Live data from Hacker News

TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

eff.org

61–70 of 135 posts

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

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.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#62
post #59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your "right" to privacy starts conflicting with your "right" to safety, something has to give.

this statement is predicated on the violation of our right to privacy having a significant and causal impact on our safety. I am something like 100x more likely to get struck by lightning _twice_ than I am to be killed by a terrorist

And the govt. controls the lightning man...

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#63
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.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#64
post #45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tech is there. This is why comments such "but spy agencies have always been spying, it's their job" have always pissed me off. The spy agencies will continue to encroach on our rights the more "tech is here". We now have "smart" devices with mics and cameras in every room, so they're going to use that. If 30 years from now we'll use some kind of "bluetooth headset" that actually interacts directly with our thou…

When your "right" to privacy starts conflicting with your "right" to safety, something has to give.

> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#65
post #3

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-passeng…

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…

> 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.

Because automated iris-at-a-distance systems that can track and identify non-cooperative human targets scale a lot differently than tetchy border guards. Pervasive CCTV is one thing if it's mostly not watched (and only used to piece together what happened after incidents), pervasive facial/iris-recognition that is watched by computers 24/7 and tracks every single human's movements is a whole other thing. Also frankly, given you recognise the ability of customs/border/immigration personnel to make your day awful, why do you seem fine giving those people even more power and methods to pervasively surveil and track people?

> I'm pretty sure those cameras at Gatwick are supposed to track how long the waiting time is

Even per publicly-available information, this is flagrantly false. Queue management does not require enrolment of the passenger's face/iris data with their boarding pass, as indeed happens at Gatwick. This is explicitly for tracking passengers through every area of the airport:

http://www.professionalsecurity.co.uk/news/press-releases/mf...

http://www.planetbiometrics.com/article-details/i/1850/desc/...

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#67
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outright evil (alleged organ harvesting of death row inmates in China) Why is this necessarily evil?

- Consent violation: important part of medical ethics. - it provides an additional financial incentive to execute inmates

If they're dead, why is their consent required?

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#68

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.

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

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#69
post #3

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-passeng…

Those immigration turnstiles at gatwick are terrifying. I went through it recently and the person beside me put their passport in the wrong way (they put the wrong page in) and an alarm blared out, everyones turnstile locked and armed guards came over to the person only to tell them to put the page in the right way.

Re: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

#70
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Consent violation: important part of medical ethics. - it provides an additional financial incentive to execute inmates

If they're dead, why is their consent required?

Are you suggesting the state has a right to execute any inmate because they will not object after they are dead?
Post reply on HN