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by bdhess
2928 days ago
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> Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents. I think your argument assumes that the US government has already captured either a fingerprint or retina scan of all of its persons of interest. I don't think that's a safe assumption. |
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That the aim is to detect people for whom border control do not have any passport/fingerprint/retinal information for, but some reason still consider to be a "person of interest" at a border?
I'm not sure if that's a valid point, or a scary overreach...
Part of me worries about using a barely 99% accurate face detection technology (perhaps trained on Facebook or YouTube jihadist videos?) on what must be at least several hundred million airport border control crossing a year is inevitably going to result in several million false positives a year - presumably mostly for bearded middle eastern males. The invasiveness of recording and storing facial data on every international traveller with the possible payoff of detecting someone genuinely "interesting" amongst the million per day or so stream of false positives seems like a poor security solution.
Another part of me acknowledges that the US (and, to be fair, every sovereign nation) can invade everybodies privacy at the border _anyway_ and what's the problem with adding just this one tiny straw to the camel's back?
As Wil Wheaton so eloquently pointed out, I'm a middle aged, white, heterosexual, cisgender man - I live life on the lowest difficulty setting. This is unlikely to affect me in any way apart from giving me a great opportunity to rant on internet forums. If you have any 15-30 year old male friends of middle eastern descent, ask them how _they_ feel about an algorithm with a well known 1%+ error rates most likely trained on "terrorist suspects" being pointed at _them_ every time they fly in or out of the US...