Govt Wants Airlines To Delay Flights So They Can Scan Faces...
THE GOVERNMENT WANTS AIRLINES TO DELAY YOUR FLIGHT SO THEY
CAN SCAN YOUR FACE
By Sam Biddle September 26 2018, 11:57 a.m.
OMNIPRESENT FACIAL RECOGNITION has become a golden goose
for law enforcement agencies around the world. In the United States, few are as
eager as the Department of Homeland Security. American airports are currently
being used as laboratories for a new tool that would automatically scan your
face — and confirm your identity with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — as
you prepare to board a flight, despite the near-unanimous objections from privacy
advocates and civil libertarians, who call such scans invasive and pointless.
According to a new report on the Biometric Entry-Exit
Program by DHS itself, we can add another objection: Your flight could be late.
Although the new report, published by Homeland Security’s
Office of the Inspector General, is overwhelmingly supportive in its evaluation
of airport-based biometric surveillance — the practice of a computer detecting
your face and pairing it with everything else in the system — the agency notes
some hurdles from a recent test code-named “Sprint 8.” Among them, the report
notes with palpable frustration, was that airlines insist on letting their
passengers depart on time, rather than subjecting them to a Homeland Security
surveillance prototype plagued by technical issues and slowdowns:
Demanding flight departure schedules posed other
operational problems that significantly hampered biometric matching of
passengers during the pilot in 2017. Typically, when incoming flights arrived
behind schedule, the time allotted for boarding departing flights was reduced.
In these cases, CBP allowed airlines to bypass biometric processing in order to
save time. As such, passengers could proceed with presenting their boarding
passes to gate agents without being photographed and biometrically matched by
CBP first. We observed this scenario at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson
International Airport when an airline suspended the biometric matching process
early to avoid a flight delay. This resulted in approximately 120 passengers
boarding the flight without biometric confirmation.
“Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to standard
flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a habit that
is difficult to break.”
The report goes on to again bemoan “airlines’ recurring
tendency to bypass the biometric matching process in favor of boarding flights
for an on-time departure.” DHS, apparently, is worried that it could be
habit-forming for the airlines: “Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to
standard flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a
habit that is difficult to break.”
These concerns, however, are difficult to square with a
later assurance that “airline officials we interviewed indicated the processing
time was generally acceptable and did not contribute to departure delays.”
The report ends up concluding that this and other
logistical issues “pose significant risks to CBP scaling up the biometric
program to process 100 percent of all departing passengers by 2021.” And it has
some ideas to do something about it, namely “enforcement mechanisms or back-up
procedures to prevent airlines from
bypassing biometric processing prior to flight boarding.”
As the success of biometric-reliant line-skipping
services — like TSA Pre-Check and Clear — have shown, many flyers are happy to
swap their irreplaceable biometrics in the name of convenience. The prospect of
missing a connecting flight, however, could bring out the pitchforks.
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