TSA Facial Recognition Scanning Spreading, Part of Planned ‘Across The Board’ Biometric Future

TSA Facial Recognition Scanning Spreading, Part of Planned ‘Across The Board’ Biometric Future

I don’t fly that much, but I did notice in the last few months that when approaching the TSA agent checking i.d. the request was not just for your i.d. The agent asked me to step in front of a screen which took some sort of image. It wasn’t an ‘order’ but it wasn’t a request, it was just taken as matter of fact, part of the routine.

I hadn’t noticed it in the past. But with a lot of other travel worries on my mind, I thought it odd, but didn’t really think about it much at all.

Apparently you can opt-out of the scan, but that wasn’t presented as an option. Reportedly the scanners have a disclosure of the option to opt-out, but I didn’t see it (I also didn’t look for it).

TSA also is promoting the voluntary use of facial recognition to speed check-in:

A new program allows travelers to use their faces for identity verification at the security checkpoint—no driver’s license required. Situated at nine airports across the country, it’s often faster than other lines, and often the shortest.

Travelers flying Delta and United can already use the facial-recognition technology at eligible airports, while those flying American and Alaska should expect to see the option in the coming months, Transportation Security Administration officials say.

While some people express reservations about widespread use of biometrics, travelers on web forums across the internet joke that TSA PreCheck Touchless ID is the veteran flier’s best-kept secret.

“The first rule about Touchless PreCheck is you don’t talk about Touchless PreCheck,” one traveler wrote on Reddit.

Touchless ID allows eligible travelers to get past the security officer in an average of six to eight seconds, compared with 18 to 20 seconds for standard PreCheck screenings, TSA says. The program has read six million faces in its few years of operation.

Crowd facial recognition is growing around the world, with China the leader in using it for social control:

China’s facial recognition system logs nearly every single citizen in the country, with a vast network of cameras across the country. A database leak in 2019 gave a glimpse of how pervasive China’s surveillance tools are — with more than 6.8 million records from a single day, taken from cameras positioned around hotels, parks, tourism spots and mosques, logging details on people as young as 9 days old….

China’s aggressive development and use of facial recognition offers a window into how a technology that can be both benign and beneficial — think your iPhone’s Face ID — can also be twisted to enable a crackdown on actions that the average person may not even consider a crime. Chinese officials have used surveillance tools to publicly shame people wearing sleepwear in public, calling it “uncivilized behavior.”

The punishing of these minor offenses is by design, surveillance experts said. The threat of public humiliation through facial recognition helps Chinese officials direct over a billion people toward what it considers acceptable behavior, from what you wear to how you cross the street.

“The idea is that the authorities are trying to put in place comprehensive surveillance and behavioral engineering on a mass scale,” said Maya Wang, a senior researcher on China at the Human Rights Watch. “The authorities want to create a kind of society that would be very easy for them to manage.”

China used facial recognition for control during COVID:

A Chinese company says it has developed the country’s first facial recognition technology that can identify people when they are wearing a mask, as most are these days because of the coronavirus, and help in the fight against the disease.

China employs some of the world’s most sophisticated systems of electronic surveillance, including facial recognition.

There are no clear guidelines for TSA use of the scans it it taking, accorging to a letter from Senators sent in late November to the Inspector General of Homeland Security:

We urge you to conduct thorough oversight of the Transportation Security Administration’s (“TSA”) use of facial recognition technology for passenger verification from both an authorities and privacy perspective. This technology will soon be in use at hundreds of major and mid-size airports without an independent evaluation of the technology’s precision or an audit of whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect passenger privacy.

TSA reportedly plans to introduce next-generation credential authentication technology (CAT) equipped with facial recognition at over 430 airports nationwide.¹ Yet the agency already deploys non-facial recognition devices, known as CAT-1 scanners, which are capable of determining if identification documents are fraudulent. TSA has not provided Congress with evidence that facial recognition technology is necessary to catch fraudulent documents, decrease wait times at security checkpoints, or stop terrorists from boarding airplanes….

While the TSA claims facial recognition is optional, it is confusing and intimidating to opt out of TSA’s facial recognition scans, and our offices have received numerous anecdotal reports of Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) becoming belligerent when a traveler asks to opt out, or simply being unaware of that right. Signage directing passengers to follow officer instructions and step in front of the facial recognition camera is prominently displayed, while the signage for opting out is often strategically placed in inconspicuous locations, making it challenging to read and locate. TSOs are inconsistently trained on how to respond to passengers who request to opt out and have told passengers they will face delays for opting out.⁴

Additionally, despite promising lawmakers and the public that this technology is not mandatory, TSA has stated its intent to expand this technology beyond the security checkpoint and make it mandatory in the future. In April 2023, TSA Administrator Pekoske admitted at the South by Southwest Conference that “we will get to the point where we will require biometrics across the board.” ⁵ If that happens, this program could become one of the largest federal surveillance databases overnight without authorization from Congress.

There are several hundred (maybe more) photos of me on ‘the internet’ from media and other appearances. My phone scans my face for access to some apps and websites, which lurks out there somewhere in the cloud. And when I got my license, the i.d. I generally use, my face is on it and in a state computer system.

So I hardly consider my face ‘private’ in any meaningful way. And I might even join one of those facial recognition fast-flyer programs if given more information and understanding of how it will be used.

But for some reason having TSA run that facial scan as a matter of routine and without clear and obvious disclosure that I could opt-out bothered me. A multi-dimensional facial scan is not the same as a Facebook photo. The government taking and using my digital image for facial recognition purposes without clear limitations is worrisome.

It is not at all far-fetched to imagine the federal government implementing wide-ranging facial recognition technology not just for people boarding an airplane, but also for other restrictive purposes during a ‘national emergency’ like took place during COVID.

Or worse, to identify behavior (e.g., standing on the Capitol lawn during a protest?) and using that to restrict access to travel and other services, such as banking, as happened in Canada during the truckers’ strike.

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