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The thinking behind this isn't complicated. The US wants to construct a database of people who visit the US, and using it on people leaving the US will probably

The thinking behind this isn't complicated. The US wants to construct a database of people who visit the US, and using it on people leaving the US will probably encounter less resistance than people entering the US, as well as have people who don't travel much going "whats the big deal anyway?" Now they have your face and personal data, and they can probably run that against all the surveillance information being collected daily by the NSA etc. From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and you're not a citizen), this is F*g terrible, but that's what happens when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don't see this ending up anyplace good.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Heck, there are lots of ways this could screw up a citizen like me. I don't live in the US. I'm only going to be there for visits at the most, and at this point I'm holding out. I'm too afraid that one day, I won't be able to leave for whatever reason. This doesn't help that. My non-American spouse refuses to travel there again. Even being late catching a flight could make things rather inconvenient.
astrodust 10y ago
I'm less concerned about privacy, although still concerned about that, than I am about the Brazil principle here. The sorts of people that end up in these border security jobs are, if nothing else, very good at "following orders" and if the computer says someone's a target who are they to think otherwise? Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly. They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features. What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to over-fit for a particular set of inputs? The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

Heck, there are lots of ways this could screw up a citizen like me. I don't live in the US. I'm only going to be there for visits at the most, and at this point I'm holding out. I'm too afraid that one day, I won't be able to leave for whatever reason. This doesn't help that. My non-American spouse refuses to travel there again. Even being late catching a flight could make things rather inconvenient.

astrodust 10y ago

I'm less concerned about privacy, although still concerned about that, than I am about the Brazil principle here. The sorts of people that end up in these border security jobs are, if nothing else, very good at "following orders" and if the computer says someone's a target who are they to think otherwise? Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly. They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features. What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to over-fit for a particular set of inputs? The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.