Posted on 10/25/2001 3:15:50 PM PDT by maggie
Boston's Airport to Test Face-Scanning Cameras
B O S T O N, Oct. 25 — Logan Airport, where hijackers boarded the airliners that brought down the World Trade Center, will become one of the first airports in the nation to install controversial face-recognition technology.
Computers will scan the faces of travelers and others who pass through checkpoints, and compare them with the facial features of suspected terrorists in a law enforcement database.
The computers will be installed at two checkpoints within the next 45 days, Massachusetts Port Authority spokesman Jose Juves said today.
The technology is being used at Iceland's Keflavik Airport and Toronto's Pearson Airport, and the San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., airports also plan to install the system, The Boston Globe reported.
At Logan, two rival companies — Viisage Technology Inc. of Littleton and New Jersey-based Visionics Corp. — will install their systems, and they will be tried out for 90 days, Juves said.
The American Civil Liberties Union has opposed the technology, saying it is intrusive and may not even work well under certain conditions, such as dim lighting.
"This is a high-tech Band-Aid that is not going to make us any safer, and will give us a false sense of security," said Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU in New York. —The Associated Press
I'll never set foot or spend money there ever again, nor in Tampa's Ybor City for the same reason. I hope others do the same, and I hope the airline's stockholders get very, very angry.
Run Hillary, Madeline Albright and Janet Reno past them. See if the lens can withstand the strain...
No, but we would know who they were after the fact when they're all dead. Just like what happened without Big-Brother cameras.
IF FACE SCANNING CAMERAS LINKED TO DATABASES ISN'T BIG BROTHER, WHAT THE H*LL IS?!
Exactly. For this technology to accompish anything, somewhere in a database Atta would need to be identified as a terrorist or terrorist suspect. He was not. Therefore, he could have just cheerfully waved at the camera and it would have accomplished nothing.
Agreed. Wish my trip through Logan in 3 weeks would be the last for some time, though I know better. :-( Possessing what I call "stock face #47" (it is absolutely incredible how often people mistake me for someone else), I guess I'll be an unwilling guinea pig for the "false positive" tests. :-)
Now I really do want to change my job so I don't have to travel anymore.
Also, there should be cameras recording the passengers going aboard, right at the hatches.
It jumped up 12% today.
In any event, what I've read of the face-scanners isn't comforting; some of the parameters they measure would seem to be beyond the resolution of a reasonably cost-effective camera operating in such a dynamic real-time environment (things like iris to eye ratio), that the ony way to avoid too many false negatives is to relax the matching to get more false positives.
And it's pretty certain that every single reader here was taught from a very young age to know the danger of having too many false positives:
Right?<p< It's called "crying 'wolf.'"
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