TSA Wants to Expand Use of Facial Rec to Hundreds of Airports

The TSA is piloting the use of facial recognition to all 400+ airports they operate at within the next decade.

The current pilot, at 25 airports, is supposedly voluntary, at least now, but likely people who are not familiar with the process will not think that it is voluntary.

The process seems straight forward. YOU place your ID in the ID reader and look at the camera. The system then tells the agent if you are good to go.

Privacy rights groups say this amounts to large scale surveilance; the TSA, of course, disagrees.

At least for now and for the most part (more in a minute) all they are doing is scanning your license and looking at an image of you from a camera next to the TSA agent and seeing if it is a match.

It also automates the process of checking that the person has a reservation and that they are not subject to additional security checks or barred from flying.

The TSA spin doctor carefully says that the image capture is local and is wiped either when the next ID is scanned or at the end of the shift. What they don’t say is what happens the the terabytes of other data that they collect every day.

This week, for example, 500,000+ people are supposed to travel through Denver’s airport. That means, for this airport alone, TSA has a database of when each of those people showed up at the podium, whether they are scheduled to fly, what airline and flight they are on, what the results of the no fly checks were, etc.

They are NOT even suggesting that this data is being deleted, so I suspect that it is not being deleted.

For a subset of people, right now, supposedly, only for those registered for TSA Pre, it compares the image captured against a government database, so they do not need to show an ID at all.

The agency claims to have done testing, claims the results are accurate and claims to have done testing.

I say claims to because they refused to even disclose any information about the algorithms they are using, never mind releasing the results of their supposed secret testing.

For folks that do not trust the government anyway, this is not going to improve the situation.

I can’t find a list of which airports they are testing it at on the TSA’s website but Thrifty Traveler provides this list:

The list of airports where you’ll now find facial recognition in use in some TSA lanes includes: Atlanta (ATL); Baltimore (BWI); Boston (BOS); Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW); Denver (DEN); Detroit (DTW); Cedar Rapids (CID) in Iowa; Cincinnati (CVG); Columbus (CMH) in Ohio; Gulfport-Biloxi (GPT) and Jackson (JAN) in Mississippi; Honolulu (HNL); Las Vegas (LAS); Los Angeles (LAX); Miami (MIA); Nashville (BNA); New Orleans (MSY); Oklahoma City (OKC); Orlando (MCO); Phoenix (PHX); Richmond (RIC); Salt Lake City (SLC); San Francisco (SFO); San Jose (SJC); and Washington, D.C.-Reagan (DCA).

Credit: Fast Company, The Register, TSA and Thrifty Traveler

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