DHS Quietly Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition of Passengers Exiting U.S

This is awful!<p>Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don&#x27;t think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and it&#x27;s unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data distribution that&#x27;s dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite faces). I&#x27;m not aware of a lot of research about this.<p>Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into custody for false positives?<p>This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more.<p>(See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult&#x27;s tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, &quot;Biometrics: Practical Issues in Privacy and Security,&quot; for a great high-level overview of these kinds of issues: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130412032945&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.securics.com&#x2F;~walter&#x2F;IJCB2011&#x2F;IJCB11-tutorial-part1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130412032945&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.securic...</a> In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this kind of analysis)

The thinking behind this isn&#x27;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&#x27;t travel much going &quot;whats the big deal anyway?&quot;<p>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.<p>From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and you&#x27;re not a citizen), this is F<i></i><i></i>*g terrible, but that&#x27;s what happens when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don&#x27;t see this ending up anyplace good.

Hate to say I told ya so, but [1].<p>Anyone who has any doubt as to the way this country is headed, should really read 1984 for a preview of what&#x27;s coming.<p>All that will take to make this full-blown is some metastasizing event (see 9&#x2F;11) that will take us from slipping down the slope directly to falling into the abyss.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13601878" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13601878</a>

This is part of the effort to detect visa overstayers. CBP tries to measure this.[1] As of the end of 2015, they estimate that there are 416,500 people in the US who overstayed their visa. They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them. This tells them who&#x27;s entered the US legally but now needs to be found and deported.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;publications&#x2F;FY%2015%20DHS%20Entry%20and%20Exit%20Overstay%20Report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;publications&#x2F;FY%2015...</a>

Direction to implement this was in the executive order Trump signed which banned people from the 7 countries that the Obama administration had built a database of nationals of those countries.<p>When I read the executive order I was quite troubled to see this.<p>I also noticed the exit tracking part of the order went undiscussed in the media. I searched to see if anyone else had noticed but i didn&#x27;t find anyone else talking about it.<p>It almost feels like some of the more outrageous parts of the order (eg ignoring green card holders) were designed to draw attention away from the real point: slipping in exit tracking without people noticing (because they are too busy distracted fighting the other parts of the order).

The next step is mandatory facial recognition of everyone in the U.S. What better way to track all of those visitors who come into the country and where they go than to track everyone everywhere all the time. License plates are already recorded almost everywhere. The location of your cell phone clearly has to be known by the carrier, it&#x27;s a simple database dump to track your phone. Track everything you do online by tapping databases from Facebook and Google (as best you can since they probably don&#x27;t want you to). Track all of your credit card, stock and other purchases. Correlate all of these data points together, and imagine the possibilities. Of course it&#x27;s not 100% accurate, but for nearly 400 Million people (citizens, illegals and visitors) what&#x27;s a few tens of millions of inaccurate data points.

There seems to be alot of ppl not sure as to why &#x2F; what purpose scanning ppl on exit would acomplish. To me it makes the most sense that this would be an easy first step to start working out errors in the machines and get training data in a way that is not likely to cause the electorate to get upset. In the future once it is working then then can start moving it more inwards facing.

I can understand how this is an issue, however I kind of take issue in the way the article is written: starting with comparing the US to Nazi Germany and then escalating it to equate this with the Holocaust. Only then quietly noting that &quot;they remain popular in Europe, Russia, and China.&quot; Kind of polarising from the get-go.

America is the only country I&#x27;ve been to which <i>doesnt</i> check people on the way out...

Hard at work manufacturing that freedom as always.

The &quot;green light&quot; part made it sound more like a retinal scan (because the inside of your eyeball is dark and needs to be illuminated).

Just a question - wouldn&#x27;t this actually help prevent criminals from fleeing the country with fake passports?

<i>But, so-called “exit controls,” where documents are checked as travelers are leaving the country, were popularized last century by Nazi Germany as a great way to ensure that they could control, round up, and exterminate the Jews and other “undesirables.” It can obviously serve no purpose of keeping terrorists out, because it only affects those who are already in.</i><p>Or to put it another way, they&#x27;re standard in practically every country apart from the US. Because what&#x27;s the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?

Why is this a problem? Because it looks creepy?