly narrows the ideas and experiences we are exposed to. It's a big, big world, and there is nothing in the U.S. which can substitute for Delhi or Tokyo or Vatican City.
Same boat here, I in no way approve of this. From a pragmatic POV, though, I’ve spent 35 years wandering the U. S. on my motorcycle, and probably most Canadian provinces. I’ve covered 49 of 50 states, but Canada still has a lot of holes. If I can get to the Northwest Territories, more Yukon, the Maritimes I’ve missed, all before old age takes me, I’ll consider that good.
So it makes it pretty easy to fly once, twice a year at most. Between the CO2 output of a cross-country flight and all the responsible parties making flying as unappealing as possible, if I never step foot on a plane again it would be fine by me.
Pretty sure scanning faces on private property isn't illegal any more than using security cameras would be. As to causing literal harm to people, that is against the law. And even if it weren't in the US, other nations would have some serious issues with us harming their citizens on exit.
Before there would be a very short wait, you'd walk up to the border guard (one of three or four on duty typically), put your passport on their desk, they'd look at it for three seconds and swipe it, then you'd be on your merry way 10 seconds later. Now you wait for 10 or 15 minutes (if you're lucky), insert your passport into the machine, wait for the silly glass doors to close, have your passport spat back out again, repeat the whole thing, find that you were looking a bit too low, so re-do that and so on until finally the second set of silly glass doors opens and you can move on.
It's a complete failure from a usability point of view.