Facial recognition at the airport
I don’t know about you, but this news gives me a cold chill:
Some international travelers can leave their boarding passes and passports in their pockets when flying out of Dulles International Airport thanks to a new facial recognition boarding technology that went into operation Thursday.
The new veriScan system developed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority—with guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection—scans the faces of travelers approaching the gate. The system then compares the photo to a gallery that includes images of that person—either their passport photo for U.S. citizens or the photo taken of foreign nationals when they entered the country. The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.
The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing…
There’s something about the expanding power of government to pin you down that offends the libertarian in me. All of these technical advances help with crime control (I seem to recall that some criminals and some terrorists have been identified and caught that way), assisted by the surveillance cameras that have become nearly-ubiquitous in public places. That the up side.
The down side is that a tool the government can use to help you the government can use to harm you, or at least to curtail your liberty. If a government wanted to find you, track you, keep tabs on you, for more nefarious reasons, it certainly could do so.
When I was traveling to Europe recently—something I hadn’t done in over ten years—I was amazed at how the passport scanning worked. It was mostly automated, although at certain points I did have to show my passport to an actual human being. My passport photo doesn’t even really look like me, by the way—the hair color is my old dyed dark brown, and my face looks funny (at least to me). But the machines had no trouble matching it.
The way it worked was that I was supposed to look in a camera, which took a photo and compared that photo to the photo from my passport, which had been placed face down (literally) in a scanner. If you travel abroad a lot you probably already know about this procedure (I’m assuming it’s standard, and not just at Rome and Boston). But I didn’t.
ok… when you go through a mcdonalds window, they track your radio listening…
been dong that for decades.. [want to know how?]
big retail store use it to watch your reaction to products you shop and how you move around…
they been scanning footbal stadiums and such
and now your internal passports have the facial recogniztion numbers in them
you know the things i said marcus wolfe designed for the US soviets in their national id program (real id)… try to get on a internal plane without one soon..
DID you know your TV is watching you?
yes it is… yhou see. neilson used to use these little dials
and neilson families would turn the dial up and down as they liked or disliked
over time, that changed.
today, they can scan the room, see you, and compare your emotions with the show
i work in all this for decades
Apple’s FaceID Could Be a Powerful Tool for Mass Spying | WIRED
[could?]
Orlando Stops Using Amazon’s Face-Scanning Tech Amid Spying
Amazon is selling facial recognition to law enforcement
Patents Reveal How Facebook Wants To Capture Your Emotions
Google’s Satellites Could Soon See Your Face from Space
Developer Shows How iPhone Apps Can Theoretically Spy on You
its called ICA
image content analysis.
been writing stuff for the govermment for ages
Chinese school uses facial recognition to monitor student attention in class
China’s behavior monitoring system bars some from travel, purchasing property
Drones, facial recognition and a social credit system: 10 ways China watches its citizens
China Is Using Facial Recognition Technology to Send Jaywalkers Fines Through Text Messages
want to know if your boss is spying on you with a camera?
well, i wont tell you how to locate them…
which is something i do… [why not? ]
bu now… you will be watched
i worked on some software for companies
[edited for length by n]
You better carry that Apple with you! 🙂
I read the statement a few years ago that, in the future (which appears to be here and now), the truly free person is someone who appears in no government records or databases and, thus, cannot be monitored, tracked, or interfered with by that government.
I’ll leave it to y’all to contemplate just what it would take, given today’s society and world, to insure that your particulars and photo, your fingerprints, and perhaps your DNA profile, were not collected (legally or illegally, openly or surreptitiously) and squirreled away somewhere in any government’s records or databases.
Then, of course, there are websites and businesses and their attempts to gather information on everyone for their particular purposes, and what their relationships might be with the government and vice versa.
Unless there is some massive and disastrous reset costing the lives of hundreds of millions there is no way, NO WAY, this “trend” will be turned around. It’s baked into the status quo going forward cake.
Artfldgr:
I “unapproved” your other comment, where you basically harangue everyone for supposedly being surprised at this and previously ignorant about it.
You are operating under a false premise, which is that most people were ignorant. I mention that I had been unaware of the details of the passport part of it, but I certainly was not unaware of general trends; it was merely the first time I personally experienced how it works these days with passports. Nor do I think most people here were unaware of the general trends.
You continually assume people are far more stupid and ignorant than they are.
By the way, I first wrote about surveillance cameras and their ubiquity in 2007, mentioning that they’ve been proliferating and that libertarians don’t like them. A year ago I wrote this post about similar technology at train stations in Europe, and this from 2013 on a related subject.
I will add what I’ve said before, which is that the fact that a subject isn’t covered exhaustively here does not mean I or the readers here are unaware of it or think it’s unimportant. There are only so many hours in a day, and I write about what piques my interest to write about, usually because I think I have something to add to the conversation.
You may need to keep a green apple handy when you travel… 😉
“There’s something about the expanding power of government to pin you down that offends the libertarian in me. . . . The down side is that a tool the government can use to help you the government can use to harm you,” [Neo]
Neo, you are in good company:
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” [Benjamin Franklin]
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master . . . .” [George Washington].
They have to keep track of the slaves somehow.
Wow! Ninety nine percent accurate. So of a million travelers, we can rest assured that no more than 10,000 of them are terrorists or travelling illegally. I’m so relieved that we nipped that one in the bud.
Seriously now, this technology with this 99% metric, is much more effective for purposes of tyrannizing a populace (or something else) than it is in safeguarding a populace.
I don’t trust techies at all. They have been so consumed by codes and algorithms that they have little relationship to the real world. I have a landline phone, a laptop, and an old car. I don’t need any of this new s**t. And I don’t do facebook or any social media.
“[edited for length by n-n]”
Shouldn’t this be:
“[edited for length by n]”
?
Vanderleun:
Actually, come to think of it, you’re right.
Will fix.
probably obsolete 2017 post:
http://cathelaine.typepad.com/lives_in_a_shoe/2017/01/equal-and-opposite-reaction-maybe.html
“Then I learned about Adam Harvey who is developing has developed a camouflage fabric intended to confuse the software so it cannot distinguish you from Millard Fillmore…”.
I have assumed the Feds will use any means available keep track of us. That said my real name can not be googled. Not that that means much in 2018.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” Thomas Jefferson
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” attributed to Gerald Ford as early as 1954, however Ford’s assistant, Robert Hartmann, said that Ford claimed to have heard the quotation “early in his political career” from Harvard McClain at the Economic Club of Chicago.
parker on September 10, 2018 at 4:52 pm at 4:52 pm said:
I have assumed the Feds will use any means available keep track of us. That said my real name can not be googled. Not that that means much in 2018.
* * *
Everything can be googled; it just may not be found.
Analogous to “you can sue anyone for anything, you just might not win.”
There is a reason we all use an alias on the internet.
And Facebook Delenda Est.
Oh, the (well earned) cynicism and distrust these days!
First of all, we cannot discount simple incompetence.
But, more and more, lately, I’ve wondered and had the growing suspicion–a la the growing Leftist censorship on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other platforms–that it’s possible that the results I’ve been getting from my Internet searches have been tampered with, massaged a little, censored.
The problem with “searching” the Internet using Google, Safari, Firefox, Dogpile, Duck Duck Go or some other browser is that someone other than you ultimately controls the search parameters–and unless you are a polymath, conversant with all fields of knowledge, and the key elements and major works in each, unless you have a broad knowledge of history, philosophy, and literature–you might have a suspicion, or you may not–but you will have no real certainty about whether or not the results you get from your search have been tampered with, have been censored, and whether you are being shown search results that include only what the people who run your browser want you to see, results that deliberately do not include the conservative content you may well want to see.
Maybe they’re really trying and are honest, but, in any case, I’m pretty sure that those who run your browser want you to believe that what you have found is everything pertinent that is out there.
But, is it?
If you suspect that something vital is missing in the results you get, try multiple searches using variations in your search terms, and using several different browsers. That way you have a much better chance of finding something that the people who run this or that browser–the vast majority of them apparently on the Left–may not want you to find.
Well, I hope they’re more reliable than polygraph tests.
https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx
There will be the analogues of type I and type II errors in statistics (rejecting a true null hypothesis and failing to reject a false null hypothesis). From what I remember of my statistics, the more we try to minimize the one, the easier it is for instances of the other to slip through.
Statistics, in my view, can actually be very slippery, and my intuition [read: my fear and my going-in bias] tells me that it’s much the same with facial recognition technology (as it is with polygraph technology).
Does this mean orthodox Muslim women, wearing burqas, are not able to travel on airplanes?
I suggest you look up license plate scanning some time. License plate information is sucked up from a variety of places (e.g. shopping malls) and aggregated by some private companies. I wasn’t aware of the extent of this until I saw an advertisement in an insurance trade magazine. Great tool for investigations of certain insurance claims. You can be sure the government is using this tool too.
I think that we can look at this as one more way in which the world is getting smaller. The anonymity whose loss is being lamented is a relatively new thing in human history. It has only existed since the development of cities. In small towns and villages, where everyone knows everyone, privacy is much more limited.
I have a personal theory that the phenomenon of mass shootings is partly a result of too much privacy.
Roy Nathanson:
But people could always leave that village, and many many did, and gain anonymity in a city. Now it is much much harder to hide anywhere.
So, are we now at the point where “Person of Interest” is functionally operational?
Neo,
It’s true… people could always leave. But the vast majority did not. Anonymity and privacy for the masses is a new thing in human history.
Roy Nathanson:
Naturally the vast majority didn’t leave. But if a person wanted more anonymity—which is what we were discussing—he or she could leave, and often did.
I once read that ancient cities were not such healthy places, because of the crowding and epidemics. They maintained their population through constant migration from the countryside. I don’t know where I read it and can’t find it at the moment, however.
Illegal caught at airport using facial biometrics
http://www.fox5ny.com/news/illegal-caught-at-airport-using-facial-biometrics
Border security officials have caught a second impostor trying to enter the United States using a new facial comparison biometric system. It is the second time in less than three weeks since the cutting-edge technology was deployed at Dulles Washington International Airport in the Washington, D.C. area that someone has been caught.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), says a 26-year-old woman, who arrived on a flight from Ghana, presented a U.S. passport as a returning citizen. Utilizing the facial comparison technology, the CBP officer determined that the traveler was not a match to the passport and referred her for further examination which confirmed that she was a Ghanaian citizen and an impostor.
The woman’s name was not being released while the investigation continues.