Senators call for audit of TSA’s facial recognition tech as use expands in airports | The Record from Recorded Future News

Source: therecord.media 11/22/24

A bipartisan group of 12 senators on Wednesday sent the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) inspector general a letter expressing alarm over the widespread use of facial recognition technology at American airports without an audit of privacy protections or any third-party assessment of the technology’s accuracy.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which is housed within DHS, will soon roll the technology out in small and mid-size airports, taking the total number of airports where it is deployed to 430 nationwide, the letter to Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said.

The senators questioned whether facial recognition technology is necessary at all, since TSA already uses devices known as CAT-1 scanners — which don’t take images of faces — to determine if passengers’ identification is fake.

“This technology will soon be in use at hundreds of major and mid-size airports without an independent evaluation of the technology’s precision or an audit of whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect passenger privacy,” the senators wrote. “TSA has not provided Congress with evidence that facial recognition technology is necessary to catch fraudulent documents, decrease wait times at security checkpoints, or stop terrorists from boarding airplanes.”

“If that happens, this program could become one of the largest federal surveillance databases overnight without authorization from Congress,” the letter said.

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Good luck putting the genie back in the bottle. This tech will soon be everywhere we go: grocery stores, churches, every business, sidewalk and rest-area. Those “there is no privacy anymore” people have not seen anything yet. And it will all be recorded and piped into servers easily accessible to law enforcement via software.. Welcome to the future.

Last edited 16 days ago by FactsShouldMatter

Oh no! An audit. That will stop abuses. Congress can’t even monitor the sexual predators within its own walls.

One more step towards all seeing, all knowing Big Brother? Soon, Big Brother will be everywhere, watching everything everybody does, and deciding what “needs to be done”?

While the Karen and Darren Squad live in an absurd fantasy world, where this is a “Good idea”, how much of this will sane people tolerate?

Perhaps, “Unlimited”? We live in an increasingly corrupt Nation were “What you did” is balanced against “Who you are”?

A Nation where Big Brother will be used to give us an excuse to get rid of “Undesirables” as well as the ability to extort total obedience from everyone else with threats of exposing what Big Brother saw them doing?

A system who’s corrupt nature is hidden behind a steady stream of “Undesirables” being thrown under the bus, providing the Illusion that all crimes Big Brother finds are addressed?

That can’t be true, Right?

We’ve discussed this matter in the forum previously as one major CA city has done away with this tech from their streets and others were looking at the same.

I recently air traveled and had to experience this tech as I passed through TSA hands. Even the TSA personnel I dealt with was suspicious of this tech and what really happens to the data once it is done being used at that moment. The disclaimer said it was discarded shortly thereafter. The sign also said you could opt-out of it as well. Really? After already walking through the airport where one is probably on no less than a dozen camera views on the way to the TSA station and how many afterwards?

These politicians are wise to ask more questions about it and so should the public to the TSA directly and their elected officials.

When TSA facial recognition was first implemented, I immediately stopped flying. I decided any possible future domestic travel would be by car or public transportation and I also decided no international travel until I am off the registry (which is scheduled to be not too far in the future). My reason is that I did not trust the TSA to delete the data as per their stated policies and I did not want to risk having my data tied to [being required to register], possibly causing travel issues in the future.