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Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

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Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#161

Post by gumby »

jahewson wrote: post #70
gumby wrote: post #66

On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat. And if identity actually mattered (hint: it doesn't), well it's already been "screened" via the purchase and TSA checkpoint tests. Planes flew for decades without any matching of passengers to tickets, and tickets were frequently resold (especially unused…

Planes also flew for decades without locks on the cockpit doors, but that doesn’t make it a good idea in the modern world.

There's a parallel comment to this one talking about some of the drawbacks (though TBH I think it's a reasonable risk/reward tradeoff).

But I haven't seen any actual justification that the no-fly list is actually useful, and worryingly the regulations around it are classified.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#162

Post by diebeforei485 »

wahern wrote: post #32
diebeforei485 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME questions like this typically come from people who don't deal with the bureaucracy of applying for visas very often, if at all. You assume fear of being bombed or hijacked, but it's really to make international travel easier and more efficient. Lack of a reliable way to verify identity is a major reason why applicants for admission (or applicants for a visa) are assumed "guilty until proven innocent", and a ton o…

But this has nothing to do with ports of entry or consular offices. It has to do with boarding at the gate. 99% accuracy is not remotely accurate enough to even begin replacing personnel at sensitive entry points. And consider that to the extent you automate security you permit automating measures to subvert the system. The reported accuracy of these solutions describe efficacy for typical use cases; they're not a me…

Outbound and inbound verification are sides of the same coin, as you need both in order to reliably track overstays. Congress has recognized this since 1996 when they first passed legislation requiring biometric entry-exit, and multiple times since then. The exit part of that has never really been implemented except for small trials.

It really isn't about replacing personnel (that another strawman you've made up, after the strawman about weapons). Rather - instead of humans (TSA agent + gate agent), it's now a human and a machine. It helps that the kind of mismatches made by CNN's are generally different from those made by humans.

> And consider that to the extent you automate security you permit automating measures to subvert the system.

I'm not sure what you mean by automating measures to subvert the system - there are financial and physical barriers (you'd need to get a hundred people or more into an airport, and buy them all plane tickets) If you have that level of resources, you're better off bribing CBP officers[1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/customs-border-agents-mexica...

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#163

Post by Spooky23 »

ambicapter wrote: post #157
Spooky23 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout queue optimization at a supermarket is pretty easy. It's all about time per scan. A good cashier (60-70 scans per minute) can be something like 50% more productive due to scan time savings. A slow cashier (10 scans per minute) is a drag. Self-checkout is all about cutting labor hours, period. It is both slower and leads to much higher shrink (as much as 150% more) than a manned casher. Stores hope to make mo…

60-70 scans per minute? A scan per second? Yeah I'm not buying it.

When I was a front-end supervisor at a market in high school, about 10% of the cashiers hit that. IIRC, they got a $0.15/hr bonus.

If you scanned less than 20/minute you had about a month to get to 30 before you were either canned or lost hours.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#164

Post by jedberg »

gok wrote: post #50
jedberg wrote: post #36

> Officials touted the additional security the system provides—meeting a Congressional mandate to include biometric screenings— Said someone who clearly doesn’t understand security. The entire point of adding biometrics is that it is in addition to the passport, not instead of. All they’ve done here is trade something you have with something you are. Sigh.

To say that a boarding pass is “something you have” in a security sense is absurd. I can print your boarding pass merely by knowing your name and where you’re going. A biometric check (backed by a paper ID check) is a dramatic security upgrade over that.

You’re right, a biometric check with a passport check is in fact more secure. But what they’ve done here is replace the passport check with a biometric check.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#165

Post by joecool1029 »

ambicapter wrote: post #157
Spooky23 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout queue optimization at a supermarket is pretty easy. It's all about time per scan. A good cashier (60-70 scans per minute) can be something like 50% more productive due to scan time savings. A slow cashier (10 scans per minute) is a drag. Self-checkout is all about cutting labor hours, period. It is both slower and leads to much higher shrink (as much as 150% more) than a manned casher. Stores hope to make mo…

60-70 scans per minute? A scan per second? Yeah I'm not buying it.

I’m guessing you’ve never been to an Aldi. They seem to have worked out high speed scanning.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#166

Post by Johnny555 »

cm2187 wrote: post #88
Johnny555 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.

It’s not like there aren’t CCTVs in airports. They have your face on many records that they keep much longer.

They have my picture, but they don't have my name. But when the airports get the passport photo database to implement this photo check-in, then they'll have my name too.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#167

Post by ambicapter »

joecool1029 wrote: post #165
ambicapter wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60-70 scans per minute? A scan per second? Yeah I'm not buying it.

I’m guessing you’ve never been to an Aldi. They seem to have worked out high speed scanning.

I have in fact never been to an Aldi.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#168

Post by Johnny555 »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72
Johnny555 wrote: post #9

The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%. The process el…

Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about. In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases. The real b…

Though the difference between a supermarket checkout and an airplane is once you're through the checkout, you're free to leave.

You don't walk out the supermarket door and have to wait for a hundred people to load their cars and make their way out of the parking lot. Which means that getting you through the checkout faster just means more time waiting to get out of the parking lot.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#169

Post by mikestew »

camillomiller wrote: post #142

17 years after 9/11, my question is: we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that? Or is it a false causality? Can we even establish causality between the enhanced security and the lack of large-scale airplane attacks/hijackings?

we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that?

We never had a comparable event before 9/11/01. OK City, one ham-fisted attack on WTC in the 90s, British burned down the White House in the 1800s, but nothing of that scale prior. And 18 years ago, all you did was walk through a metal detector (whose sensitivity wasn't set all that high), and on the plane you go.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#170

Post by themaninthedark »

laken wrote: post #158
ajenner wrote: post #75

The system then compares the photo to a gallery that includes images of that person—either their passport photo for U.S. citizens or the photo taken of foreign nationals when they entered the country. So those of us with dual nationality, who enter the US on our US passports and leave on our foreign passports, are going to get screwed. Lovely.

If you are a US citizen, it's illegal to enter or leave the US with another country's passport anyway, even if you're a dual citizen. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185

I am not a lawyer but I don't read that as you have to present your US passport to enter or leave. Only that you must have a valid US passport with you when you do so.

>(b) Citizens

>Except as otherwise provided by the President and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may authorize and prescribe, it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport.

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