CBP Does Not Make it Clear Americans Can Opt-out of Airport Face Scanning, Watchdog Says (techcrunch.com) 81
A government watchdog has criticized U.S. border authorities for failing to properly disclose the agency's use of facial recognition at airports, which included instructions on how Americans can opt out. From a report: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), tasked with protecting the border and screening immigrants, has deployed its face-scanning technology in 27 U.S. airports as part of its Biometric Entry-Exit Program. The program was set up to catch visitors who overstay their visas. Foreign nationals must complete a facial recognition check before they are allowed to enter and leave the United States, but U.S. citizens are allowed to opt out. But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report out Wednesday that CBP did "not consistently" provide notices that informed Americans that they would be scanned as they depart the United States.
Difference between Public and Private (Score:2, Interesting)
Private- your bathroom, your bedroom, to some extent your house or appartment.
Semi-private- controlled locations like the locker room.
PUBLIC- any business, public transportation, or service that you access from a business or the government.
THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC. Anybody who expects privacy in public is functionally insane.
Re: Difference between Public and Private (Score:3, Funny)
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Are you talking about the one that starts out "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," ... it doesn't mean you can't be tracked when you're out and about in public. Your clothes can't be arbitrarily searched without a warrant. Your house can't be searched. Nothing in that specifies your movements in public can't be tracked.
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Nothing in the 4th Amendment pertains to the public sphere, at all.
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THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC.
When I am walking through a public park or walking along a public street, I do not expect my face to be scanned, identified, and recorded in a database.
However, I do expect that to happen when I am going through a border checkpoint.
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It has nothing to do with expectations. The consitution only specifies you have the right to be secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects, If it was right to be private everywhere they wouldn't have specied home and all that.
It has something to do with expectation, see Katz v. United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Thus my comment above about grey areas.
But being able to walk down the street with an expectation that nobody, machine or human, will recognize you? That is not only outside the definition in Katz, it's outside the realm of physics as we know it.
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In this time of random Google Streetview cars, you should know better than that.
Re:Difference between Public and Private (Score:5, Insightful)
While there may be no expectation of privacy while in public, there is an expectation that we will not be tracked or followed while in public. People who do so are called "stalkers" and are subject to restraining orders, or else are called "law enforcement" and require a warrant before they can do so on a routine basis. Either way, there absolutely is an expectation that this sort of stuff shouldn't be happening.
The fact that it can be automated now does not magically make it acceptable.
Re: Difference between Public and Private (Score:3)
"I think it's good our government makes life easier for the police to catch the bad guys." "Well, I don't like to be stalked."
"This new system will be great against crime." "They're creating professional stalkers now?"
"There's no expectation of priva
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I would argue that there is no following necessary anymore, by either stalkers or law enforcement. Modern technology reduces stalking to an unnecessary activity.
You are broadcasting your location whenever you use a cell phone or a car. You are sending out a radio signal that includes RFID and IMEI numbers identifying you.
It isn't even hard to pick these up.
The expectation of privacy is severely outdated.
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Hold on. Stalking law is centered around the victim's feelings in relation to the perp's actions and intent. It has nothing to do with actual surveilling methods. The crime of stalking is that you are inflicting emotional distress on the victim. So i can track you all i want in public, as long as you are unaware of my presence.
Stepping back for a sec to make sure we're on the same page, we've been talking about expectations in this thread, not laws. We all have a reasonable expectation that we not be stalked. If someone is stalking us, there's an expectation that they first obtain a warrant, otherwise they can be hit with harassment charges, restraining orders, or other such measures.
Now to address the point you raised, laws exist to enforce society's expectations, but they aren't always capable of perfectly doing so, and this is
Re:Difference between Public and Private (Score:5, Insightful)
"THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC. Anybody who expects privacy in public is functionally insane."
You want to stand on the public street staring at your exes house around the clock ... all good, she comes outside and you start recording her, she walks her dog, you record that, she goes grocery shopping, you follow her, record it all, take notes of everything she buys, she gets in her car and goes to a friends, you hop in yours, follow her, record everything. all day everyday. totally legal.
And she's functionally insane if she thinks there's anything wrong with that?
That's totally not crossing a line, and there's no way you could be issued a restraining order for stalking?
"THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC"
The expectation is whatever society collectively agrees on. And for the last century or so the collective agreement has been that its totally fine to record people in public in transient ephemeral ways. But stalking you was not ok. The legal frameworks have generally been pretty laissez faire because the technology only really allowed for incidental, ephemeral tracking.
If the gas station security camera caught you walking down the chocolate bar aisle, no big deal. It was grainy anonymous footage that nobody was likely to even see unless the store got robbed. You weren't being facially tagged, and all your movements collected by a connected centralized network of millions of cameras to the point that someone you punch in your name, and watch video of your movements all day.
Now, as that's starting to become possible, society collectively isn't comfortable with it. And we're starting to see pushes for legislation to prevent that... because while we were collectively comfortable with the possibility we might caught on camera anoynmously and in disconnected ways as we moved from gas station to store to bus and back home. We aren't comfortable with someone being able to collect and connect all those dots in high definition and tagged our our actual identity.
If our collective expectation is that we do, in fact, expect to have a freedom from excessive tracking... then that's what we have, and we'll push for the necessary laws to enforce it.
So "THE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC SHALL BE WHATEVER WE COLLECTIVELY DECIDE IT SHOULD BE".
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Where in the constitution though is it specificied that your expectation of privacy must be respected? That would be a hell of a thing.
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Try the part about "unenumerated rights".
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Where in the constitution though is it specificied that your expectation of privacy must be respected? That would be a hell of a thing.
Where in the constitution does it say anything about your expectation of available oxygen?
Not everything is specified. Nobody could have thought to include the right to not be stalked by a huge network of cameras and computers at the time the constitution was written.
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And I would argue that such a right is completely unnecessary, even against a civilization based on rule of law.
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"And I would argue that such a right is completely unnecessary,"
And some people think any given right is completely unnecessary.
Some people think the 2nd amendment is unnecessary, some people think due process should be abridged as soon as children or terrorists are involved. Some people think letting poor people vote is a bad idea.
And that's why I said that right's are ultimately going to be the COLLECTIVE will of a society.
If enough of us think the tracking is invasive and we want it to stop, then we will
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"I DON'T CARE IF THE FBI WATCHES ME MASTURBATE"
The irony is, I'm actually far more at peace being observed by an ephemeral human with mortal eyeballs and memory than a database.
I don't have to worry about the former being connected to a million other services, indefinitely, bought sold and traded, instantly trawled by imperfect automated software with crude search criteria. Which produce suppositions on a screen that entire branches of government assume are conclusive and gospel.
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"No big deal".
Well I think it is a big deal but since I can't do anything about the cameras on me at all times public and private then I will go about my life.
I already live in 1984; just later.
Some people even have cameras and video recorders in the house; just like the book/movie.
Where can I go without cameras on me?
Do I have to live in the woods and learn to hunt or garden?
On private or public land of course with cameras.
Or am I screwed?
P.S. I think moving cameras might be one of the worst inventions eve
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The sad part is learning that progress is sometimes regress. But the better way to go is to adjust your life to the progress.
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There is only one thing wrong with what you describe- it's become totally unnecessary in a world with ring cameras and google.
The expectation itself is severely outdated.
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"There is only one thing wrong with what you describe- it's become totally unnecessary in a world with ring cameras and google."
I'd argue that google and ring cameras is precisely what's made it necessary.
"The expectation itself is severely outdated."
I disagree. True Freedom of association, freedom of movement, etc are contingent on not being invasively tracked.
It's the same reason your vote is private. As soon as someone is watching you and recording what you voted your absolute freedom to vote your consci
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In a world of man-in-the-middle attacks, I would much rather my vote be verifiable and transparent than private.
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"In a world of man-in-the-middle attacks,"
You shouldn't use a voting system that isn't susceptible to hackers in another country, that isn't running inscrutable code in a black box, that even if it were open source only experts could verify it, and even they couldn't verify every machine in every polling station.
Canada's voting system along with most 1st world countries have pretty secure voting systems using paper ballots and a pretty simple but effective system for recording who voted, and auditing the vo
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This beating happened precisely because the vote of the mother could NOT be verified.
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While arguably correct on its face, that's a pretty spectacular logic fail.
Are you really arguing that she could have avoided the beating by voting the "wrong way" at the polling station where votes were being "verified" ??
The only way she was avoiding the beating in this case would be to:
a) vote at the polling station where they were verifying votes
b) vote the 'correct' way.
In this particular scenario, if you chose to vote at the station they weren't monitoring, after being told you should vote there, they
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For once, read the handle. This is the last part of my Marxism that I have yet to get rid of.
I don't see multiple political parties or multiple cultures as an improvement.
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"I don't see multiple political parties or multiple cultures as an improvement."
Short of living by yourself in a cave, you'll need to deal with the reality that other people are going to disagree with you. Even in a marxist utopia. :)
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In Marxist Utopia, that is what Der Kommisar is for, to remove unpleasant people.
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The US Supreme Court disagrees with "THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC" with regards to surveillance. But what do they know about rights? Anyway, I look forward to your aggressive pursuit of this line of reasoning and the inevitable stalking or worse charges leveled against you..
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Where in the constitution though is it specified that your expectation of privacy must be respected? That would be a hell of a thing. A person's expectation doesn't define their rights. The consitution doesn't even have the word expectation in it.
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With regard to government violating those expectations? The 4th amendment springs to mind.
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So glad you asked. You're looking for the Ninth Amendment, which goes like this: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, any argument along the lines of, "If a right isn't specifically spelled out in the Constitution, it doesn't exist" is specious, and just plain wrong on its face.
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Exactly the 9th and 10th are possibly the most underrated amendments.
The Ninth:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The Tenth:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
To translate:
Ninth: You still have all your rights, even if we didn't list them here.
Tenth: If we didn't say here that the Feds can do it, then they can't.
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Stalking is so 1994. These days, you just do a google image search of unprotected ring cameras.
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So the doctors office with a probe up your ass, that is not private any more, does that include the camera at the tip of the probe. ALL TOTALLY PUBLIC, stop and think asshat plenty of places where PRIVACY IS LAW. How about public toilet, it specifically is public. Is not your clothing an act of privacy, so anybody can be stripped down publicly by any authority public or corporate at any time on the property, is the rectum private in those circumstances, again M$ windows anal probe ten and that software cont
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That would be a definition of semi-private. Covered by HIPPA laws specifically.
That's a lot different than expecting you can walk down the street without being recognized by every human being or Ring Camera you pass.
You can opt out (Score:2)
I thought it was pretty clear you could opt-out, but you'd get put into the slower line if you did. When you're on your way home why would you want to go into the slower line?
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You have a passport, which means your face is already in the database. And if you have a driver's license it's there as well, although that may be protected by state laws.
How about your profile picture? Is it on LinkedIn? If so, the government has already scraped it (hello LSIE!). Same with any other online profile/picture, and any pics that have been captioned by someone else, and your yearbook pics.
Good luck escaping the dragnet.
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Here is the legal catch you are missing. By law, you do not have to identify yourself unless you are breaking the law at the time and required to identify yourself. Companies can also require you identify yourself to the limits of contract law as bound by the constitution to initiate the contract. You have the right to not identify yourself to anyone you do not want to, they are actively stealing that right by using facial recognition.
A corporation can only identify you are it relates to initiating a contr
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The more 100% identified pictures of people taken at different times, the easier to recognise them in surveillance situations. This is to solidify remote tracking of people, nothing to due with airport security or convenience.
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That's on the line to enter the country.
This article is about scanners that have been put in place at boarding gates on international flights when *leaving* the country. These are positioned where you would expect an airline attendant to be checking your ticket (not a CBP official) for boarding. I have been through these. They are operated by the airline's gate crew (who are often flight attendants) who are unlikely to be trained on the legal nuances of every jurisdiction they go through and have no legal o
Re:You can opt out (Score:4, Informative)
You were doing fine until the end. Yes, the US government will not required you to show a passport to exit the country, but an airline or cruise ship will. Because they are going to be responsible for you if you get denied entry on the other side (or when disembarking back in the US.)
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If I walk to the border, I can walk across without ID.
This article is about the US Government not respecting the legal requirements and our rights. It has nothing to do with the private company's tracking or handling of passports.
If you've flown internationally, you'd know that the airlines only collect passport details when the destination is a country that requires the airline electronically file for inbound travelers ahead of arrival.
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Re: You can opt out (Score:2)
No, they already did that at the security checkpoint.
This is a new active facial scanner at the gate.
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Which legally is not required.
Gate agents don't want to see your ID, it's not legally required nor has there been any law passed granting that authority.
I feel old, I remember when slashdot was outraged that IDs would be required for airport security as part of the Patriot Act.
Re: You can opt out (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s when *entering* the US. This article is about systems going in place at the gate when *exiting* the US.
By all means opt out (Score:4, Interesting)
But how will it recognize you are the person who wanted to opt out, without using facial recognition...
Now you're not just a face passing through the system, you are a face who has screamed LOOK AT ME MORE CAREFULLY BEAUSE I WISH TO REMAIN HIDDEN.
Does any of this matter anymore since going forward anyone could just wear a facemask in an airport and no-one would care?
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But how will it recognize you are the person who wanted to opt out, without using facial recognition...
This is a dumb argument from a design standpoint anyway. It's a system blanketing entire areas, trying to "respect" the Rights of certain people passing in front of it. Either program it to do so, or accept the fact that the design of the system does not easily account for exceptions.
Now you're not just a face passing through the system, you are a face who has screamed LOOK AT ME MORE CAREFULLY BEAUSE I WISH TO REMAIN HIDDEN.
Sadly, this is the exact same problem for those in society who wish to not carry a smartphone. The lack of a digital signature makes YOU stand OUT all the more.
Does any of this matter anymore since going forward anyone could just wear a facemask in an airport and no-one would care?
Think you're going to be allowed to wear a face mask in an airpo
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Think you're going to be allowed to wear a face mask in an airport or any other facial-recognition "area" post-COVID?
I do because I think the society has now got fear ingrained.
However, they already make you remove the face mask to get through the security checkpoint (when they check your ID) so that's how they'll still be able to run face recognition on everyone.
I like all of these fake dividing lines (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you, the government already has your photo on your passport and your flight records are shared with the TSA.
I know, I know, slippery slopes and all. Opt out if it makes you feel better. The horses are already out of the barn.
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California has my thumb prints as is required to buy firearms here. But they're been too incompetent to use all those thumb prints on driver's licenses and firearm transfers to tie them to anything in the real world.
Where things shift to scary totalitarianism is when the people in power stop being lazy and incompetent. Or in this case, let the tech world invent an easy way to process the data they had all along.
Don't worry, 20 years from now we won't be having this conversation. We won't be allowed to.
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One reason to opt out is to avoid letting the government take a detailed facial scan of you to put in as a baseline for facial recognition elsewhere.
As you say they already know who's leaving, this is a way to attach a facial scan to that profile.
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The passport photo is a tiny low res physical picture you mailed in, not a full resolution digital image.
Sure they can (Score:3)
Face-mask with eyes printed on it, reflective sunglasses and a baseball-cap.
Opt out... pffft! (Score:1)
Yeah, right... Like that's possible. Wanna pull the other one?
Face scan required (Score:2)
To opt out they need your face scan to keep track of who opted out.
Moot point: Real ID (Score:2)
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No they extended that to Oct. 2021 .. pretty sure Trump didn't want travelers mad at him just before an election .. even though if it did cause chaos he weasel out of it by shifting the blame to the federal government (his supporters don't realize he is the head of that).
Also, Pre-check (Score:2)
Also, you have to give up all of your info (including fingerprints) for Pre-Check, which most people who fly frequently do, as well. At least it's not a DNA sample (yet). I don't know if I'd do that.
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Much more concerned about the 12 hour limit (Score:2)
Their sign says they delete it within 12 hours. So who cares if you can opt out of 12 hours' worth of picture. If the "watchdogs" want to be effective they need to be chasing down whether there is any truth to the 12th hour deletion.
will they have an mask free booth with air filters (Score:2)
will they have an mask free booth with air filters for the scan?
confused ... (Score:2)
The program was set up to catch visitors who overstay their visas.
The CBP can catch someone who shouldn't be in the country when they are leaving the country. So the CBP can arrest them and keep them from leaving the country so the CBP can then deport them out of the country later.
Did I get that right?
4th Amendment Warrant Exception (Score:2)
Unfortunately, there is an exception to the 4th Amendment requirement for a warrant, when at International Airports in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Opt Out = Opt In (Score:2)