If you're looking to fly out of the United States within the next few years, there is a good chance the government will have a scan of your face.
According to a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, "U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to dramatically expand its Biometric Exit program to cover 97 percent of outbound air passengers within four years."
The current imaging system only gives the ability to look up photos based on the flight manifests. With this new system, as passengers board the plane, the algorithm scans the faces on the cameras of those boarding international flights and immediately look through millions of photos to make a match on file. The images on file are pulled from visa and passport applications. If the image is not recognized, it can be manually looked up.
In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing US borders. The mandate called for “100 percent of all international passengers,” including American citizens, in the top 20 US airports by 2021.
The AI system has already been placed in 15 airports across the U.S. It has currently been tested on more than 15,000 flights and identified over 7,000 travelers who overstayed their visas. CBP calculates that 666,582 passengers who arrived by plane or boat overstayed visas in fiscal 2018. The main goal of the airport scans is to catch those who have overstayed their visas. For the past few years, overstayers have represented a majority of undocumented immigrants, larger than those who enter the country illegally.
However, not everyone is thrilled about this venture. Critics argue that this use of AI is an invasion of privacy and it could be of concern how this information could be used outside the airport. With access to facial recognition from many people, it could be used by hackers or given to law enforcement and used unlawfully.
The documents released by President Trump explicitly said there were no limits on how partnering airlines can use this facial recognition data. CBP did not answer specific questions about whether there are any guidelines for how other technology companies involved in processing the data can potentially also use it.
Civil liberties expert Edward Hasbrouck has expressed concern about the potential of giving the government too much control over American citizens through facial recognition software.
“This is opening the door to an extraordinarily more intrusive and granular level of government control, starting with where we can go and our ability to move freely about the country,” he told Buzzfeed News. “And then potentially, once the system is proved out in that way, it can literally extend to a vast number of controls in other parts of our lives.”
As of now, the CBP says the images are encrypted and that it only keeps them for a brief period of time.
