[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...
It seems to me that there are far more compelling reasons to implement exit controls if you have other, less savory motives.
That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point. So preventing re-entry is a plausible cause.
> obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth.
Unless their plot fails and they are trying to escape and regroup. Now how many of those failed plots that we were about to catch them but they escaped have we solved recently. I can't think of any.
Working with the government for a bit, I would say when stuff like this comes about, the reasons are usually more more about money. Something like a a company lobbied to get a large hundred million dollar contract to implement this. And it just happens that the head of DHS is first cousin with the CEO of said company.
I've lived outside of the USA for most of my adult life and from the people I've interacted with, anecdotally, the threat that if they overstay their visa they'll be fined <insert large number here> per day and be denied a visa & entry in the future seems to motivate people to comply with the terms of their visa.
It's of course completely possible that there are unsavory and foul motives at work. It's also possible that there are things other than mass human rights violations that such a system might be useful for.
Who said all of them were leaving the country?
The US doesn't even try to have general exit controls, though, and the routes of egress that DHS has the kind of presence at to implement facial recognition ar already have supposedly positive identification procedures for what is theoretically more critical and immediate security purposes in place, making facial recognition at those locations a very low value in improving ability to narrow down potential visa overstays.
Which isn't to say this isn't the reason, just that it's a very poor reason.
There is no US record of who leaves southbound into Mexico, and in most cases Mexico doesn't have a record of their entry either (requiring a Mexico tourist permit isn't enforced at most entry points).
I guess the numbers for longer overstays will be lower, it'd be interesting to see the estimates.
Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and it's unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data distribution that's dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite faces). I'm not aware of a lot of research about this.
Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into custody for false positives?
This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more.
(See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult's tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, "Biometrics: Practical Issues in Privacy and Security," for a great high-level overview of these kinds of issues: http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securic... In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this kind of analysis)
The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy.
At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening?
That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen).
One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road.
Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).
that's a "strawman" as well. Every law is oppression, the real question is what degree of oppression is justified for the good of society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Examples
One of the examples is about terrorism, with 100 out of 1 million people being terrorists and a 99% accurate system. Being 99 percent accurate, 99 out of the 100 terrorists will trigger the alarm, but so will about 9,999 law abiding citizens. Given an individual that triggered the alarm, there's a less than 1% chance they're actually a terrorist.
IIRC, there was a NY Times article a few years ago (which I cannot find) that mentioned that it started with LPR cameras, but was capable of capturing faces as well.
Anyone who has any doubt as to the way this country is headed, should really read 1984 for a preview of what's coming.
All that will take to make this full-blown is some metastasizing event (see 9/11) that will take us from slipping down the slope directly to falling into the abyss.
And just to be clear, I think these fears are non-partisan. The problems didn't start in January, but much sooner. Solving them isn't as easy as just electing the right party.
Your post you link is about your prediction that Social Media account credentials will be required to be handed over by citizens on exit. That's not a complete non sequitur, but hold your horses, you have made a verifiable claim, and it isn't true yet. You haven't "told" us anything.
Or to put it another way, they're standard in practically every country apart from the US. Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?
There already is a record, it's called the I-94. Used to be a paper thing you handed to the airline when leaving the US, now it's all recorded electronically.
Well they do have a record, from the flight
Not invasive at all. SRI's "Iris On-the-Move" product is a gateway that people walk through; a long-range infrared camera images their iris as they're passing through. As long as you catch a glimpse of the green light as you're walking, they can match your iris template. See "Iris on the Move: Acquisition of Images for Iris Recognition in Less Constrained Environments", Matey et al 2006.
(I'm trying to vaccinate you from this idea, not convince you. I obviously hate the idea of iris scanners at airports. My point is that unfortunately it can be done, and we should be careful.)
Another reason I'm nearly certain this was face recognition is that DHS already has a database of faces -- your passport photos -- and thus they have something to compare to. They don't have an iris or retina database for U.S. citizens.
Now they have your face and personal data, and they can probably run that against all the surveillance information being collected daily by the NSA etc.
From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and you're not a citizen), this is F*g terrible, but that's what happens when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don't see this ending up anyplace good.
Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly.
They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features. What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to over-fit for a particular set of inputs?
The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.
I don't live in the US. I'm only going to be there for visits at the most, and at this point I'm holding out. I'm too afraid that one day, I won't be able to leave for whatever reason. This doesn't help that. My non-American spouse refuses to travel there again.
Even being late catching a flight could make things rather inconvenient.
A passport isn't just a document anymore, it's an entry in a database. Hard to fake.
When I read the executive order I was quite troubled to see this.
I also noticed the exit tracking part of the order went undiscussed in the media. I searched to see if anyone else had noticed but i didn't find anyone else talking about it.
It almost feels like some of the more outrageous parts of the order (eg ignoring green card holders) were designed to draw attention away from the real point: slipping in exit tracking without people noticing (because they are too busy distracted fighting the other parts of the order).
