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Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

185 points by us0r 8y ago

tibyat 8y ago
fuck them. fuck everyone who worked on this.
admax88q 8y ago
> For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security. Conditioning works.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  > They take your picture any time you go to America anyway, so I don’t really mind. Things not being different is a good reason to not be concerned.
- gruez 8y ago
  I wouldn't be too cynical. "privacy was not a major concern" might just mean that she still thinks it's a privacy violation, but it's not such a big violation to warrant boycotting trips to the US. That is, she knows she's sacrificing privacy to visit the US and has already accepted it. Consider an alternative story: headline: "china blocks all access to all foreign media websites" > For John Smith of United States, censorship was not a major concern, as the practice doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from Chinese censorship. Doesn't mean that the same John Smith isn't going to be up in arms if the FCC starts censoring news websites in the US.
azernik 8y ago
Note - this is only for international flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway. Data retention period is 14 days for pilot testing, 12 hours for some unspecified "short term", and zero after that.
- tibyat 8y ago
  don’t kid yourself, there’s no such thing as temporary data retention.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  > Note - this is only for international flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway. Not typically on outbound flights, only inbound as part of customs.
  - jambo 8y ago
    And inbound is only because they have installed kiosks that they guide everyone to. Otherwise if you go to a CBP agent they don't take your photo if you're a US passport holder. The kiosks are an end-run around tradition/rules about how CBP can treat Americans.
    - azernik 8y ago
      > they don't take your photo if you're a US passport holder This is very much in the "you don't have to go through the body scanners" at the airport category. By default they take your photo and fingerprint, even if you're a US citizen; the specific language on CBP's website is: "At this time, CBP does not require U.S. Citizens to have their photos captured when entering or exiting the country. U.S. Citizens who request not to participate in this biometric collection process may notify a CBP Officer or an airline or airport representative in order to seek an alternative means of verifying their identity and documents." https://www.cbp.gov/travel/biometrics https://www.cbp.gov/travel/biometrics
      - JoshTriplett 8y ago
        > By default they take your photo and fingerprint, even if you're a US citizen Photo, yes; fingerprint, no. Every customs station I've been through when re-entering the US has taken photos but not fingerprints. (They do require fingerprints from non-US-citizens.)
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> “The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.” But you can hold accountable an airline or customs gate agent who doesn’t have access to a library of images forming a signature of your face and who may be bound by policies or laws regarding privacy and identity that could be nearly impossible to enforce or even verify with a digital system. > “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.” Yikes, this sounds like Idiocracy to me. I frequently am the befuddled dad traveling with kids and bags, and I can tell you that apart from very exceptional circumstances or special needs, this is not at all any kind of serious inconvenience that requires more surveillance culture. (And for truly special needs situations, there are many parsimonious solution possibilities that don’t use a bazooka to swat a fly like this face recognition system is doing...)
- wahern 8y ago
  I mean, from a security and safety standpoint it fails. From a financial standpoint it makes perfect sense, especially if CBP is picking up the tab. Not having to dedicate an employee to each gate that is currently boarding is a huge labor saver for airlines. From CBP's standpoint, they get to use fancy new technology while also furthering mission creep. It's win-win.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I’m super skeptical that it’s actually a financial cost saver. The data infrastructure and sunk costs are quite high for systems like this, and the non-zero defect or failure rates mean you still generally have to employ most of the same staff. They just do something else on the computer or deal with other gate check issues, stuff they generally still had to do already while scanning people onto the plane. Face recognition systems are notoriously difficult to implement in a way that actually saves money. Even if boarding huge flights happens faster, the limiting factors are usually runway traffic delays and other problems anyway. All this infrastructure only so sometimes on a few international flights, when no special issues pop up, they can possibly save a small amount of money (relative to other costs involved) by boarding slightly faster (a matter of a few dozen minutes, max) and potentially depart sooner if there’s no other type of hold up. It doesn’t add up.
Johnny555 8y ago
The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%. The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane. So at least they are clear that this is a cost-saving method for airlines, it has nothing to do with speeding boarding or making boarding more secure. This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said. “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen. Oh wait, I guess it is about speeding boarding... but is boarding pass scanning really what slows boarding? I always seem to get backed up in the line at the plane door, waiting for everyone to stow their carryons and sit down. Most busy flights have two agents scanning and most people who have flown more than once scan their pass/phone quickly.... I'm surprised it's any faster getting people to stand in the right spot and stand still for a photo.
- peteretep 8y ago
  > if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1% Is this worse than the current security measures in place while boarding?
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.
    - 8y ago
diebeforei485 8y ago
As long as false flags get sent to a human gate agent standing right there who can make manual approvals, I fail to see why anyone traveling internationally would object to this. I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph. From a legal standpoint, domestic travel is different (and there should be open debate in Congress before they make a decision there). But I fully support facial recognition for international travel and other immigration benefits.
- wahern 8y ago
  I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph. Why? I'm sure there's nefarious activity that could be prevented, I'm just struggling to identify activities that would make be feel (let alone actually be) unsafe on an airplane as a practical matter, and without doning a screen writer's hat. I'm assuming weapons are already adequately checked. And if not I'm not sure how facial recognition would appreciably help in this regard. Sure, maybe 12 bad guys enter the system though 12 airports with lax security, then all board the same flight at a major hub in a manner that circumvents analytics that searches for suspected bad guys flying together. But that already makes some dubious assumptions, such as the degree of efficacy in the system looking for suspected bad guys traveling together. For most of air travel hijackings and bombings were incredibly common. We all but solved that by the 1980s by physically screening for weapons and suspect material, not by pretending we could predict people's behavior.
  - diebeforei485 8y ago
    IME questions like this typically come from people who don't deal with the bureaucracy of applying for visas very often, if at all. You assume fear of being bombed or hijacked, but it's really to make international travel easier and more efficient. Lack of a reliable way to verify identity is a major reason why applicants for admission (or applicants for a visa) are assumed "guilty until proven innocent", and a ton of people are denied visas (or denied entry) every day on the slightest reasons as a result. Being able to verify someone identity biometrically makes international travel and immigration more trustworthy, which makes it politically more palatable to make the lives of travelers and immigrants easier. And doing this on outbound flights is no different from doing it on inbound flights - from the host government's perspective, they need to know when people enter and leave.
ReGenGen 8y ago
The speed of boarding pass checks is rarely the limiting factor for loading a plane. Perhaps the A380 is different? Are they comparing a single human boarding pass checker vs multiple facial scanner lanes?
- paxy 8y ago
  I can see the number of scanning lanes (which is usually 1) being a bottleneck on large aircrafts with lots of doors, like the A380 example they have given.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    I've very rarely seen the case where there isn't a queue after the boarding pass scan and before the boarding door(s) and seating area of the airplane. This suggests that downstream of the boarding pass scan is already the true bottleneck of the system.
    - stevehawk 8y ago
      i believe that's why he (and the article) mentioned the A380 which can have something like 4 simultaneous embarking points (probably double that if they board from both sides of the plane).
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        I’ve only flown the A380 twice. Both times that still had a bottleneck in economy of people getting settled despite boarding through multiple jetways. The bottleneck is at the seats, esp in coach/economy. On a single-aisle aircraft, this typically backs up onto the jetway, but even multiple door/aisle, the slowest agent can scan tickets and check IDs faster than people can get settled on average even when some of them can settle in parallel (perhaps one per aisle per very few rows).
refurb 8y ago
Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge. “What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?” “I was at home all night.” “You’re lying. We have confirmation your face was recognized at the gas station, grocery store and bank between the hours of 7 and 9pm.” That sends a shiver down my spine.
- noobermin 8y ago
  Is this situation any different from security footage already at gas stations and the like? I suppose automatic aggregation of said data is more problematic.
  - weej 8y ago
    I'd like to think so. A grainy, CCTV at a gas station with ZERO FACIAL RECOGNITION is not correlated and crossed check with my passport photo or physical movements.
    - alphakappa 8y ago
      CCTVs don’t have to be grainy and low-res anymore. Recording 4K video and storing a finite amount of it is getting cheaper every day.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - mbel 8y ago
    And is this situation any different from location logs based on mobile phone? It's obviously easier to leave s phone than a face at home, my point is that we have already pretty much agreed to be tracked most of the time.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  This doesn't really change anything other than just being more damning evidence against you slightly easier to obtain. If you carry a phone of any kind, it is already betraying your movements. All it takes to paint you like a game of Snake is a subpoena to Google (for GPS history) or your carrier (tower associations), assuming they don't pull your location history out of the device itself. Hell, even cars are starting to get in on it with self-reporting telemetry even if you manage to avoid all the commodity ALPR scans. Your privacy is already dead. You're objecting to death itself at this point.
noobermin 8y ago
>For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security. I suppose that's one unfortunate way to look at it.
- camillomiller 8y ago
  I mean, technically it's true. Data and pictures are already there and aggregated. We're already past the non-return point. It just took 17 years from this day in 2001.
josephpmay 8y ago
The technology is really just being piloted here in a low-risk application. Everyone commenting here is right that it really doesn’t save that much time when boarding a plane, but think of where else it could save time. (I probably shouldn’t go into details even though I never signed an NDA, so I guess I technically could talk about it)
village-idiot 8y ago
Creepy.
monksy 8y ago
Nope. This needs to be protested.
jedberg 8y ago
> Officials touted the additional security the system provides—meeting a Congressional mandate to include biometric screenings— Said someone who clearly doesn’t understand security. The entire point of adding biometrics is that it is in addition to the passport, not instead of. All they’ve done here is trade something you have with something you are. Sigh.
- gok 8y ago
  To say that a boarding pass is “something you have” in a security sense is absurd. I can print your boarding pass merely by knowing your name and where you’re going. A biometric check (backed by a paper ID check) is a dramatic security upgrade over that.
  - blitmap 8y ago
    Passports are printed similar to currency. There are many features in them that are hard to replicate. It can be done but not easily, so it does fit the bill of "something you have" to authenticate. Not nearly as secure as a yubikey or an rsa token, but oh well.
    - gok 8y ago
      Again this isn’t at passport control, it’s to board the plane after security.
      - robotresearcher 8y ago
        Where your passport is again checked on most international flights. Or your driver’s license / photo ID on internal flights in many countries.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    You’re right, a biometric check with a passport check is in fact more secure. But what they’ve done here is replace the passport check with a biometric check.
skywhopper 8y ago
I’m skeptical of the faster boarding claim. My perception is that it’s the physical loading of the plane cabin, rather than the scanning of boarding passes, that wastes time. Also, having dealt with the face scanners at the border entry points I’m also skeptical that self service face scanning will be faster than just scanning a boarding pass. Not to mention that security, not boarding, is the painful part of the process anyway. And 99% accuracy is not actually great...
- duxup 8y ago
  Yeah the scanners for tickets are basically ... put ticket on scanner, beep ... now wait in a new line while people load up stuff.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    It depends a bit. On smaller flights, there may only be one gate agent and scanner. If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. Sometimes that takes several minutes, and the smaller flights are often the ones with short 20-30 minute turnarounds scheduled. Had this happen on a flight I took a few weeks back.
    - wccrawford 8y ago
      >If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition. The only time saved is scanning a ticket vs scanning a face. And people are pretty much guaranteed not to lose their faces.
      - ceejayoz 8y ago
        > And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition. Not if it's an automated gate. I just got back from Australia, and the passport gates there are automated facial recognition; they look kinda like the gates in a subway where you scan a travel card. A reject heads over to the desk to get sorted. Everyone else keeps going through the automated gate.
acjohnson55 8y ago
I can't remember a time when I boarded a plane that I didn't have to wait in a queue on the jet bridge. How does this help with that? Also, I'm constantly seeing people accidentally end up in the wrong row or seat because they misread the label up above. Invariably, everyone takes out boarding passes to sort it out. Reeks of a trojan horse to get more pervasive face scanners in place.
- melkiaur 8y ago
  I've only been once in Washington, and it was ages ago. But they have this incredible system where they put you in a massive bus (At first I didn't even realise it was a bus, it looked more like a room), and the bus goes to the plane, lifts ups, and docks to the plane door. So, it's very important they can cram the people in the bus as fast as possible. Do a google image search for "Dulles buses", you'll understand what I'm on about. But this benefit (of accelerated boarding) would apply to any airport where you don't go into a jet bridge but have to take the bus to go to the plane.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Ah yeah, I've done bus boarding before (although not the Dulles thing), wasn't considering that. Still seems like you could time that boarding of the earlier vehicle to just start earlier.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    They have not used the "mobile lounges" for normal boarding since the 80s. That said, occasionally when there is a fuckup they still have to use them, but it's rare. Almost every flight uses either the jetbridge or the stairs (for tiny commuter flights).
ataturk 8y ago
What this is for: Using private industry to build a facial database that can later be obtained by the government via subpoena, further proving that individual rights are a joke as long as we the people allow corporations and government to work so closely together. And just to drive home how complete the control is becoming, I am limited to only one post a day here. Dissenting voices are being driven from the Internet. God help us all if they succeed at suppressing speech completely--it will be just like China.
exabrial 8y ago
This is a great time to remind everyone to buckle their seatbelts tomorrow. You have a much greater chance of dying in a car wreck tomorrow than you will in your cumulative lifetime risk of dying in an aviation terrorist incident. Also don't mind the giant pile of cash someone got paid with public funds to address this crisis via government contacts.
- optimiz3 8y ago
  Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed. The TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of a threat of terrorism against aviation in the US[0]. [0] https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-in-leaked-doc-no-evidence-of-terrorist-plots-against-aviation-in-us/ https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...
  - mikeash 8y ago
    It was true before the new measures as well. Even 9/11 only matched the death toll from one month on American roads. Basic security measures definitely help. The rate of hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s was absurdly high, and dropped fast one basic screening was put in place. But there’s little evidence that anything beyond that helps.
jupiter90000 8y ago
Tangent, but I thought Dulles Airport's "moon buggies" felt super weird to have to go onto after a long international flight. It felt like I was loaded into an armored personnel carrier or something. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge
gumby 8y ago
On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat. And if identity actually mattered (hint: it doesn't), well it's already been "screened" via the purchase and TSA checkpoint tests. Planes flew for decades without any matching of passengers to tickets, and tickets were frequently resold (especially unused legs) via classified ads and later eBay. The airlines were delighted when the government (without any evidence to justify it) told them to start matching people to tickets.
- jahewson 8y ago
  Planes also flew for decades without locks on the cockpit doors, but that doesn’t make it a good idea in the modern world.
  - Macha 8y ago
    How many tragedies have been enabled by suicidal pilots + the locked doors? I know of at least one case in the Alps and pretty sure there was another in India recently enough? I'm not sure they come out that far ahead really, though obviously the incidents they were designed to counter are bigger and more headline grabbing.
  - gumby 8y ago
    There's a parallel comment to this one talking about some of the drawbacks (though TBH I think it's a reasonable risk/reward tradeoff). But I haven't seen any actual justification that the no-fly list is actually useful, and worryingly the regulations around it are classified.
- amf12 8y ago
  > On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat. Well, but that's an assumption and an edge case.
bogomipz 8y ago
So after the 20 to 30 minute procedure of handing your ID and boarding pass to a TSA agent, taking off your shoes, belt, emptying your pockets and having a full body scan done, adding a facial scan at the gate is somehow going to improve both boarding time and security. Right that makes sense. This shit needs to stop.
makecheck 8y ago
This is sort of “hurry up and wait”; every time I feel like I got through the gate quickly, I just end up in line on the jet bridge or waiting 2 minutes for someone to fish every variety of item out of their overhead bin while the whole plane waits for them. The cause of slower boarding is BAGGAGE FEES. Airlines are penny-pinching, people bring everything on board to compensate, and struggling with luggage is slow as hell.
- r_c_a_d 8y ago
  People take bags onboard to avoid fees, yes, but mostly because airlines lose hold luggage (or send it to the wrong place) and even if they don't you have to go and wait for it at the carousel. The last flight I took, there were too many people taking onbord luggage and mine got taken off me and put in the hold :(
toomanybeersies 8y ago
It seems like this system has been designed with privacy in mind, after the pilot program, they won't store your image after the comparison. The only question is will it remain that way?
ajenner 8y ago
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. So those of us with dual nationality, who enter the US on our US passports and leave on our foreign passports, are going to get screwed. Lovely.
- dmurray 8y ago
  I don't see why. You don't show either passport to anyone when leaving the country. Instead they take your photo and compare it to the ones they have on file, which for a dual nationality citizen will include at least your passport photo. I'm more surprised they don't want to physically stamp your passport. Even though they already have a record of you entering and exiting the country, they've always liked to have physical passport stamps. And losing those makes a material difference in the case where another country cares where you've been.
- laken 8y ago
  If you are a US citizen, it's illegal to enter or leave the US with another country's passport anyway, even if you're a dual citizen. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185
  - themaninthedark 8y ago
    I am not a lawyer but I don't read that as you have to present your US passport to enter or leave. Only that you must have a valid US passport with you when you do so. >(b) Citizens >Except as otherwise provided by the President and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may authorize and prescribe, it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> “It doesn’t matter,” Maryland resident Kim Meekins said of not being informed ahead of time. “You go to different airports and they do different things depending on their technology. If it’s another safety measure to make sure everyone has a safe flight, I’m all for whatever. I didn’t need to be notified ahead of time.” "I'm all for whatever"! The hell does one engage rationally with that?
- gambiting 8y ago
  By being so used to the security theatre everywhere that is just doesn't even register anymore. They could start doing automated anal probing at passport gates and at least some part of the population would go "meh, if it makes it safer than I'm all for whatever".
  - justwalt 8y ago
    I hope that comes with Facebook integration.
- INTPenis 8y ago
  Frequent fliers are business people, professional people. They fly all the time to get things done. Very unlikely to care about privacy issues. They most likely use several cloud services with no worry at all. These are the majority of people in the world. HN is a bubble.
  - wemdyjreichert 8y ago
    > Frequent fliers are business people, professional people. They fly all the time to get things done. Very unlikely to care about privacy issues. They most likely use several cloud services with no worry at all. > These are the majority of people in the world. HN is a bubble. Yep. We're past the point of caring. The frog has been slowly boiled.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  She's trusting. It's not irrational to trust other people.
pimmen 8y ago
According to the Geneva Convention, refugees don't need a visa or travel documents like passports to travel (to make it purposefully more difficult to mess with persecuted people, like Germany did by stamping a "J" in the passport of Jewish citizens so it would be easier for countries who didn't want them to refuse them). I have fears that widespread adoption of systems like this could make air travel for refugees inaccessible if governments really want to.
amelius 8y ago
I don't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing a facial recognition scanner where the camera first physically moves up/down to match the height of the person (which takes a few seconds), and then takes a photo. Quite a ridiculous system if you ask me.
- Macha 8y ago
  Sounds like EU passport control.
acd 8y ago
But people have similar faces called eigen faces in Mathematics. This is not Secure because faces are not unique. Similar to finding a similar to you looking face on the street/internet. Humans have an average faces and then diverge from that. Eigenface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface
jeltz 8y ago
Most European airports only scan your boarding card for flights within Schengen and do not check any ID, and many of them let you scan it yourself.
marty331 8y ago
There is no way in hell this is a good thing for US Citizens. First it's good for doing your boarding pass but then it will be used for identifying people on the street, maybe at a protest and then locking them away if they disagree with the political party in power. FML
- camillomiller 8y ago
  It's incredible how eager people are to give away freedom and privacy in exchange for a little convenience.
csomar 8y ago
> The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane. Do they really do that? I mean in most airport? And in Dubai (dxb) you just scan the barcode on your boarding pass and board the plane. No one checks your identity.
- psychometry 8y ago
  Domestic U.S.? No one checks passports. International? Probably. Scanning a boarding pass takes very little time, so I don't see this as a big benefit to travelers.
jandrese 8y ago
I'm really surprised they were able to cut boarding time in half with this, my experience is that the gate isn't the bottleneck, it's little old ladies with 50lb carryons struggling to get them into the overhead bin and blocking the aisle.
camillomiller 8y ago
17 years after 9/11, my question is: we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that? Or is it a false causality? Can we even establish causality between the enhanced security and the lack of large-scale airplane attacks/hijackings?
- mikestew 8y ago
  we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that? We never had a comparable event before 9/11/01. OK City, one ham-fisted attack on WTC in the 90s, British burned down the White House in the 1800s, but nothing of that scale prior. And 18 years ago, all you did was walk through a metal detector (whose sensitivity wasn't set all that high), and on the plane you go.
devy 8y ago
I was at ATL 2 weeks ago. Many Delta's boarding gates were also equipped with facial recognition boarding cameras too.
noer 8y ago
Is the scanning of boarding passes really the thing that slows down boarding? They rarely pause between groups because of a line of people getting scanned. It's more often that the line of people waiting to get onto the plane has stretched too far down the jetbridge.

185 points by us0r 8y ago

fuck them. fuck everyone who worked on this.

> For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security. Conditioning works.

Godel_unicode 8y ago
> They take your picture any time you go to America anyway, so I don’t really mind. Things not being different is a good reason to not be concerned.
gruez 8y ago
I wouldn't be too cynical. "privacy was not a major concern" might just mean that she still thinks it's a privacy violation, but it's not such a big violation to warrant boycotting trips to the US. That is, she knows she's sacrificing privacy to visit the US and has already accepted it. Consider an alternative story: headline: "china blocks all access to all foreign media websites" > For John Smith of United States, censorship was not a major concern, as the practice doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from Chinese censorship. Doesn't mean that the same John Smith isn't going to be up in arms if the FCC starts censoring news websites in the US.

azernik 8y ago

Note - this is only for international flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway. Data retention period is 14 days for pilot testing, 12 hours for some unspecified "short term", and zero after that.

tibyat 8y ago
don’t kid yourself, there’s no such thing as temporary data retention.
JoshTriplett 8y ago
> Note - this is only for international flights, where CBP takes your photo anyway. Not typically on outbound flights, only inbound as part of customs.
- jambo 8y ago
  And inbound is only because they have installed kiosks that they guide everyone to. Otherwise if you go to a CBP agent they don't take your photo if you're a US passport holder. The kiosks are an end-run around tradition/rules about how CBP can treat Americans.
  - azernik 8y ago
    > they don't take your photo if you're a US passport holder This is very much in the "you don't have to go through the body scanners" at the airport category. By default they take your photo and fingerprint, even if you're a US citizen; the specific language on CBP's website is: "At this time, CBP does not require U.S. Citizens to have their photos captured when entering or exiting the country. U.S. Citizens who request not to participate in this biometric collection process may notify a CBP Officer or an airline or airport representative in order to seek an alternative means of verifying their identity and documents." https://www.cbp.gov/travel/biometrics https://www.cbp.gov/travel/biometrics
    - JoshTriplett 8y ago
      > By default they take your photo and fingerprint, even if you're a US citizen Photo, yes; fingerprint, no. Every customs station I've been through when re-entering the US has taken photos but not fingerprints. (They do require fingerprints from non-US-citizens.)

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

> “The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.” But you can hold accountable an airline or customs gate agent who doesn’t have access to a library of images forming a signature of your face and who may be bound by policies or laws regarding privacy and identity that could be nearly impossible to enforce or even verify with a digital system. > “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen.” Yikes, this sounds like Idiocracy to me. I frequently am the befuddled dad traveling with kids and bags, and I can tell you that apart from very exceptional circumstances or special needs, this is not at all any kind of serious inconvenience that requires more surveillance culture. (And for truly special needs situations, there are many parsimonious solution possibilities that don’t use a bazooka to swat a fly like this face recognition system is doing...)

wahern 8y ago
I mean, from a security and safety standpoint it fails. From a financial standpoint it makes perfect sense, especially if CBP is picking up the tab. Not having to dedicate an employee to each gate that is currently boarding is a huge labor saver for airlines. From CBP's standpoint, they get to use fancy new technology while also furthering mission creep. It's win-win.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I’m super skeptical that it’s actually a financial cost saver. The data infrastructure and sunk costs are quite high for systems like this, and the non-zero defect or failure rates mean you still generally have to employ most of the same staff. They just do something else on the computer or deal with other gate check issues, stuff they generally still had to do already while scanning people onto the plane. Face recognition systems are notoriously difficult to implement in a way that actually saves money. Even if boarding huge flights happens faster, the limiting factors are usually runway traffic delays and other problems anyway. All this infrastructure only so sometimes on a few international flights, when no special issues pop up, they can possibly save a small amount of money (relative to other costs involved) by boarding slightly faster (a matter of a few dozen minutes, max) and potentially depart sooner if there’s no other type of hold up. It doesn’t add up.

Johnny555 8y ago

The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%. The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane. So at least they are clear that this is a cost-saving method for airlines, it has nothing to do with speeding boarding or making boarding more secure. This spring, Lufthansa announced that it boarded an A380 with over 350 passengers at LAX in less than 20 minutes—less than half of their normal time—using self-boarding gates linked to CBP’s facial-enabled traveler verification service,” McAleenan said. “No more fumbling with your boarding pass while you have two carry-ons, maybe a kid; no more trying to find your QR code or trying to refresh your screen. Oh wait, I guess it is about speeding boarding... but is boarding pass scanning really what slows boarding? I always seem to get backed up in the line at the plane door, waiting for everyone to stow their carryons and sit down. Most busy flights have two agents scanning and most people who have flown more than once scan their pass/phone quickly.... I'm surprised it's any faster getting people to stand in the right spot and stand still for a photo.

peteretep 8y ago
> if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1% Is this worse than the current security measures in place while boarding?
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Probably not since agents don't check ID at all, but if I'm going to give up my privacy by having my passport photo shared with airports without my knowledge or consent, I'd like to think that I'm getting something out of the deal.
  - 8y ago

diebeforei485 8y ago

As long as false flags get sent to a human gate agent standing right there who can make manual approvals, I fail to see why anyone traveling internationally would object to this. I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph. From a legal standpoint, domestic travel is different (and there should be open debate in Congress before they make a decision there). But I fully support facial recognition for international travel and other immigration benefits.

wahern 8y ago
I sure as heck want everyone else on the plane with me to be compared against their photograph. Why? I'm sure there's nefarious activity that could be prevented, I'm just struggling to identify activities that would make be feel (let alone actually be) unsafe on an airplane as a practical matter, and without doning a screen writer's hat. I'm assuming weapons are already adequately checked. And if not I'm not sure how facial recognition would appreciably help in this regard. Sure, maybe 12 bad guys enter the system though 12 airports with lax security, then all board the same flight at a major hub in a manner that circumvents analytics that searches for suspected bad guys flying together. But that already makes some dubious assumptions, such as the degree of efficacy in the system looking for suspected bad guys traveling together. For most of air travel hijackings and bombings were incredibly common. We all but solved that by the 1980s by physically screening for weapons and suspect material, not by pretending we could predict people's behavior.
- diebeforei485 8y ago
  IME questions like this typically come from people who don't deal with the bureaucracy of applying for visas very often, if at all. You assume fear of being bombed or hijacked, but it's really to make international travel easier and more efficient. Lack of a reliable way to verify identity is a major reason why applicants for admission (or applicants for a visa) are assumed "guilty until proven innocent", and a ton of people are denied visas (or denied entry) every day on the slightest reasons as a result. Being able to verify someone identity biometrically makes international travel and immigration more trustworthy, which makes it politically more palatable to make the lives of travelers and immigrants easier. And doing this on outbound flights is no different from doing it on inbound flights - from the host government's perspective, they need to know when people enter and leave.

ReGenGen 8y ago

The speed of boarding pass checks is rarely the limiting factor for loading a plane. Perhaps the A380 is different? Are they comparing a single human boarding pass checker vs multiple facial scanner lanes?

paxy 8y ago
I can see the number of scanning lanes (which is usually 1) being a bottleneck on large aircrafts with lots of doors, like the A380 example they have given.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  I've very rarely seen the case where there isn't a queue after the boarding pass scan and before the boarding door(s) and seating area of the airplane. This suggests that downstream of the boarding pass scan is already the true bottleneck of the system.
  - stevehawk 8y ago
    i believe that's why he (and the article) mentioned the A380 which can have something like 4 simultaneous embarking points (probably double that if they board from both sides of the plane).
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      I’ve only flown the A380 twice. Both times that still had a bottleneck in economy of people getting settled despite boarding through multiple jetways. The bottleneck is at the seats, esp in coach/economy. On a single-aisle aircraft, this typically backs up onto the jetway, but even multiple door/aisle, the slowest agent can scan tickets and check IDs faster than people can get settled on average even when some of them can settle in parallel (perhaps one per aisle per very few rows).

refurb 8y ago

Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge. “What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?” “I was at home all night.” “You’re lying. We have confirmation your face was recognized at the gas station, grocery store and bank between the hours of 7 and 9pm.” That sends a shiver down my spine.

noobermin 8y ago
Is this situation any different from security footage already at gas stations and the like? I suppose automatic aggregation of said data is more problematic.
- weej 8y ago
  I'd like to think so. A grainy, CCTV at a gas station with ZERO FACIAL RECOGNITION is not correlated and crossed check with my passport photo or physical movements.
  - alphakappa 8y ago
    CCTVs don’t have to be grainy and low-res anymore. Recording 4K video and storing a finite amount of it is getting cheaper every day.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- mbel 8y ago
  And is this situation any different from location logs based on mobile phone? It's obviously easier to leave s phone than a face at home, my point is that we have already pretty much agreed to be tracked most of the time.
jstarfish 8y ago
This doesn't really change anything other than just being more damning evidence against you slightly easier to obtain. If you carry a phone of any kind, it is already betraying your movements. All it takes to paint you like a game of Snake is a subpoena to Google (for GPS history) or your carrier (tower associations), assuming they don't pull your location history out of the device itself. Hell, even cars are starting to get in on it with self-reporting telemetry even if you manage to avoid all the commodity ALPR scans. Your privacy is already dead. You're objecting to death itself at this point.

noobermin 8y ago

>For Thea Ottersen of Norway, privacy was not a major concern, as the general procedure doesn’t differ much from what she has come to expect from American airport security. I suppose that's one unfortunate way to look at it.

camillomiller 8y ago
I mean, technically it's true. Data and pictures are already there and aggregated. We're already past the non-return point. It just took 17 years from this day in 2001.

josephpmay 8y ago

The technology is really just being piloted here in a low-risk application. Everyone commenting here is right that it really doesn’t save that much time when boarding a plane, but think of where else it could save time. (I probably shouldn’t go into details even though I never signed an NDA, so I guess I technically could talk about it)

village-idiot 8y ago

Creepy.

monksy 8y ago

Nope. This needs to be protested.

jedberg 8y ago

> Officials touted the additional security the system provides—meeting a Congressional mandate to include biometric screenings— Said someone who clearly doesn’t understand security. The entire point of adding biometrics is that it is in addition to the passport, not instead of. All they’ve done here is trade something you have with something you are. Sigh.

gok 8y ago
To say that a boarding pass is “something you have” in a security sense is absurd. I can print your boarding pass merely by knowing your name and where you’re going. A biometric check (backed by a paper ID check) is a dramatic security upgrade over that.
- blitmap 8y ago
  Passports are printed similar to currency. There are many features in them that are hard to replicate. It can be done but not easily, so it does fit the bill of "something you have" to authenticate. Not nearly as secure as a yubikey or an rsa token, but oh well.
  - gok 8y ago
    Again this isn’t at passport control, it’s to board the plane after security.
    - robotresearcher 8y ago
      Where your passport is again checked on most international flights. Or your driver’s license / photo ID on internal flights in many countries.
- jedberg 8y ago
  You’re right, a biometric check with a passport check is in fact more secure. But what they’ve done here is replace the passport check with a biometric check.

skywhopper 8y ago

I’m skeptical of the faster boarding claim. My perception is that it’s the physical loading of the plane cabin, rather than the scanning of boarding passes, that wastes time. Also, having dealt with the face scanners at the border entry points I’m also skeptical that self service face scanning will be faster than just scanning a boarding pass. Not to mention that security, not boarding, is the painful part of the process anyway. And 99% accuracy is not actually great...

duxup 8y ago
Yeah the scanners for tickets are basically ... put ticket on scanner, beep ... now wait in a new line while people load up stuff.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  It depends a bit. On smaller flights, there may only be one gate agent and scanner. If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. Sometimes that takes several minutes, and the smaller flights are often the ones with short 20-30 minute turnarounds scheduled. Had this happen on a flight I took a few weeks back.
  - wccrawford 8y ago
    >If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition. The only time saved is scanning a ticket vs scanning a face. And people are pretty much guaranteed not to lose their faces.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      > And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition. Not if it's an automated gate. I just got back from Australia, and the passport gates there are automated facial recognition; they look kinda like the gates in a subway where you scan a travel card. A reject heads over to the desk to get sorted. Everyone else keeps going through the automated gate.

acjohnson55 8y ago

I can't remember a time when I boarded a plane that I didn't have to wait in a queue on the jet bridge. How does this help with that? Also, I'm constantly seeing people accidentally end up in the wrong row or seat because they misread the label up above. Invariably, everyone takes out boarding passes to sort it out. Reeks of a trojan horse to get more pervasive face scanners in place.

melkiaur 8y ago
I've only been once in Washington, and it was ages ago. But they have this incredible system where they put you in a massive bus (At first I didn't even realise it was a bus, it looked more like a room), and the bus goes to the plane, lifts ups, and docks to the plane door. So, it's very important they can cram the people in the bus as fast as possible. Do a google image search for "Dulles buses", you'll understand what I'm on about. But this benefit (of accelerated boarding) would apply to any airport where you don't go into a jet bridge but have to take the bus to go to the plane.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Ah yeah, I've done bus boarding before (although not the Dulles thing), wasn't considering that. Still seems like you could time that boarding of the earlier vehicle to just start earlier.
- jandrese 8y ago
  They have not used the "mobile lounges" for normal boarding since the 80s. That said, occasionally when there is a fuckup they still have to use them, but it's rare. Almost every flight uses either the jetbridge or the stairs (for tiny commuter flights).

ataturk 8y ago

What this is for: Using private industry to build a facial database that can later be obtained by the government via subpoena, further proving that individual rights are a joke as long as we the people allow corporations and government to work so closely together. And just to drive home how complete the control is becoming, I am limited to only one post a day here. Dissenting voices are being driven from the Internet. God help us all if they succeed at suppressing speech completely--it will be just like China.

exabrial 8y ago

This is a great time to remind everyone to buckle their seatbelts tomorrow. You have a much greater chance of dying in a car wreck tomorrow than you will in your cumulative lifetime risk of dying in an aviation terrorist incident. Also don't mind the giant pile of cash someone got paid with public funds to address this crisis via government contacts.

optimiz3 8y ago
Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed. The TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of a threat of terrorism against aviation in the US[0]. [0] https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-in-leaked-doc-no-evidence-of-terrorist-plots-against-aviation-in-us/ https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...
- mikeash 8y ago
  It was true before the new measures as well. Even 9/11 only matched the death toll from one month on American roads. Basic security measures definitely help. The rate of hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s was absurdly high, and dropped fast one basic screening was put in place. But there’s little evidence that anything beyond that helps.

jupiter90000 8y ago

Tangent, but I thought Dulles Airport's "moon buggies" felt super weird to have to go onto after a long international flight. It felt like I was loaded into an armored personnel carrier or something. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge

gumby 8y ago

On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat. And if identity actually mattered (hint: it doesn't), well it's already been "screened" via the purchase and TSA checkpoint tests. Planes flew for decades without any matching of passengers to tickets, and tickets were frequently resold (especially unused legs) via classified ads and later eBay. The airlines were delighted when the government (without any evidence to justify it) told them to start matching people to tickets.

jahewson 8y ago
Planes also flew for decades without locks on the cockpit doors, but that doesn’t make it a good idea in the modern world.
- Macha 8y ago
  How many tragedies have been enabled by suicidal pilots + the locked doors? I know of at least one case in the Alps and pretty sure there was another in India recently enough? I'm not sure they come out that far ahead really, though obviously the incidents they were designed to counter are bigger and more headline grabbing.
- gumby 8y ago
  There's a parallel comment to this one talking about some of the drawbacks (though TBH I think it's a reasonable risk/reward tradeoff). But I haven't seen any actual justification that the no-fly list is actually useful, and worryingly the regulations around it are classified.
amf12 8y ago
> On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat. Well, but that's an assumption and an edge case.

bogomipz 8y ago

So after the 20 to 30 minute procedure of handing your ID and boarding pass to a TSA agent, taking off your shoes, belt, emptying your pockets and having a full body scan done, adding a facial scan at the gate is somehow going to improve both boarding time and security. Right that makes sense. This shit needs to stop.

makecheck 8y ago

This is sort of “hurry up and wait”; every time I feel like I got through the gate quickly, I just end up in line on the jet bridge or waiting 2 minutes for someone to fish every variety of item out of their overhead bin while the whole plane waits for them. The cause of slower boarding is BAGGAGE FEES. Airlines are penny-pinching, people bring everything on board to compensate, and struggling with luggage is slow as hell.

r_c_a_d 8y ago
People take bags onboard to avoid fees, yes, but mostly because airlines lose hold luggage (or send it to the wrong place) and even if they don't you have to go and wait for it at the carousel. The last flight I took, there were too many people taking onbord luggage and mine got taken off me and put in the hold :(

toomanybeersies 8y ago

It seems like this system has been designed with privacy in mind, after the pilot program, they won't store your image after the comparison. The only question is will it remain that way?

ajenner 8y ago

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. So those of us with dual nationality, who enter the US on our US passports and leave on our foreign passports, are going to get screwed. Lovely.

dmurray 8y ago
I don't see why. You don't show either passport to anyone when leaving the country. Instead they take your photo and compare it to the ones they have on file, which for a dual nationality citizen will include at least your passport photo. I'm more surprised they don't want to physically stamp your passport. Even though they already have a record of you entering and exiting the country, they've always liked to have physical passport stamps. And losing those makes a material difference in the case where another country cares where you've been.
laken 8y ago
If you are a US citizen, it's illegal to enter or leave the US with another country's passport anyway, even if you're a dual citizen. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185
- themaninthedark 8y ago
  I am not a lawyer but I don't read that as you have to present your US passport to enter or leave. Only that you must have a valid US passport with you when you do so. >(b) Citizens >Except as otherwise provided by the President and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may authorize and prescribe, it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> “It doesn’t matter,” Maryland resident Kim Meekins said of not being informed ahead of time. “You go to different airports and they do different things depending on their technology. If it’s another safety measure to make sure everyone has a safe flight, I’m all for whatever. I didn’t need to be notified ahead of time.” "I'm all for whatever"! The hell does one engage rationally with that?

gambiting 8y ago
By being so used to the security theatre everywhere that is just doesn't even register anymore. They could start doing automated anal probing at passport gates and at least some part of the population would go "meh, if it makes it safer than I'm all for whatever".
- justwalt 8y ago
  I hope that comes with Facebook integration.
INTPenis 8y ago
Frequent fliers are business people, professional people. They fly all the time to get things done. Very unlikely to care about privacy issues. They most likely use several cloud services with no worry at all. These are the majority of people in the world. HN is a bubble.
- wemdyjreichert 8y ago
  > Frequent fliers are business people, professional people. They fly all the time to get things done. Very unlikely to care about privacy issues. They most likely use several cloud services with no worry at all. > These are the majority of people in the world. HN is a bubble. Yep. We're past the point of caring. The frog has been slowly boiled.
jonny_eh 8y ago
She's trusting. It's not irrational to trust other people.

pimmen 8y ago

According to the Geneva Convention, refugees don't need a visa or travel documents like passports to travel (to make it purposefully more difficult to mess with persecuted people, like Germany did by stamping a "J" in the passport of Jewish citizens so it would be easier for countries who didn't want them to refuse them). I have fears that widespread adoption of systems like this could make air travel for refugees inaccessible if governments really want to.

amelius 8y ago

I don't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing a facial recognition scanner where the camera first physically moves up/down to match the height of the person (which takes a few seconds), and then takes a photo. Quite a ridiculous system if you ask me.

Macha 8y ago
Sounds like EU passport control.

acd 8y ago

But people have similar faces called eigen faces in Mathematics. This is not Secure because faces are not unique. Similar to finding a similar to you looking face on the street/internet. Humans have an average faces and then diverge from that. Eigenface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface

jeltz 8y ago

Most European airports only scan your boarding card for flights within Schengen and do not check any ID, and many of them let you scan it yourself.

marty331 8y ago

There is no way in hell this is a good thing for US Citizens. First it's good for doing your boarding pass but then it will be used for identifying people on the street, maybe at a protest and then locking them away if they disagree with the political party in power. FML

camillomiller 8y ago
It's incredible how eager people are to give away freedom and privacy in exchange for a little convenience.

csomar 8y ago

> The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane. Do they really do that? I mean in most airport? And in Dubai (dxb) you just scan the barcode on your boarding pass and board the plane. No one checks your identity.

psychometry 8y ago
Domestic U.S.? No one checks passports. International? Probably. Scanning a boarding pass takes very little time, so I don't see this as a big benefit to travelers.

jandrese 8y ago

I'm really surprised they were able to cut boarding time in half with this, my experience is that the gate isn't the bottleneck, it's little old ladies with 50lb carryons struggling to get them into the overhead bin and blocking the aisle.

camillomiller 8y ago

17 years after 9/11, my question is: we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that? Or is it a false causality? Can we even establish causality between the enhanced security and the lack of large-scale airplane attacks/hijackings?

mikestew 8y ago
we never had any other event comparable to the twin towers attack because of the extreme security measures we took after that? We never had a comparable event before 9/11/01. OK City, one ham-fisted attack on WTC in the 90s, British burned down the White House in the 1800s, but nothing of that scale prior. And 18 years ago, all you did was walk through a metal detector (whose sensitivity wasn't set all that high), and on the plane you go.

devy 8y ago

I was at ATL 2 weeks ago. Many Delta's boarding gates were also equipped with facial recognition boarding cameras too.

noer 8y ago

Is the scanning of boarding passes really the thing that slows down boarding? They rarely pause between groups because of a line of people getting scanned. It's more often that the line of people waiting to get onto the plane has stretched too far down the jetbridge.