Your face is your passport

Boarding commenced.  I gathered my backpack, re-adjusted the mask, and kept my boarding pass handy.  I slowly walked up to the line.

I noticed that passengers who were way ahead of me in the line were stepping in front of a machine when it was their turn at the gate.  "Perhaps it is a temperature check" I thought to myself.  A thermal scanner?

During the Swine Flu pandemic--remember that?--many airports in Asia had thermal scanners that automatically checked the temperatures of passengers walking past.  That was also the first time that I noticed many Asian travelers rushing around with facial masks.  Those masks seemed so bizarre then.  Ah, such innocent days!

I was now much closer to the boarding gate and the machine.  I could see that it was not a temperature scanner because passengers were not merely stepping in front of it, but were also pointedly looking into the machine with their masks lowered.

I then heard the staff at the gate tell a passenger that the boarding pass will not be needed, and that the facial scanning was the boarding check.

With my iPhone, I have intentionally not opted for the machine to validate me through my thumb print or my face.  Remember the movie The Big Sick, in which the young woman is in a coma and her (ex) boyfriend grabs her finger in order to unlock her iPhone in order to contact her parents?  That can't happen with me and my iPhone!

But, at this boarding gate I had no say in the matter.  It was now my turn.  I lowered the mask and looked into the eye of the soulless machine.  It flashed a green light and I joined the line in the jet bridge.

That was not my first encounter with looking into cameras at airports.  My first was in 2014, when returning to the US.  But, the machines merely recorded the image and did not analyze them.  Over the years, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) has implemented a new facial recognition system.

In April, the C.B.P. quietly reached its goal of installing cameras next to customs officers in every international airport in the United States, with the goal of verifying virtually all incoming travelers by face, and building a related tool intended to spot foreign nationals lacking proper visas when they depart the country.

“By and large, almost all travelers are going through some sort of biometric process on entry,” said Larry Panetta, the director of the biometric entry/exit program transformation.

(Panetta?  Related to the old political hand Leon Panetta?)

Should we be concerned about facial recognition?

Of course, yes.

At the hearing in July, Jeramie D. Scott, the senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit focused on privacy, called Simplified Arrival a “powerful and dangerous tool” that requires more federal oversight. In an interview, he argued that by using facial recognition on U.S. citizens and filling the database with Americans’ passport photos, the program is already overstepping, given that the underlying legislation focuses on foreign nationals. (C.B.P. officials noted that most passport fraud involves U.S. passports and that Americans can opt out.)

Perhaps you are thinking that this is a problem only for international travelers.  Well, you know that old saw: First they came for the socialists, and I said nothing ... The large scale employment of biometric technology should worry everybody:

Facial recognition is distinctly dangerous because it is a keystone technology in 21st century mass surveillance. Facial recognition uses algorithms to match a picture of an unknown individual to a gallery of identified images based on facial features like the distance between a person’s eyes. The proliferation of available digital images created by security cameras, added online via social media, or collected by the government for routine purposes (e.g. passport photo) has created a wealth of data to use for face surveillance. And there is a lack of legal protections against the use of images for facial recognition. The result is that the images used to create the underlying algorithms and databases are often collected surreptitiously and without consent.

Facial recognition makes it easy to identify anyone at any time without their consent and even without their knowledge to track the movements of that person or connect that person to the copious amounts of information collected by the government and private sector. The technology also greatly increases the ability to conduct mass surveillance of large crowds. The dangers of facial recognition are growing as its uses expand.

During my recent lengthy stay in the old country, I was chatting with a guy whose daughter lives in the US after having completed her Phd in Seoul.  Yes, she earned her doctoral degree in South Korea, after all her life in Chennai.  When she was a student in Seoul, he went there a couple of times.  He loved the city, especially because it was so clean and safe.  "There are cameras everywhere, and if anything happens they immediately catch the culprit," he said.

I didn't want to tell him how much I hate such a big-brother society.  When I am out in public, I don't want cameras watching me all the time.  Don't even get me started about cameras outside homes!

But, he is not an outlier when it comes to appreciation of cameras and facial recognition.  In a survey by Pew, only "39% say people should have a right to privacy when they are in public spaces."

Only 39%!

I guess I shouldn't pick my nose anymore in public!