'Face Scans' For Air Passengers To Begin in UK This Summer

'Face Scans' For Air Passengers To Begin in UK This Summer

www.guardian.co.uk

A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips on passports.

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.

(visit the link for the full news article)



[edit on 24-4-2008 by DimensionalDetective]

DNA sampling, Fingerprinting Microchips, and now this...What is next? Perhaps we can get a simultanious "Shock Bracelet" affixed to us while they scan our faces!

But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

I was going to comment "How soon until the states start implementing this Orwellien crap", but based on the below paragraph I see they have ALREADY been using it, and not too successfully it appears...

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said: "It's a laughable technology. US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn't even recognise gender. It's not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won't match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a computer can't."

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 24-4-2008 by DimensionalDetective]

A system like this has already been implemented at Melbourne airport. It doesn't scan everyone, but you get picked 'at random' to stand in front of a camera, while they swipe your passport through a reader. It only takes a few seconds.
I'm not totally against face scanning (after all, that's what the guards do anyway) but I sure don't like the idea of the cameras and shock bracelets working in tandem.

I may be able to defeat this facial recognition system, because i've
practiced for years, trying to 'lift' my eyebrows like John Belushi!

Las Vegas casinos, and others have had this for some time.
World's largest casino selects 3D facial recognition

And more law enforcement agencies are adapting this, too!
Face recognition next in terror fight

"That's not MEEeeee, officer!"

...and so the fictitious bad guys - those bogeymen who are in our midst now plotting and scheming the downfall of civilisation as we know it, and killing our kittens and other small cuddly creatures - will get the ferry instead and fly onwards from a European airport without the scanning technology.

Seriously, all this is another example of problem creation, reaction and problem solution. The problems do not exist in the first place, at least not in any hugely threatening or meaningful way, but ramp up the fear of the unknown with wild speculation and fairy tales and get the frightened masses to comply.

The people behind the curtain are determined to get us all catalogued. Hell, they probably have a large shareholding in the tech companies producing the equipment too. A win-win situation for them and large G&T's at the club

Ok how then should the world's police/security forces ID criminals/terrorists/fugitives/smugglers or other wise unsavory people?

To many on this board it seems any sort of lists or identification equipment is just a hop skip and a jump to 1984.

I'm not even going to say this is necessary for terrorism (because some will say terrorism is an "invention of the shadow government blah blah". Take for example child pornography, Interpol has a list of people it wants for various sick and depraved crimes. These people have faces. If someone on this list travels to the airport and gets ID'd and caught where is the world suffering?

I just don't see how people expect this standard of absolute privacy above all else and then either ask for security or bitch when something goes wrong.

Sounds me me like the next stage in the grand plan to disuade anyone from flying in or out of Britain (following on from the Heathrow Terminal 5 luggage fiasco).

The European airports must be loving it.

Won't be long before we all get the train to Paris or Amsterdam to catch the plane there - to avoid the 3 day delays, being misidentified as a terrorist, and having all your luggage disappear into the ether.

Just glad I never fly anywhere!

Originally posted by Agent47
Ok how then should the world's police/security forces ID criminals/terrorists/fugitives/smugglers or other wise unsavory people?

The way they always used to? Hard work and toughening up the existing laws to deal with those people harshly and stop all the PC crap.

To many on this board it seems any sort of lists or identification equipment is just a hop skip and a jump to 1984.

It is! we have gotten along a long time without all these measures.

I'm not even going to say this is necessary for terrorism (because some will say terrorism is an "invention of the shadow government blah blah". Take for example child pornography, Interpol has a list of people it wants for various sick and depraved crimes. These people have faces. If someone on this list travels to the airport and gets ID'd and caught where is the world suffering?

See my first comment. If the courts got tough with these people in the first place instead of putting them back out on the streets then we wouldn't need all these tough measures. Terrorism may not ALL be the product of a shadow government (the old boy network - the real power!) but they are certainly up to their eyeballs in a lot of dirty little games. Then there's the actions of our own government - the talking heads - conspiring with the corporate world for big profits and directly / indirectly causing a lot of strife and suffering along the way. That has plenty to do with the backlash from others against us.

I just don't see how people expect this standard of absolute privacy above all else and then either ask for security or bitch when something goes wrong.

Why shouldn't we have standards of absolute privacy? Those very people who impose these intrusive measures against us expect more and more privacy and secrecy applied to themselves.
Using the worn out adage "if you have done nothing wrong then why object" also holds true of government. If they have nothing to hide then why all the secrecy? And don't come back with any "National Security" excuses as most of what they deem secret is purely to hide their own misdeeds.

Just consider how long that piece of crap your sitting at has been in existence... tweaked... fixed... upgraded... and it's still a piece of garbage computer, freezing up, picking up 'bugs', etc...

Never trust a machine. This face thing is a friggin' joke. And it's just one more way around finger-printing, a national ID card, an rfid chip... I don't see this damn thing as being much different

The people that deserve all this, are the ones who say if you done nothing wrong, whats the problem.

reply to post by Britguy


Great post britguy. I fully agree with what you have said. This is fear mongering at its finest, by control-freak-happy gov entities who want total submissiveness from their sheeple populace, invading into every nook and cranny of their existences. Video surveillance everywhere, no right to piss without their approval first.


[edit on 25-4-2008 by DimensionalDetective]