Smile, Your Face Is Now in a Database
How airports and DHS are using facial recognition on travelers
A crucial step has been added to international travel. If you aren’t a U.S. citizen, you might need more than just your documents in these 10 airports: Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Logan in Boston, O’Hare in Chicago, Hobby and George Bush in Houston, McCarran in Las Vegas, Miami International, John F. Kennedy in New York, and Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. As part of Trump’s executive order banning certain Muslims from entering the United States, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—has ramped up and expanded its Biometric Exit program, which gathers biometric data from international individuals exiting the United States to document and verify that they’ve left. But instead of the fingerprints or document review DHS had been using as biometrics verifiers since 2004, the focus now is on facial recognition.
John Wagner, deputy assistant commissioner at CBP, outlined the program vision in early May. It was initially trialed in June 2016 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “We’re going to build this for [Biometric] Exit. We’re out of time; we have to,” Wagner told the audience at the Connect ID conference in Washington, D.C., referring to further implementation…
