TSA to expand facial recognition to 400 US airports (opens in new tab)

Why is this disgusting overreach of authority not being talked about? How can we fight against these kinds of extreme privacy violations but still be able to use such facilities? Is there no other choice than to kick back and take it lying down anytime you go on a flight?

Aiports, the security lines, people traveling, people working there, flights, etc. are all miserable. And I have a drastically reduced trust in the airline companies these days in terms of their safety. At this point, I feel like cattle just being shuttled into a tube that may or may not be safe.

I wonder how much money is being spent into these programs. They don't seem to be about keeping flights safe. Don't they already know who is traveling anyways? What's the percentage of people they don't know via the standard checks? And then what's the percentage of those people that would be caught by these systems? It seems more likely that this is just an excuse of using fear to subsidize a massive collection of facial and body data of people moving through airports.

> allows participants to verify their identities without taking out a physical ID at all.

As if that's the hardest part traveling thiugh an airport.

> TSA doesn’t retain the details of people’s faces—what’s called biometric data—after the comparison is made.

There's no way that's true, and the article.in fact points out that they already admit it isn't true.

Is the point of this to get rid of the humans in the loop when checking IDs and flight tickets? Again, what percentage of people will this catch that isn't caught by the existing checkpoints?

> the agency declared an intention to phase out even the use of physical IDs and rely purely on facial recognition.

And there we go. As if that will be safer.