
DHS Quietly Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition of Passengers Exiting U.S - tsaoutourpants
https://professional-troublemaker.com/2017/02/27/dhs-quietly-testing-mandatory-facial-recognition-of-passengers-exiting-u-s/
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gcr
This is awful!

Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a
system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face
training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and
it's unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data
distribution that's dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite
faces). I'm not aware of a lot of research about this.

Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of
thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For
every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the
steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into
custody for false positives?

This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more.

(See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult's tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, "Biometrics:
Practical Issues in Privacy and Security," for a great high-level overview of
these kinds of issues:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securic...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securics.com/~walter/IJCB2011/IJCB11-tutorial-
part1.pdf) In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this
kind of analysis)

~~~
gshulegaard
Personally, I think talking about false positive and accuracy is a straw man
problem.

The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who
you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect
accuracy.

At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become
oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras?
Mandatory facial screening?

 _That_ is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be
grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen).

One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile.
Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides
of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road.

Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth
pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well
(e.g. the UK).

~~~
gcr
100% agree. Dragging the issue into the "accuracy" direction away from the
"moral" direction is a Thermian argument.

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trustfundbaby
The thinking behind this isn't complicated. The US wants to construct a
database of people who visit the US, and using it on people leaving the US
will probably encounter less resistance than people entering the US, as well
as have people who don't travel much going "whats the big deal anyway?"

Now they have your face and personal data, and they can probably run that
against all the surveillance information being collected daily by the NSA etc.

From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and
you're not a citizen), this is F __ __*g terrible, but that 's what happens
when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don't see
this ending up anyplace good.

~~~
astrodust
I'm less concerned about privacy, although still concerned about that, than I
am about the _Brazil_ principle here. The sorts of people that end up in these
border security jobs are, if nothing else, very good at "following orders" and
if the computer says someone's a target who are they to think otherwise?

Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's
identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet
money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin
because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly.

They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people
mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features.
What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate
threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to
over-fit for a particular set of inputs?

The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is
going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million
trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the
numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.

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r00fus
Hate to say I told ya so, but [1].

Anyone who has any doubt as to the way this country is headed, should really
read 1984 for a preview of what's coming.

All that will take to make this full-blown is some metastasizing event (see
9/11) that will take us from slipping down the slope directly to falling into
the abyss.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878)

~~~
pjungwir
When I think of things like mass surveillance, proliferation of felonies,
over-charging & plea bargaining, civil asset forfeiture, and police
militarization, the book I really think of is not _1984_ , but Hannah Arendt's
_Totalitarianism_. I think it is very thought-provoking and helps show what it
means to lose the rule of law in your country. Also unlike _1984_ it is about
things that actually happened.

And just to be clear, I think these fears are non-partisan. The problems
didn't start in January, but much sooner. Solving them isn't as easy as just
electing the right party.

~~~
r00fus
I question whether elections will be a concern for those in power soon.

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Animats
This is part of the effort to detect visa overstayers. CBP tries to measure
this.[1] As of the end of 2015, they estimate that there are 416,500 people in
the US who overstayed their visa. They want to use the same identification
techniques at entry and exit and match them. This tells them who's entered the
US legally but now needs to be found and deported.

[1]
[https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015%20DHS%20Entry%20and%20Exit%20Overstay%20Report.pdf)

~~~
tsaoutourpants
But why do we want to identify visa overstayers ___who are leaving the
country_ __? That doesn 't do us any good. You could argue that we're doing it
to prohibit them from re-entering, but the vast majority of our illegal
immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving and thus
will never be found on a jet bridge. Likewise, it obviously won't do much for
terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country
contemporaneously with leaving the earth.

It seems to me that there are far more compelling reasons to implement exit
controls if you have other, less savory motives.

~~~
pdabbadabba
If GP is correct, I would think that the point is not to detect departures by
people who have overstayed but to more reliably detect _all_ departures, so we
can more accurately figure out who has not departed, but should have.

~~~
tsaoutourpants
But that's just silly, given that you can easily leave the country by walking
across the border. Even if they implement this for every international plane
departure, the data will still be massively incomplete.

~~~
cpncrunch
>you can easily leave the country by walking across the border

which is of course illegal...

~~~
tsaoutourpants
I don't know where you got the idea that it is illegal to leave the country on
foot, but you are mistaken.

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a97272
Direction to implement this was in the executive order Trump signed which
banned people from the 7 countries that the Obama administration had built a
database of nationals of those countries.

When I read the executive order I was quite troubled to see this.

I also noticed the exit tracking part of the order went undiscussed in the
media. I searched to see if anyone else had noticed but i didn't find anyone
else talking about it.

It almost feels like some of the more outrageous parts of the order (eg
ignoring green card holders) were designed to draw attention away from the
real point: slipping in exit tracking without people noticing (because they
are too busy distracted fighting the other parts of the order).

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coldcode
The next step is mandatory facial recognition of everyone in the U.S. What
better way to track all of those visitors who come into the country and where
they go than to track everyone everywhere all the time. License plates are
already recorded almost everywhere. The location of your cell phone clearly
has to be known by the carrier, it's a simple database dump to track your
phone. Track everything you do online by tapping databases from Facebook and
Google (as best you can since they probably don't want you to). Track all of
your credit card, stock and other purchases. Correlate all of these data
points together, and imagine the possibilities. Of course it's not 100%
accurate, but for nearly 400 Million people (citizens, illegals and visitors)
what's a few tens of millions of inaccurate data points.

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_audakel
There seems to be alot of ppl not sure as to why / what purpose scanning ppl
on exit would acomplish. To me it makes the most sense that this would be an
easy first step to start working out errors in the machines and get training
data in a way that is not likely to cause the electorate to get upset. In the
future once it is working then then can start moving it more inwards facing.

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beezischillin
I can understand how this is an issue, however I kind of take issue in the way
the article is written: starting with comparing the US to Nazi Germany and
then escalating it to equate this with the Holocaust. Only then quietly noting
that "they remain popular in Europe, Russia, and China." Kind of polarising
from the get-go.

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cavisne
America is the only country I've been to which _doesnt_ check people on the
way out...

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Havoc
Hard at work manufacturing that freedom as always.

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mtdewcmu
The "green light" part made it sound more like a retinal scan (because the
inside of your eyeball is dark and needs to be illuminated).

~~~
therobot24
retinal scan is way too invasive to be deployed at this point - iris or face
is most likely

~~~
gcr
(Edit: I made the classic mistake of confusing iris with retina. Sorry. I
assumed you're talking about iris recognition here.)

Not invasive at all. SRI's "Iris On-the-Move" product is a gateway that people
walk through; a long-range infrared camera images their iris as they're
passing through. As long as you catch a glimpse of the green light as you're
walking, they can match your iris template. See "Iris on the Move: Acquisition
of Images for Iris Recognition in Less Constrained Environments", Matey et al
2006.

(I'm trying to vaccinate you from this idea, not convince you. I obviously
hate the idea of iris scanners at airports. My point is that unfortunately it
can be done, and we should be careful.)

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2_listerine_pls
retina != iris

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EGreg
Just a question - wouldn't this actually help prevent criminals from fleeing
the country with fake passports?

~~~
yaur
Personally if I was going to "flee the country" and was worried about DHS I
would just paddle across the St Lawrence river and report to CanBSA as
required. Exit visas aren't a thing and there is no requirement AFAIK to
report that you are leaving.

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gydfi
_But, so-called “exit controls,” where documents are checked as travelers are
leaving the country, were popularized last century by Nazi Germany as a great
way to ensure that they could control, round up, and exterminate the Jews and
other “undesirables.” It can obviously serve no purpose of keeping terrorists
out, because it only affects those who are already in._

Or to put it another way, they're standard in practically every country apart
from the US. Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term
visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?

~~~
klipt
> no record of whether they left at the end of it?

There already is a record, it's called the I-94. Used to be a paper thing you
handed to the airline when leaving the US, now it's all recorded
electronically.

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clubm8
I think that only applies to air crossings.

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tehwebguy
So does the CBP scan being discussed

~~~
gydfi
I guess this is some kind of trial. My point is that exit records are neither
novel, useless, nor in most countries the least bit controversial.

Not sure why the US needs to make a big deal out of it with biometric scans
instead of the tried-and-true option of a little man in a box stamping your
passport.

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tinus_hn
Why is this a problem? Because it looks creepy?

~~~
tsaoutourpants
You could try reading the rest of the thread, as several users have broke it
down for you.

