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Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

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Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#201

Post by abdullahkhalids »

shiroiushi wrote: post #164
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because other forms of mass travel such as trains and buses, which barely have any security checks, rarely get blown up by bombs smuggled on to them, or hijacked by guns smuggled onto them.

That's because you can't really drive trains into buildings, and while you could technically do it with a bus, it's not that feasible nor that damaging. Flying a huge intercontinental airliner fully loaded with fuel into a building is quite different. There's very good practical reasons the terrorists chose airplanes and not trains or buses.

That is already completely mitigated by the fact that cockpit is sealed now days, so hijackers cannot kill/disable the pilots and take over.

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#202

Post by _yb2s »

antipaul wrote: post #188
_yb2s wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saw this one- love the guy's eye contact also. He knows how to stand up to fascist jerks. https://preview.redd.it/travel-safe-for-thanksgiving-v0-i3ja...

How do you know the dude in blue is a fascist, and a jerk?

To be fair, I think most of the TSA agents are not, many are just doing their job and trying to bring some dignity to a tense situation. I travel a lot and have met some very kind TSA agents.

But as an organization, they clearly have a culture that allows or even encourages people to openly abuse and harass travelers, and punish people for exercising their rights. When I was being sexually harassed by a TSA agent, the other agents standing nearby allowed it to happen and said nothing.

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#203

Post by southernplaces7 »

tehjoker wrote: post #103
casenmgreen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that by this it becomes ever more difficult to get rid of an oppressive, dictatorial, unelected and violent Government.

tbqh, first if the insinuation is that China is not democratic, that is only true in the sense it is not a liberal democracy with a conservative wing represented (a good thing), but it is still a democracy with elections. secondly, if people surviving a literal genocide in Palestine can resist the most technologically sophisticated, surveilled, and completely enclosed death camp ever constructed by the U.S. and Israe…

It's sometimes hard to credit that there are people who think in such a contorted way as you apparently do.

China isn't a democracy. The word doesn't apply when your choices for candidates can only come from one political party that pre-approved them. Don't be absurd.

It's a one-party state in which variations of style among different senior figures are still forced together under the rubric of a general monolithic dogma that's only marginally beholden to public opinion, and very much subject to the whims of dominant figures. Also, many elements of the Chinese state are at least as conservative as the worst you could see in the U.S, just without the religious overtones. Truly, go study the subject and it's history a bit better.

What's happening in Palestine, or more specifically in the Gaza Strip, is not a genocide. It's a tragedy of destructive military strategies by Israel, but calling it a genocide is demeaning to the definition of real genocides, which you should also study a bit better.

>the most technologically sophisticated, surveilled, and completely enclosed death camp ever constructed by the U.S. and Israel

Death camp, really? Also, if you're disgusted by technologically sophisticated, heavily surveilled, enclosed camps, then you really might want to find out what the Chinese "democracy" is doing in the Xinjiang Uyghur Region...

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#204

Post by Klonoar »

Terretta wrote: post #181
Klonoar wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I opt out every time, but the horrifying thing is that almost everyone simply complies with whatever is asked of them. I honestly blame Apple for pushing FaceID, as it completely normalized facial recognition on a mass scale. Nobody thinks about this at all anymore. (No, it's not entirely Apple's fault, but I do think this point warrants more notice/discussion)

> Apple's fault Apple showed how this can be done without compromise. A combination of on-device-only FaceID and app-by-app opt-in to even trigger a validation, with on-device federal ID validation of some kind, putting you in control of presenting a cryptographically signed ID, would, in fact, be ideal for both convenience and privacy. IF you're going to require ID, that would be a fine way. The REAL issue is whethe…

> Apple showed how this can be done without compromise.

Sure, but also no.

I am outright stating that facial recognition did not need to become so normalized, and everyone getting used to it for the device in their pocket did no good in this regard.

> IF you're going to require ID, that would be a fine way.

Or we could just, y'know, do it the way we've been doing it for decades now.

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#205

Post by casenmgreen »

_yb2s wrote: post #36
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #2

I was shocked to see this program arrive in my local airport. I opt out every time, but the horrifying thing is that almost everyone simply complies with whatever is asked of them. The TSA agents use phrasing that make it seem like you are supposed to go through the facial recognition process and don’t have a choice. Yes, there are tiny signs scattered around that say you can opt out. But when the officer says “step…

TSA will punish you for opting out of anything. If you're lucky, the least they will do is hold you up a long time so you have a good chance of missing your flight. I've also had them sexually harass me, and confiscate (e.g. steal) legal items in retaliation for opting out of things I had the legal right to opt out of. They know people are in a hurry and won't do anything about being treated unethically or illegally,…

I always opt-out, of course.

The most recent time, which was years ago now, when I was leaving the country (I'm not a US citizen, and had finished working on a H1-B).

In the EU, there's delay - they have to get someone, you go to a room, pat-down. Unremarkable.

In the US, delay, they get someone - but the "pat-down" was so forceful I had trouble keeping my balance. It seemed to me to be deliberately excessive.

Fortunately, I do not live in, and do not need to travel to, the USA.

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#206

Post by southernplaces7 »

snakeyjake wrote: post #172
numeri wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of this program isn't that it makes things substantially quicker at the checkpoint – it is a minor speed-up at best. The goal is to normalize the collection of biometric data, to shift the Overton window of surveillance.

The collection of biometric data is already normalized. It has been normalized since the 1920s, when the FBI's central fingerprint repository was created. And the end goal isn't the system that currently exists. It is a system in which the movement of passengers isn't halted. Someone watched 1990's Total Recall and said "we need a security checkpoint like that". Also, the "Overton window" is a libertarian bullshit re…

>The collection of biometric data is already normalized.

So by your logic we should just fully accept its further normalization with absolutely no pushback or regard for any notion of private life and activity?

>It has been normalized since the 1920s, when the FBI's central fingerprint repository was created.

This is a blatant bullshit comparison that you can't possibly be ignorant enough to compare to modern real-time data collection accessible to many levels of government for tracking you and your personal details down to a deeply minute level almost as you live them. The U.S government of the 1920s and for decades after had its repositories and files on people, but in any given moment they were unlikely to have any clue what you were doing or where you were and lacked the means to easily know these things unless they were specifically targeting you for a particular reason.

That by the way is as it should be, a world in which a powerful state that could easily at some point turn actively hostile in some unfair way can't also passively monitor anyone and everyone as it pleases. A world in which the state, if it wants to monitor someone heavily, needs to make an effort to do it, and through means that can only be sanctioned by specific legal procedures, for specific activities, based on specific legal motives.

No, the Overton window is not "libertarian bullshit" about natural shifts in society. There's no natural law that makes total surveillance axiomatic to a society, and normalizations of dangerously abnormal permissiveness are very real in many social contexts.

>usually trotted out whenever libertarians get pissed off that "muh freedom" no longer excuses their bigotry

What the fuck are you even talking about at all here? What's bigoted about wanting personal freedom or defensible privacy? So because some random hypothetical racist libertarian likes to make off-color jokes, defending privacy is only something done by racist bigots?

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#207

Post by mrguyorama »

aaomidi wrote: post #58
tokai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remove TSA. Airport security provides nothing.

So I’ve heard this a lot, but how can we actually test this? The only realistic test I can imagine here is that the TSA shuts down for a decade and we see what happens?

The TSA tests this yearly. They usually fail their own tests.

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#208

Post by aspenmayer »

bayindirh wrote: post #81
casenmgreen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that by this it becomes ever more difficult to get rid of an oppressive, dictatorial, unelected and violent Government.

For an insider's perspective about "The Social Credit System", and the biometrics which underpin it, you can watch https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system It's a long, but interesting talk.

Also available on the media.ccc.de YouTube page:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7UKYUTke58

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#209

Post by aaomidi »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #189
aaomidi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is silly given how much Germany is actively helping a country where the PM of that country has an arrest warrant out for him through the ICC. Germany is still facilitating an alleged genocide. The only thing that has changed is the profile of the victims. The situation now is even worse, given that practically everyone in the world knows what’s happening but life is going on as normal.

You could have made a sensible argument about how security policies in Israel move in a wrong direction, even if it isn't at all on topic. But you stumbled here too.

It’s a reply to this part of OP:

> Ask IBM what becomes of databases full of people's names associated with their movements.

None of this matters. If a state wants to commit a genocide, they will. Collection of IDs being there or not is a minuscule bump in the road there.

Re: Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control

#210

Post by shiroiushi »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #201
shiroiushi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you can't really drive trains into buildings, and while you could technically do it with a bus, it's not that feasible nor that damaging. Flying a huge intercontinental airliner fully loaded with fuel into a building is quite different. There's very good practical reasons the terrorists chose airplanes and not trains or buses.

That is already completely mitigated by the fact that cockpit is sealed now days, so hijackers cannot kill/disable the pilots and take over.

That door isn't invincible: the pilots have to go to the toilet sometime.
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