TSA Expands Controversial Facial Recognition Program - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  Here you go. A perfect example of where billions can be cut. An unnecessary, bloated government program which serves no useful purpose. Even their own inspectors admit the TSA misses up to 95% of all fake bombs and explosives used in test scenarios.

  Last I heard, a 95% failure rate is just that. A failure.

  • Re:

    From the story:

    " 'So we know that it brings the accuracy level close to 100% from mid-80% with just a human looking at a facial match.' "

    So we can much better find an ID mismatch. But that does not help with the psychological part of screening: looking for fidgety, unusual acting people, asking questions, which has proved very effective at finding drug traffickers.

    • Re:

      This kind of system always has two types of errors: type I (false positive, in this case accepting a wrong face as belonging to the identity) and type II (false negative, in this case rejecting the real person's face as a match). Most of the easy ways to reduce the rate of either error type increase the other. Giving only one error rate hides the important differences between these two kinds of errors and how that trade-off is being handled.

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  • Re:

    The TSA is using facial recognition on bombs and explosives? Those bastards!!

  • Re:

    The same Republicans who (performatively) complain about surveillance and yet magically vote for surveillance every single time? To be fair they only want the plebes under surveillance. They also have their status as legislators to get them by security.
    
    Ron "I love surveillance if it's targeting plebes" Johnson, and many other Republicans, will gladly scream "SOFFF ON TERRIR!!!" at opponents who want to reign in government surveillance and security theater. After all they know 99% of their base, despite b

• • Re:

    It's almost as if you believe airports are full of terrorists, and that aircraft are the only place they can possibly get you.

    Fact 1: Terrorists can do their thing outside of airports... or even in the lines of people waiting to pass through airport security. What do you think the effect of a dozen simultaneous nail bombs in airport security lines across the country would be?

    Fact 2: The only thing the TSA has really done to improve security is to lock the cockpit doors on the aircraft.

    Ref: https://www.goog [google.com]

• The results you get all are published by companies that sell the technology, or articles about how the TSA is doing a great job rolling this out. There are just a few pesky elected officials who are standing in the way of PROGRESS by making dumb objections.

  And of course the TSA is would never lie and they are well known for their transparency and willingness to admit mistakes. It will all deploy seamlessly and no one will ever get stranded in an airport and have their trip turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare. No even one person. Really.

• Google and Apple's photo apps still can't tell the difference between gorillas and blacks:
  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0... [nytimes.com]
  https://www.wired.com/story/wh... [wired.com]

  If the TSA can, I'm sure both of these billion dollar companies would pay quite a lot to license the technology, and pay even more for an exclusive license.

  • Re:

    That's no doubt a real problem in some contexts, but how many gorillas have you seen going through the TSA line?

• This looks and feels the same system being used to allow non-American citizens to enter the country, found at multiple international ports of entry, since many years ago. Surprised the volume of people coming in every day from all over the world did not adequately trained the American version of the system enough for what apparently seems to be an issue with a very ugly face.

• Wow, airports are implementing facial recognition technology for security checks. TSA claims it's faster and more accurate than humans, but some senators are skeptical and want it halted. Privacy concerns, anyone?

• Sounds great. TSA agent points the gadget at my ID and pushes a button, points the gadget at me and pushes another button, either it goes "baBEEP" and I get right through, or it goes "BEEPBEEPBEEP" and the TSA agent squints at me and my ID like a bouncer carding me at a club show, then, presuming the two are a match, waves me through.

  ...but I get the feeling it's not going to work out that way. It's probably going to be something more like:

  TSA agent points the gadget at my ID and pushes a button. Resulting

• Everyone forgets that, for a couple DECADES, people were told to do the following during a hijacking:
  
  Sit down.
  Shut up.
  Listen to the cabin crew / pilots.
  Odds are you'll live through the ordeal.
  
  That's exactly what Al Qaeda was counting on when they conducted their attack. People seem to forget that they did it all on ONE DAY. No attack since then has followed a similar profile. Do you know why?
  
  Allow me to say this for the cheap seats of Republican bed wetters and other people living in fear of thi

  • Re: The TSA is not needed

    Heck, these days passengers won't sit still even if everything is fine. Random assaults, fights, and even opening the doors during landing.

  • Re:

    We also locked the cockpit door and will refuse to open it.

• Conservatives always claim government can't do anything right, you have to starve the beast and all that - so why did nobody object when they formed a new bloated federal agency, the TSA? Why should our tax money pay for an airline's operating expense?
  
  If airport security were the responsibility of the airlines themselves, lawsuits, or the threat of them, would balance things out a little more. But no. We have this instead, misbehavior shielded by a sovereign immunity legal black hole that nobody can do an