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TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports

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

#71

Post by bzbarsky »

mandeepj wrote: post #8
megaman22 wrote: post #7

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.

> if it means I can keep my shoes and my belt on going through security, I'm all for it. The option is already there for this - TSAPre

1) Doesn't work if you're flying international on a non-US airline (great protectionist measure there).

2) Requires you to give the government your fingerprints. This is particularly a problem if you have children between the ages of 13 and 18 (old enough to not just get pre-check if the parents have it, not old enough yet to make their own decisions about whether the government should have their fingerprints).

3) Not available at all airports.

4) Not available at all gates at the airports where it _is_ available (even for US airlines).

It's better than nothing as long as item 2 is not a problem for you, but it's a lot worse than sanity would be.

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

#72

Post by usrusr »

cmiles74 wrote: post #50
skate22 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my opinion, that's just propaganda. It's not at all clear that all the surveillance is making anyone safer.

Safety is never an absolute. Imagine a world of "very-many-nines" safety, where only once in a century a person died from a violent death, planetwide: the cause of that death would be on people's minds for decades, and any measure for decreasing the chance of it ever happening again would see great support.

Once we have established that safety is a relative term it becomes pretty clear that ruthless surveillance would yield some safety improvement. I think that you can make a much more meaningful stand against surveillance when you acknowledge that, a opposed to outright denying any possible effect.

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

#73

Post by AnthonyMouse »

saas_co_de wrote: post #2

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 theo…

> 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.

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

#75

Post by dhimes »

avs733 wrote: post #59
skate22 wrote: 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

While I don't disagree, it's still hard to turn a blind eye to the Texas church shootings, or the Las Vegas shootings, or the NY park pickup truck slaughter. Any politician that just throws up his arms and says "it all just statistics" is likely out of a job.

Privacy invasion has to be stopped by law. There is no way, currently, for a person who has public safety as a responsibility to say "no" to this kind of technology.

It's much the same with businesses invading user privacy and using it to drive profits. Without a law forbidding it, everyone has to keep up with the profits of the most "evil" corporation.

We need explicit laws.

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

#76

Post by cmiles74 »

usrusr wrote: post #72
cmiles74 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, that's just propaganda. It's not at all clear that all the surveillance is making anyone safer.

Safety is never an absolute. Imagine a world of "very-many-nines" safety, where only once in a century a person died from a violent death, planetwide: the cause of that death would be on people's minds for decades, and any measure for decreasing the chance of it ever happening again would see great support. Once we have established that safety is a relative term it becomes pretty clear that ruthless surveillance woul…

So far, I don't believe we have much, if any, concrete evidence that pervasive surveillance makes anyone safer. What little evidence exists is self-serving and sounds more like advertising then anything else. These surveillance organizations cost large amounts of money and produce nothing but large backlogs of data that no one has time to analyze.

In my opinion, that only makes it more likely that this data will be misused in order to prove that the dollars spent yielded _something._ That the cry of "safety" is accepted as somehow obviously true is a significant problem and exacerbates the issue.

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

#77

Post by yardie »

vixen99 wrote: post #58
yardie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prime minister needs a new kidney and we’ve found the perfect match. But he is on prison for robbery. Well, just upgrade that robbery to capital offense and kill 2 birds... Brilliant, Watson! I’ll inform the prime minister’s family immediately.

Yes and of course that only occurs in horrible corrupt states - never in our back yard.

You're going to have to be specific about who's backyard. Western Europe doesn't allow executions. The UK doesn't accept organ donation from executed prisoners due to moral perceptions. And the US flat out doesn't do it because the AMA will have no part in it. So if there is evidence of prisoner organ donation please present it.

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

#78

Post by grogenaut »

camiller wrote: post #68
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #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.

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

+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.

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

#80

Post by zkms »

frostwhale wrote: post #54
mseebach wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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...

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.

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