
TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports - hourislate
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/11/tsa-plans-use-face-recognition-track-americans-through-airports
======
sho
> (Every government on earth) plans to use face recognition to track
> (everyone) through airports

Fixed it for you. I know for a fact at least 2 asian countries which are
either actively using or trialling this, and not just at airports. Both
already have fairly comprehensive facial recognition DBs of their citizens
(smile for your driver's license picture!)

I've also heard anecdotal accounts of people who stay too long airside at SIN
being questioned by airport police. They walk right up to them - pretty
obvious what's going on. My only surprise is that they would reveal their
capabilities so obviously, but maybe that's a deliberate strategy ("we know
everything so don't try anything").

It's only a matter of time before basically all governments are doing this.
The tech is there.

~~~
otakucode
The tech is not there, actually. Facial recognition is absolute garbage. It
borders on being completely useless even in ideal circumstances. Airports
might have a slight advantage since they have a list of people they expect to
be present (people with upcoming flights) and such, but in my experience
systems like what the TSA uses are obstinantly terrible. They most likely have
a commercial product purchased from some vendor deployed in ways it was never
meant to function with management types forcing everyone to ignore the utter
uselessness of the solution. They're going to make their career on deploying
the system regardless of whether it works or not.

~~~
rtkwe
Making it slightly easier is that they have multiple points where a person is
matched with a name during their time in the airport. With that and good
enough coverage they could make the recognition better with continuous
tracking. Even without an explicit name attached to a person just knowing all
the places a person has gone could be useful for flagging 'weird' behavior.

~~~
libertyEQ
It's almost as if some people are taking the poor state of the technology
being proposed as some challenge, when most of us simply do not want to live
in a police state.

 _Do. Not. Want._

------
zkms
They already have this at Gatwick, there's security gates/turnstiles where the
system doesn't let you pass until it's scanned your face and associated it
with your boarding pass, and IIRC they scanned faces again right before
boarding.

There's also cameras scattered throughout the airport which have
spinning/swirly LED rings around the lens (which look like this:
[https://www.hrsid.com/assets/images/art/proven-passenger-
que...](https://www.hrsid.com/assets/images/art/proven-passenger-queue-
measurement.gif)) -- meant to trick you into involuntarily looking at the
cameras. It's flagrantly and unashamedly dystopian.

~~~
mseebach
I get the dystopian flavour of surveillance in general society -- but I don't
really get why it's specifically dystopian that you are recorded by a camera
_while you stand in line to hand over your government issued photo ID to a
government agent_ with pretty broad discretion to make your day pretty awful.

I'm pretty sure those cameras at Gatwick are supposed to track how long the
waiting time is, not to "surveil" you in any meaningful sense.

~~~
frostwhale
While I agree in general, airports are a bit different. Reading the title of
this article I thought, "Good". It's their job to surveil and monitor the
airport to the best of technology and law. It is our job to regulate what big
brother can and can't do. While security is ridiculously dystopian and over
the top, the climate of our world has forced this in airports, so of course
they're going to be using all the tech possible. We just need to set the rules
for this tech.

~~~
zkms
> It's their job to surveil and monitor the airport to the best of technology
> and law. It is our job to regulate what big brother can and can't do. While
> security is ridiculously dystopian and over the top, the climate of our
> world has forced this in airports, so of course they're going to be using
> all the tech possible.

I strongly concur that civil aviation needs to be protected from malfeasance.
However, all this fancy iris/face-tracking machinery is only useful for, well,
tracking and identifying people and doesn't do _anything_ to prevent people
from artfully concealing explosives through security checkpoints. Furthermore,
it's possible to hide on-body contraband from full-body imaging devices:
[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity14/sec14-paper-
mowery.pdf)

Afaict, there's too much development/use of methodology that has secondary
uses for mass surveillance (and isn't even good at detecting explosives), and
not enough focus on detecting energetic materials. Large-scale automated
iris/face detection on noncooperative human targets is a dangerous tool in the
wrong hands and it is frankly disingenuous to develop it (and make its use
socially-acceptable) in the name of improving civil aviation security.

~~~
frostwhale
That's a fair counter. I am assuming the technology already exists in fully
functional and efficient form, and that the TSA is just applying it to the
airport.

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Sir_Cmpwn
I'm really sick of the TSA being used as the testing grounds for mass
surviellance technologies and surveillance normalization. Why don't they just
call it the Getting Americans Used to the Idea of Being Spied On Agency? Their
current excuse is so thin it hurts.

~~~
camiller
Pretty sure they will be leveraging the tech casinos already use for face
tracking.

~~~
grogenaut
+1 I haven't been back to a casino since they kept thanking my friends by name
even though they never told them their names. I don't gamble so the only loss
was expensive bufffets. The 3rd f is for fat.

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exabrial
[http://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-
undercover-o...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-
operation-us-airports/story?id=51022188)

I can't believe the TSA came in _as low_ as 80% a failure rate. The fact that
they managed to stop _anything_ done by professionals is sort of amazing in my
mind.

~~~
glenneroo
To be fair, they improved slightly over the past 2 years:

> The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret
> teams from the DHS found that the TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop
> inspectors from smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.

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joelrunyon
When you fly into HKG - they pretty forcefully make you take off any confusing
items that obscure your face (specifically hats) when walking away from your
gate.

Pretty obvious what they're doing.

~~~
robryk
I remember something similar in Taiwan in 2008. The ostensible reason was that
they want to have a thermal camera pointed at people's faces so that they can
see if someone has a fever. I don't expect that face recognition was the real
reason at that time.

Also, what do they do with people wearing lots of makeup?

~~~
overlordalex
International arrivals in South Africa have the thermal camera - the line
before they check your passport funnels you past the camera (whose screen is
visible). If you come up "hot" then a separate immigration officer pulls you
aside for a more in-depth questioning.

These cameras first went up around the time the H1N1 swine flu was making
headlines, and then just never came down. Since everyone is made to present
their faces head-on, without glasses/masks, it would be trivial for the
government to simply siphon off the data.

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megaman22
Hey, if it means I can keep my shoes and my belt on going through security,
I'm all for it. Anything that is going to actually be effective, and not
merely massively inconvenient security theater.

~~~
Smushman
You can get excited then, because you can be sure this will be used to
supplement vs supplant any existing US security theater.

We couldn't lay off the nearly 250,000 active employees of the Security
Theater arm of the US Government just because we had an actionable
technological solution that reliably worked. We have votes to think about!

~~~
wallace_f
Just to illustrate how wasteful the TSA is. It has spent over a billion on
something called deception detection. A method with no scientific foundation.
It is not clear what, if any, good has come out of the program.[1]

I would be interested in the cost-per-life-saved by TSA, and how many orders
of magnitude larger than universal healthcare it would be.

1 - www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-aclu-tsa-20170207-story.html

~~~
mchannon
Since onerous security theater has deterred drivers from flying, who then are
more statistically prone to dying during car travel, you're going to find the
cost-per-life-saved number is a negative number.

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jeffwilcox
Frankly surprised they aren't doing it already, or at least some other agency.
The Europeans seem to be leading when it comes to some of this tech, though at
least with GDPR in theory it's a rolling 30-day window of data and not
anything too permanent.

~~~
dzhiurgis
What you really going to store permanently? The fact you travelled is already
there, either in your passport or in one of hundreds of databases.

~~~
arbie
Can't a positive match be stored as new ground truth for retraining or
reinforcing the recognition model?

------
unabridged
>plans?

Casinos and even grocery stores have been using facial recognition for years.
I highly doubt these systems have not been in place for airports for a long
time.

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sidesquid
Singapore's newest terminal runs fully on automatic immigration with facial
recognition.

[http://t4.changiairport.com/en/fast](http://t4.changiairport.com/en/fast)

~~~
hansjorg
They've had this for a while in immigration at least. Second time I visited
(about 2003) I was greeted with a picture of my first visit through
immigration there. Shown on a flat panel with a camera on top. Might just've
been a tech demo though.

~~~
sidesquid
The existing ones are for returning citizens and PRs for arrival. The new
terminal is using facial recognition for all immigration for departure as
well, meaning there's no immigration officer. A swift process.

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olingern
So, by flying on an airplane I forfeit my privacy in exchange for a facade of
security?

Nothing suspect about this.

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ekianjo
I think Australia plans to switch to full face recognition based immigration
check in the very near future (next year) for its airports, as long as you
have a biometric passport. So the whole process would be automated.

~~~
toomanybeersies
It already is, isn't it? I didn't have to talk to anybody as I went through
immigration a couple of months ago, I just scanned my passport, and looked at
the camera, and they let me in. Same story for New Zealand.

Or do you mean you wouldn't even have to scan your passport?

~~~
ajdlinux
[http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-
service/faci...](http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-
service/facial-recognition-technology-to-replace-passport-scans-at-
airports-20170726-gxjd5v.html)

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tsukikage
Opportunity for people selling adversarial jewelry and eurion face painting?

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Carhughes
Yeah, not happy about Big Brother intruding even more here. I hate to say it
but why can't they do face recognition on more likely suspects visiting ISIS
strongholds and regions. Instead they want to vacuum hose all Americans in a
wide dragnet. This is BS.

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sailfast
Can we talk about how to hack this? Is there camera-defeating reflective make-
up that I can apply before going through an airport? How does one defeat these
technologies effectively so that they are no longer useful to governments?

~~~
Sargos
Honestly? You can't. Even if a perfect spray did exist you wouldn't be able to
get even close to half of the population to use it. It would actually be a
small minority. There's actually quite a large group of people out there that
support things like this.

Since you could only ever get a small group to attempt this it would only draw
more scrutiny onto yourself and make your life harder. It wouldn't be enough
of an inconvenience for the authorities to care.

The largest group I've heard of is the opt-out of scanners group who refused
and always demands xrays. It even made the media. It faded away and now the
one or two people that care take an extra few minutes in security getting a
pat down. No real change happened.

~~~
JBlue42
>There's actually quite a large group of people out there that support things
like this.

Isn't that kind of the issue? The majority, some of whom will rarely if ever
travel by airline, are fine with this crap because they somehow thinks it
makes them "safer" vs terrorists.

>pat-downs

I used to opt-out up until a year ago. I felt like it was the only way I could
take some small stand against the security theatre crap. They had just
introduced the new 'enhanced' pat-downs - back some guy being much more firm
and thorough with his touches and wiping the back of his hand across my dick
4-5 times. That sat with me (still does) and I said fuck it, the system got
me, and I do the body scanner now.

Beyond the mass surveillance BS, I'd really like us to take on the state-
sanctioned sexual assault that has been going on since 9/11\. I've seen
grannies and pre-teens patted down too. So ridiculous. Checking the private
areas of citizens doesn't make this country safer.

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johansch
I always wondered if those passport scanners/photo booths/turnstiles at e.g.
Helsinki airport has a human somewhere that decides if your face matches your
passport or not.

Does anyone know?

~~~
joshvm
I believe it's automatic with human oversight. In the UK there's always an
officer or two watching the feeds from each of the electronic gates. Whether
they're actually confirming each match, or just checking for outliers, I don't
know though.

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cm2187
If it works as well as epassport gates, we are safe for a while.

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pvdebbe
I'm surprised they didn't do this already.

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saas_co_de
While I think there are legitimate concerns about how this technology will be
used I also think that there is a bit of FUD here:

> losing your social security or credit card numbers to fraud is nothing
> compared to losing your biometrics. While you can change those numbers, you
> can’t easily change your face.

What does this even mean? Last time I checked anyone can take my picture any
time I am in public.

Is their theory that someone is going to use a mission impossible face mask to
impersonate me and then get me put on a terrorist watch list?

How would having machines doing facial recognition change anything from having
humans doing facial recognition?

If anything the machines will be more accurate, so face theft will be less of
a problem, but I have never heard of any real life cases of face theft, so I
don't actually think it is or will be a problem.

> However, due to the fact that immigrants and people of color are
> disproportionately represented in criminal and immigration databases, and
> that face recognition systems are less capable of identifying people of
> color, women, and young people, the weight of these inaccuracies will fall
> disproportionately on them.

This is a fascinating finding and definitely a subject of concern.

You can read the research this is based on here:
[http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klare2012demographics...](http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klare2012demographics.pdf)

What I would point out here is that even if there are race and gender
discrepancies in algorithmic performance for facial recognition these systems
are being used as a replacement for humans who are not exactly known for being
free from racial and gender bias.

At least the facial recognition system is not going to share see through
images of you with their colleagues or give you an enhanced pat down because
they find you attractive.

Even if the algorithms are less accurate for some groups it should be possible
to adjust the algorithms to require a higher level of certainty for those
groups so that no group experiences a higher rate of false positives than any
other. That is something you can't do with people that you can do with a
machine.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Is their theory that someone is going to use a mission impossible face mask
> to impersonate me and then get me put on a terrorist watch list?

Biometrics are basically useless, but they're useless in two separate
contexts.

Using them for access control is useless because of this:

> Last time I checked anyone can take my picture any time I am in public.

Lifting someone's fingerprints or face/iris scan is easy, and fooling an
automated scanner is not very expensive. Which makes it terrible access
control any time gaining access is worth more than e.g. $50.

> If anything the machines will be more accurate

That is definitively false. Face recognition is one of the things humans
evolved to do as a prerequisite to survival. We're really, really good at it.
The only reason anyone wants to use machines at all is that they're cheaper
and scale better. They are not more accurate. At best they may become as
accurate, but that is only a headache because it makes their false positives
undesirably convincing.

Which brings us to the second context in which biometrics are useless. Trying
to match random people off the street to people on some kind of watch list.
Because the false positive rate is a few percent, which is several orders of
magnitude higher than the ratio of people on the watch list to people in the
general population. So the vast majority of people the machine flags will be
innocent.

Worse, the people the machine thinks look like someone on the list, it
_always_ thinks that. So you implement something like this and it ruins the
lives of anyone who looks enough like someone on the list for the machines to
consistently flag them.

~~~
saas_co_de
> That is definitively false. We're really, really good at it. machines [are]
> cheaper and scale better.

I am taking the "cheaper and scale better" part into account when I say that
machines will be more accurate.

If you want to pick a face out of thousands in a crowd or match a single face
to a list of thousands of targets facial recognition is going to outperform
humans at the same cost.

> the false positive rate is a few percent

The false positive rate is whatever you configure it to be. The confidence
level for flagging someone is a parameter and you can adjust it to whatever
false positive rate is acceptable.

> the vast majority of people the machine flags will be innocent

Every single flag will be reviewed by a human who will decide whether or not
to take action based on it. This is no different than a human looking at a
list of suspects and then watching for matches, except that the computer can
use a much larger suspect list, and give the human hints.

> Worse, the people the machine thinks look like someone on the bad list, it
> always thinks look like them

Every time a person is flagged that must be reviewed by a human. If the human
marks the flag as a false positive then the algorithm learns from its mistake.

The idea that people will be repeatedly flagged is FUD unless they look a lot
like the target, which is a problem with humans too:
[http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-
identic...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-identical-
twins-murder-confession-met-20160922-story.html)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I am taking the "cheaper and scale better" part into account when I say that
> machines will be more accurate.

Then you used the wrong word, because cost and throughput are not accuracy. A
machine that always returns "true" can be very cheap and very fast.

> The false positive rate is whatever you configure it to be. The confidence
> level for flagging someone is a parameter and you can adjust it to whatever
> false positive rate is acceptable.

When that makes the false negative rate ~100%, you might as well do yourself a
favor and throw the entire system in the trash.

> Every single flag will be reviewed by a human who will decide whether or not
> to take action based on it. This is no different than a human looking at a
> list of suspects and then watching for matches, except that the computer can
> use a much larger suspect list, and give the human hints.

That's the problem though. Getting arrested and subjected to twelve hours of
questioning every time you walk in front of a camera will ruin your life even
if you ultimately get released every time. The much larger suspect list only
exacerbates things. Even if the false positive rate is no worse, it gets
multiplied by a much higher volume.

When the problem is that people make mistakes, making the same mistakes faster
only makes the problem bigger.

And of course they'll look a lot like the target. That's what causes the false
positive.

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reacweb
IMHO, there are places where we expect privacy. An airport is not one of them.

------
nachosgalore
At the rate surveillance is encroaching upon us, how long before we start
receiving visits from Grammaton Clerics? Or precog women in bathtubs are
reading our thoughts?

