San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
TSA TESTS FACE SCANNERS TO VERIFY TRAVELERS’ IDENTITIES
Avoiding close contact has added urgency to program
The Transportation Security Administration is launching a pilot program at Reagan National Airport that will use facial scanners — rather than humans — to verify travelers’ identities.
The program is part of a long-standing push by the agency to automate the process for traveler verification, but it has taken on new urgency during the pandemic, in which avoiding close encounters is becoming the norm, particularly in places such as airports, where large numbers of unrelated people come together.
“In light of COVID-19, advanced health and safety precautions have become a top priority and part of the new normal for TSA,” Administrator David Pekoske said in a statement that accompanied the announcement. “As a result, we are exploring rapid testing and deployment of this touchless, self-service technology.”
But the use of facial scans is controversial and has raised concerns among lawmakers, privacy advocates and civil rights groups. They said that even during a pandemic, it is important to make sure that measures are put into place to ensure the technology is used properly and that efforts are made to safeguard any data that is collected.
“While I am glad that TSA is developing security technologies to reduce checkpoint interaction while the nation is still in the midst of a pandemic, it is clear that facial recognition technology has not been fully developed yet and still faces privacy and civil liberties questions,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has held several hearings on the use of biometrics.
“I continue to have concerns that facial recognition technologies have known inherent racial biases and are unable to accurately and consistently process people of color,” Thompson said. “It is apparent that facial recognition camera systems malfunction too often to be effective in the field — and these malfunctions are often due to skin color and age.”
Andrew Ferguson, a professor at American University’s Washington College of
Law, said through email: “The path to the surveillance state is paved with good intentions. It is also paved with cynical uses of real emergencies to shift power to the government. It is unclear which path the TSA is on.”
The TSA piloted a similar system last fall at Mccarran International Airport in Las Vegas.
At National, the new system is at Terminal B, the checkpoint for Gates 10 through 22, and is open to those enrolled in TSA’S Precheck program.
Instead of handing their identification to a TSA officer, passengers who agree to participate will be directed to insert their identification into a machine. The same unit will take a picture of the traveler and compare it with the image on the person’s ID. For now, a TSA officer will verify that the images match, but eventually, travelers will be able to complete the entire process on their own, Pekoske said.
TSA officials said the photographs taken are used only to verify travelers’ identity and are not saved. That element may be key, because a 2017 study by researchers at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that while Congress has passed legislation authorizing the collection of biometric data from noncitizens, it has never explicitly authorized collecting that information from citizens.
For more than a decade, Congress has pushed Homeland Security officials to develop programs that use biometrics to track people who enter and exit the United States. In 2016, lawmakers authorized the use of up to $1 billion from certain visa fees to fund the program. In March 2017, President Donald Trump gave the program another boost when he signed an executive order to expedite deployment of biometric screening programs.