
Not Ready for Takeoff: Face Scans at Airport Departure Gates - driverdan
https://www.airportfacescans.com/
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jacquesm
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.

~~~
marklyon
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.

~~~
robjan
Are you sure about that? The Hong Kong frequent flyer e-gates are supposed to
check your right thumbprint.

~~~
marklyon
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.

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oliv__
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.

~~~
meddlepal
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.

~~~
pmiller2
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.

~~~
meddlepal
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.

~~~
macintux
Innocence is remarkably difficult to prove.

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?

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astura
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.

Who is this really going to stop?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
It's not even that hard. Grow a long beard and get punched in the face the day
before your flight.

~~~
EpicEng
The goal isn't to have a 100% success rate, it's to work most of the time in
order to speed up processing.

~~~
bobwaycott
I believe you are confusing the _rationale_ provided for the _goal_.

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matt_the_bass
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.

~~~
CPLX
It's literally the definition of "a free country"

Specifically it was always used as a sharp contrast with the policies of the
Soviet Bloc which did not allow people to freely leave their countries.

~~~
LV-426
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.”
    

[http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/paul-robeson-
lose...](http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/paul-robeson-loses-appeal-
over-his-passport)

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cypherpunks01
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?

~~~
GuB-42
How can they tell you really are a US citizen unless they check your ID?

The cameras do just that. The problem is that it is done poorly.

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bogomipz
>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.

~~~
iak8god
> 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].

[1] [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/airport-
scanner-...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/airport-scanner-
scam/)

~~~
mLuby
Follow the money…

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dawnerd
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.

[http://news.delta.com/delta-opens-first-biometric-self-
servi...](http://news.delta.com/delta-opens-first-biometric-self-service-bag-
drop-us)

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nsm
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.

~~~
ntaeuc4nt
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.

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Havoc
Personally I don't have a problem with this. I do want gov to take ID control
at borders seriously & if face rec helps with that fine.

Less pleased about stuff like "we need your passwords". That's invasive
bullsh.

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lerie82
Shouldn't they just do a fingerprint scan then?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
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".

Google couldn't help me find the original source.

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dsfyu404ed
Not that I approve of this in any way but I'll run out of money long before I
run out of places in The US and Canada I want to go visit.

~~~
forapurpose
'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.

