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US government to use facial recognition technology at Mexico border crossing
- samueldavid 8y agowtf? what are they complaining about? this is just a common check, is basically on every decent airport.
- yodon 8y ago> this is just a common check, is basically on every decent airport Citation?
- jstanley 8y agoEven if surveillance is already widespread, that doesn't make more surveillance a good thing.
- mieseratte 8y ago> Even if surveillance is already widespread, that doesn't make more surveillance a good thing. I'm one of those types who uses cash, doesn't own a cell-phone, doesn't have Facebook or any of the others, opts for pat-downs at the airport as a form of protest, etc. etc. Having security and surveillance on our ports of entry seems entirely reasonable to me. The problem I can imagine is that we're almost guaranteed to run into No-Fly-List style mistaken-identity situations and I sincerely doubt CBP will have reasonable recourse for such mistakes.
- actuallyalys 8y agoMy privacy-related concern is that historically, surveillance data tends to be kept for long periods of time and used for purposes other than what it was collected for. My other concern is that I don't really welcome immigration officials having any more tools, giving how they're abusing the tools they already have.
- mieseratte 8y agoThat's a very fair and real concern, given "Synthesis Centers" and somewhat frequent allegations of parallel construction. I suppose the proper answer is "Unfuck our security apparatus" but absent that, I see how abstaining from extremely abusable tools, e.g. this facial recognition, is a reasonable response.
- MarkusAllen 8y agoSpeaking of the no-fly list... I got tickets at the airport last week (cool little trick to save some money on taxes vs. online)... The ticket lady told me some customer was upset with her. So she called over TSA security and was able to put him on the no-fly list. She just thought it was great! That blew me away. Someone can ruin a person's life in seconds. Punchline: be a good, politically correct person at the airport. Even the hint of anger could get one on the no-fly list.
- walterbell 8y agoWhich taxes are not applicable to ticket purchases at the airport?
- jstanley 8y agohttps://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/09/26/buy-cheap-frontier-tickets-airport/ https://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/09/26/buy-cheap...
- jstanley 8y ago> Having security and surveillance on our ports of entry seems entirely reasonable to me. Having "ports of entry" as a concept seems entirely unreasonable to me. I can travel between Bristol and Manchester without having to justify myself to anyone, prove who I am, etc. and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to travel between England and Canada under the same circumstances. Everyone in the world is an equally valid human being. How can one human being say to another "you're not allowed to exist in this public place unless you've got the correct paperwork"? It's barbaric.
- walterbell 8y agoAirport facial scanning, https://www.npr.org/2018/03/16/593989347/facial-scanning-now-arriving-at-u-s-airports https://www.npr.org/2018/03/16/593989347/facial-scanning-now... > CBP is testing biometric scanning at a dozen or so U.S. international airports to ensure that people leaving the country are who they say they are, and to prevent visa overstays. The Transportation Security Administration, another agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is testing similar devices at security check-in lines ... CBP hopes to have face scanners installed at all the nation's airports in four years. AWS facial recognition service, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/06/06/amazon-facial-recognition-cost-just-10-and-was-worryingly-good/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/06/06/amazo... > Even if we include costs of testing, figuring out AWS and actually running the facial recognition on our scenario, it’s going to be under $10 ... the ACLU found the Orlando Police Department spent just $30.99 to process 30,989 images .. Compared to other facial recognition projects currently being run by the federal government, the Amazon service is staggeringly cheap.
- Someone1234 8y agoIt is a little, unsettling, when they set up checkpoints to make sure people exiting the country are authorized to do so. I'm sure people can state good reasons, but it feels very East Germany-est.
- cryoshon 8y agoyeah. why would they want to verify we're allowed to leave? the default assumption should be that everyone is allowed to leave...
- atonse 8y agoAt first this didn't add up, but I think they want to be able to prove that you overstayed your visa. But with the current process, you can come, overstay your tourist visa, and leave, but they don't stamp you on departure, only on arrival, so they can't actually tell that you left. Again, is this a real, rampant, dangerous problem? Probably not. But it's a real use-case (so they don't have to give fake reasons) for state-wide surveillance. Since it also claims to target foreigners (which by definition aren't voters), most locals/voters/politicians won't care, thinking it doesn't apply to them. Not that I'm defending this, I think this level of surveillance is extremely dangerous. And the most obvious thing is that they'll slowly and quietly expand this to everyone else.
- reacharavindh 8y agoI'd be surprised if they're not doing this already. I suppose they just want it to be done more openly/legally from now... Anyways, time to paint CV confusing patterns on cars, clothes and window glasses.. https://qz.com/878820/new-camouflage-promises-to-make-you-unrecognizable-to-facial-recognition-technology/ https://qz.com/878820/new-camouflage-promises-to-make-you-un... We've got to somehow make this fashionable. Confuse the heck out of image recognition systems. At least the optical ones.
- ddtaylor 8y agoNot that I agree with it but my guess is this would be seen similar to how infrared license plate covers are deemed unlawful.
- cfadvan 8y agoIt’s one thing to obscure an object designed to be recognizable, and another to regulate clothing, makeup, etc. if it’s not a mask, it’s going to probably be legal. The first amendment is very broad, and what you wear has been protected many times under it.
- dgzl 8y ago> if it's not a mask, it's going to probably be legal. I believe masks are also legal. First amendment + a religion that lets you cover your face = your right.
- cfadvan 8y agoIt’s not that simple. If the police or border patrol want to ID you they can compel you to remove a mask. There are also various regulations around wearing full face masks in banks and the like.
- dgzl 8y agoI believe it's very simple. If a police officer wants to do just about anything with you, they can and will, regardless of the rights you have, or restrictions put on the police. Also, the Bill of Rights trumps regulations, but a bank is a private entity and you don't have rights there.
- 1ba9115454 8y agoIt's my understanding that the error rates are so high with these systems even in good conditions that they are next to useless.
- ta76567656 8y agoThey're probably quite useful in obtaining probable cause, much like drug search dogs.
- awakeasleep 8y agoDecreasing accuracy actually increases utility
- tzs 8y agoModern facial recognition systems are actually pretty accurate. The problem is when you use them for screening on a population where only a small fraction of the people fall into the group you are screening for. You can then run into the "False Positive Paradox". This is more well known in the context of medical testing. Suppose you are screening for a rare disease. You are testing a group of 10 000 people, of which 100 have the disease and 9 900 do not. Let's say you have a test that is right 99% of the time. Of the 100 people you test who actually have the disease, your test will catch 99 of them. Of the 9 900 people you test who do not have it, your test will falsely report that 99 of them have the disease. The result is you get 198 people reported as having the disease, but only 50% of them actually have the disease. The other 50% are false positives. If the test were right 90% of the time rather than 99% of the time, the results would be 90 positives who have the disease, and 990 positives who do not. Only 8.3% of the people who test positive actually have the disease! If you used that 90% test on a population where 5 000 of 10 000 have the disease, things are dramatically different. 90% of the people who test positive actually have the disease. Same thing with facial recognition. Set up a facial recognition system at a big football game and look for people who have outstanding arrest warrants, and you are in a situation like the medical test for the rare disease. A 90% accurate system might give you 10 times as many false positives as true positives. Set up a system at a border that has a lot of one-day tourist traffic both ways, and use it to try to match up people coming back at the end of the day with people who left earlier in the day, and it might be more like the 50/50 disease. A 90% accurate test might only have a 10% false positive rate.
- kolbe 8y agoI'm not sure what the general objection is to facial recognition technology. What's the difference between this and hiring a team of autistic savants who can remember a ton of faces? They use their eyes (cameras) to look at faces, and their brains (algorithms) to classify the image. One just costs a lot less to create.
- jamiek88 8y agoOh come on. You can reduce almost anything that way. ‘What is wrong with a surveillance balloon hovering over every city following all citizens and logging their activity? It’s no different to the police officer on the corner observing the public’. It’s a matter of scale, efficiency and generality. The scariest thing imaginable is a truly efficient government. Our system works because there is room for rebels and alternate ways of thinking and living to bubble into the whole polity. Gay rights for example. If the government had had the ability to monitor all homosexuals back when the laws were truly terrible - they’d all be in prison. Runaway slaves? Same deal.
- kolbe 8y agoOn the other hand: Murder and rape? Same deal. I think it's perfectly correct to believe that the US government in its current state is pure shit for more than just the reasons you mentioned. But forced inefficiency sounds like a ridiculous way to go about fixing it. If society takes issue with the laws, fix the laws. But having a law that relies on selective and inefficient enforcement is a stupid law.
- rtkwe 8y agoSearching and following a particular person with probably cause is fine under the constitution allowing the police effectively follow anyone 24/7 strips away a lot of 4th amendment protections. The fact that the laws haven't quite caught up to the ability of police to spy on people en mass should not be a justification for them doing so. Law makers lag behind the public and the state of technology by decades.
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- pimmen 8y agoI'm an EU citizen. If I drive from Juarez to El Paso I assume I can contact the company the CBP is using to find out what they're doing with my data? Edit: I previously wrote the CBP, but I meant the company that owns the facial recognition tech and stores my facial data.
- pc86 8y agoIf you can show how the CBP is under the jurisdiction of the EU, sure.
- Spooky23 8y agoThat’s a great scenario, but I believe that sovereign immunity prevents the EU from taking action, barring a treaty.
- frockington 8y agoI'm pretty sure the CBP would give you the finger and ask you to "come and get it". I really don't understand why Europeans think other nations will follow other nations laws
- JBReefer 8y agoNo dude, the EU Army will back him up, so will the EU Navy and EU Airforce. The law applies globally.
- pc86 8y agoIt's been too long to edit my post, but what makes you think the company that the CBP is using has any EU offices?
- danschumann 8y agoI think some of the general weirdness people feel around AI policing is that there are so many dumb laws on the books, and if we let robots judge, then there is no mercy. Also, everyone will be in jail because, on average, every American commits a felony every day ( because there are so many weird dumb laws ). I think someone should make AI to refactor law code into 1/1000 its current size. There are like millions of lines of law, even for stuff like soybean farming. I'm sure a lot of that is duplicitous, redundant legal speak, not a precise computer-type language.
- pjc50 8y agoSpoken like someone who's never seen a million lines of business logic in actual code. And it develops for the same reasons: in a complex system there's going to be all sorts of weird corner cases, and some of them are bad, so you write some more code/laws to deal with those outcomes ...
- oceanghost 8y agoThe phrase for this is "the law of unintended consequences."
- ErikAugust 8y agoHow does that detract from the point? They are arguing for a sort of "code deletion" and "refactoring" of laws. A far superior way of maintaining a codebase. Not just "ADD MORE LINES OF CODE", which you make sound is like some concrete reality of how things always get done. It's not. And no one should strive to do things this way.
- TrainedMonkey 8y agoAdding more lines of code is something that you can control and do right now. Changing the world so you do not have to do that takes significantly more time and effort. In other words, growing complexity of the system to deal with new cases is past of least resistance.
- BurningFrog 8y agoThis seems like the least objectionable place to do this. It's already accepted that everyone passing a border show photo ID and get their passage approved and recorded.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThe way I see it is that your face is kind of like your license plate number. The government being able to map your likeness to your official metadata (taxes, license, etc) is somewhat legitimate. It's when they start tracking it everywhere that I have huge issues. Feeding security camera footage into facial recognition software is like putting up an ALPR at every street corner. It's not an invasion of privacy per-se but because technology allows all that metadata to be sifted through on demand at scale it's basically government stalking. The facial recognition ship has long sailed for 1st world citizens thanks to how many pictures most of us have online, official photos for ID, etc, etc. The government can already map your face to your identity. This particular program is probably more targeted at the non US residents crossing the border because the three letter agencies don't have access to as much good data and metadata on them. Because all the Mexican government agencies don't share ID photos with the three letter agencies the three letter agencies have to do it themselves hence facial recognition at borders. As others have said I'd be very surprised if they weren't just trying to legitimize something they were already doing.
- John_KZ 8y agoExactly. Facial recognition already happens, but it's it's "natural", analog form. The border guard will make sure your documents are valid and the face in the document matches that of your face. That's more than adequate. If it's important to visa conditions, the date of entry/exit can be recorded, or for the sake of security, the date can be recorded in an offline log to be opened only by due process. Photographing and storing data on millions of people without probably cause, sharing them with third parties (like Amazon) and keeping them forever, that's not just unnecessary, but also dangerous.
- amaccuish 8y agoBut, but, China!
- drak0n1c 8y agoThere was a prior HN discussion about a previously convicted felon and four-time deportee who still managed to re-enter via the regular border crossing and steal a million dollars in gold. This technology will solve that edge case. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327728
- test6554 8y agoIdeally it would eventually dramatically speed up the border crossing process and reduce visible red tape.
- alottafunchata 8y agoGood
- kchoudhu 8y agoIf they're anything like the automated data collection kiosks at LAX, this is going to be a colossal failure. In my experience, they are terrible at identifying brown people and children. Good luck implementing this at scale.