ACLU Sues Homeland Security Over Airport Face Recognition Program Secrecy

A leading civil liberties group is suing Homeland Security, claiming the agency is keeping the details of its airport face recognition program secret, which it says raises "profound civil liberties concerns." From a report: The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit in a New York federal court on Thursday, demanding that the agency turns over records to understand the scope of its airport face recognition system. The group wants to know who Homeland Security works with -- including private companies and airlines -- as well as internal policies and guidance on how the system is used. The face recognition system is part of a recent government initiative to scan the faces of travelers both arriving and departing the United States. Homeland Security claims the system will help crack down on immigration violations, such as visitors overstaying their visas. Although U.S. citizens can opt-out of having their faces scanned, it's not always openly advertised. Already more than a dozen U.S. airports have already rolled out the face scanning technology, with many more to go before the U.S. government hits its target of enrolling the largest 20 airports in the country by 2021.

Face-recognition is NOT NEW

[mi]

Such systems aren't new — we've relied on our ability to recognize other people's faces since before Human Sapiens appeared. (With few exceptions [wikipedia.org], of course.)

What's new is our tools' ability to help us recognize not dozens, but millions of faces. But, hey, these are the same tools, that allow us to communicate instantly over vast distances, perform enormous amounts of computations, or sift through copious amounts of data.

Computerized face-recognition is just part of the natural progress of things...

And then a totalitarian says...

[aeropage]

"I'll take that. The State, that's me."

Re:

[NathanWoodruff]

This would be fine and dandy if no data is being kept and compiled. I'm fairly certain, that a date and time as well as location is being kept too. But in this day and age, deleting any data is highly unlikely. And sure a criminal would be obsessed about a profile on him/her that could match him/her to a crime. But what about other innocent people that also come up false positive and now are under surveillance for no other reason other than a false positive.

There are lots of things people do that are les

Re:

[AHuxley]

Re "displaying fake license plates"
That was what the UK set up to work on the Irish problem.
".... force drivers to slow down and be recorded by CCTV cameras."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Now the USA does the face collection. Hard to change and fake a face on average :)
Use travel documents from immediate family?

Sounds like a reasonable request.

[sarren1901]

If I'm reading this correctly, the problem isn't that they are using the technology but the secrecy and overall lack of transparency regarding how, when and where it's used, as well as how long the information is being kept.

Knowing every single person that comes into and leaves the country can be a very useful tool. If the UK has a suspected murderer on the loose, it would very useful to catch this suspect at the border of the country, assuming UK doesn't pick said suspect up before leaving in the first place.

The concerning part is if they are keeping records of all people coming and going along with a timestamp and then tucking the information away. Also how the data securely would this data be kept and for how long.

If the data is held for a short period of time for everyone and then deleted, that would be acceptable. You could hold the data of wanted individuals and people already on a list for a longer period of time, but not for an indefinite amount of time.

Rules for these technologies for government and business should exist and need to be known to the public.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion