Kennedy, Merkley introduce bill to end TSA facial recognition (2023)
kennedy.senate.govThis is a short bill.
It disallows the TSA from using facial recognition and requires that the TSA disposes of all facial recognition biometric information, including images and videos, obtained through facial recognition, no later than 90 days of the enactment of the act. Congressional acts prior to the enactment of the act are invalidated with regards to TSAs authorization of facial recognition use, and the TSA can use facial recognition only if authorized in future congressional acts. In section 4, it modifies law to exclude facial recognition for pilot licenses, those deemed threats to air security, and prevents the TSA from using the $20mm DARPA defense research grant for researching facial recognition means of defense. Additionally in section 5 it prevents the TSA from using facial recognition in implemented pilot programs, it prevents the TSA from cooperating with airport operators on the use of facial recognition, and prevents the TSA from issuing guidance to identify airport employees & law enforcement via facial recognition.
Cynic criticism:
1) The invalidation of former Congress acts with regards to TSA authorization of facial recognition use seems too polemic; would this pass as is?
2) Airport operators can still use facial recognition.
3) It does not define biometrics; nor what disposing means, and this may render this part ineffective, especially if derivatives of these data are not considered biometrics.
Overall what I'm reading this bill as, is that the government does not want the TSA to directly participate in this type of surveillance, but I think it leaves open the possibility of contractors to do so. It is still a good bill in my opinion.
I disagree, I think it's worse than useless. It provides a false sense of security to voters, and it will prevent future reform because people will think the problem has already been solved.
Better is good. You can keep your standards up after things get better.
Nothing has happened to the bill since it was introduced.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/336...
And FYI nothing will in this session. The chambers are split, and regardless of the election results, there is unlikely to be a mad dash by one party to push through bills. This will be reintroduced in January.
How about we end the TSA instead. It’s provably pointless security theater. Their own pen tests show it to be ineffective.
TSA detected 6700+ firearms in 2023, 93% of which were loaded.
I like that people can’t accidentally bring a loaded gun onto my plane and are deterred from doing it on purpose.
A committed attacker can probably get by TSA, but a committed attacker will also likely flag other parts of the layered defense system that TSA is only one part of. The intelligence apparatus can and does flag specific threats to TSA, which is way better than FBI having to figure out ad-hoc how to screen millions of travelers whenever they think there’s a specific credible risk.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-underco...
I have no reason to believe this got any better since then. So they accidentally caught a bunch of dudes who don’t read the fine print. Any determined adversary would have no issue at all bringing guns or explosives onboard whether or not I “remove my shoes and put my laptop in the bin”. It’s only a matter of time. Don’t like it? Stop funding genocide in the Middle East.
This is a logical fallacy. Bring unable to stop 100% of something doesn't mean you should give up. If they're stopping over 90% that's reason to keep going.
The same argument can be used for almost any risk reduction techniques, including air bags and seatbelts, and it's wrong there too.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
I don't know if you're familiar with guns, but you actually don't have to be a sophisticated committed ideologue to be dangerous with them. Especially on an airplane.
You ever seen a drunk asshole on a plane? Now add a couple loaded firearms to the mix, held by drunk person or by person annoyed by drunk person. Sufficiently dangerous for me to be thankful TSA intercepts thousands of them every year.
> Any determined adversary would have no issue at all bringing guns or explosives onboard whether or not I “remove my shoes and put my laptop in the bin”. It’s only a matter of time. Don’t like it? Stop funding genocide in the Middle East.
Yet, stunningly, the number of times someone has brought a bomb or a gun through TSA and committed a terrorist act with it since 9/11 is exactly zero times.
This is the same nonsense argument that people use in favor of abolishing police. "They only catch some crime and keep some criminals off the streets, not all of it" is a totally nonsensical reason to get rid of the institution entirely.
I will leave it to the sibling comment or to describe in detail how wrong you are about guns specifically.
I'm sitting on a plane with a bag full of knives, can confirm, they aren't doing shit
Need to look into how this turned out – I've sent letters to Merkley and Wyden over the years about privacy concerns relating to facial recognition and similarly invasive technologies. We need more regulation in this space.
That said, the TSA is in some respects the lesser concern. Don't get me wrong, the TSA not having free rein with facial and biometric technologies is a good thing. But when companies like Clearview AI (https://www.clearview.ai) sell their facial recognition technologies to local police departments – technologies that were built on illegally obtained data and have a history of substantial racial bias – we have bigger issues. It's opaque, unregulated, invites a wellspring of social injustice, and doesn't past muster under any ELSI framework.
Government regulating government is important. But we, as a society, need to stop giving private companies like Clearview AI a pass on harmful, exploitative behavior – especially when they're run by founders like Hoan Ton-That who offer post-hoc rationalizations that amount to (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'Well, if we hadn't done it, someone else would have, so why not us?'
We need a bigger bill that enshrines and elevates privacy for the modern world.
I think facial recognition is a good vehicle for those bills. For example, it should be illegal for a business to use facial recognition for decisions about pricing. I think that's a no-brainer. Put that together with other protections for facial recognition and I think it will leave the station.
Can they ban facial recognition in general?
It's been almost a year since it was introduced, and it doesn't look like it has made much progress since then.
Why is that? I didn't know the timeline for bills would be so slow.
A bipartisan bill to protect our freedoms. This is the America I know and love.
I’m much happier with the TSA having those scans than airlines and services like CLEAR. At least there are rules the government is held to about how the data is stored and privacy/deletion requirements.
I kinda sadly agree with you, esp with where 23andme is and where millions of peoples DNA will be... with the highest bidder.
Just used digital id today and it let me skip a massive line. Also really nice not having to show anything. They already got my biometrics from my passport and global entry, might as well get some benefit out of it.
The TSA is a joke and is nothing more than security theater and a government jobs program for low skilled workers.
>Undercover tests conducted by the Department of Homeland Security have shown that the TSA's failure rate frequently ranges between 80% and 95%.
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...
>An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
Unpopular opinion: That means for someone actually trying to bring explosives on board, they are looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds that they are caught and potentially deemed an enemy of the state, taken to a CIA black site, etc.
I'm not saying that the TSA is a cost effective deterrent, but I do think that that even with those odds there is a deterring effect. And its a jobs program! The US Gov spends money in worse ways.
Edit: and TSA is funded by airline fees, so not only is it a jobs program, it is paid for by a tax on the wealthy.
> Edit: and TSA is funded by airline fees, so not only is it a jobs program, it is paid for by a tax on the wealthy.
Even though people who fly are on average richer than people who don't, the vast majority are still normal people who get a W-2, and not Jeff Bezos or a trust fund kid. It's still an incredibly regressive tax because it's a flat per-trip fee rather than a percentage.
Taxes on groceries are incredibly regressive. The lottery is quite regressive.
Taxes on airplane flights can never be more than slightly regressive because the bottom 50% very rarely fly anywhere. A tax on what is fundamentally a luxury service would have to try really hard to be even a little bit regressive.
The fact that my CEO in first class and me in economy class pay the same flat fee is still regressive, just not as regressive as, eg. taxing food twice the normal rate
You said "incredibly regressive", which is what I disagree with.
It's at best slightly regressive—the fee is $5.60, so it's not like it's substantially raising the price of a ticket for someone who can already afford one in the first place. And the fee does scale with income to a small degree in that the higher your income the more frequent your flights tend to be.
Could it be a percentage of the ticket price? Possibly, though I'm not sure that would elicit fewer complaints. But it's already in the bottom quartile of regressiveness in how we do taxes in this country, so calling it "incredibly regressive" is either a clear exaggeration or a sign that you have no idea how bad the tax situation is here.
That's all well and good, but I'd prefer that our mildly effective deterrent and jobs program weren't pioneering privacy violations and generally making air travel a pain. They could probably achieve their terrible success rate with some sort of automated detectors that travellers could just walk through like a metal detector.
It's like a public works project to vandalize property and spread trash rather than the opposite.
They basically do if you’re willing to do a background check every ten years or whatever? (Precheck)
Seems like a fine trade off to me.
For someone that was about to blow themselves up, that’s not much of a deterrent. A terrorist group can just sent 10 people through and be happy with the successful 9 or so that get through.
> For someone that was about to blow themselves up, that’s not much of a deterrent
There are plenty of people who don't fear death, but I think there are far fewer who don't fear getting disappeared by the CIA.
The TSA operates on American soil and the CIA can't disappear you from there. Worst that happens is an FBI guy arresting you.
You're woefully mistaken if you don't think the CIA doesn't operate on US soil.
Bad faith to even argue it when the we all know the word CIA is generally used colloquialy as a catch all for "feds" or "intelligence". We all know what they meant by CIA. Also, the FBI is just as scary as the CIA and its not like they won't make you disappear literally, or via a dark 10x10 cell in the Colorado desert.
I didn't see the CIA doesn't operate at all in the US, just that they don't disappear people from US soil, and we all know that GP was specifically referring to the CIA's rendition practices, which are a CIA thing, not a general fed thing.
What would happen is that the TSA tells local law enforcement who tells the FBI and all sorts of very normal "law enforcement" happen to you. In comparison to the CIA, the FBI is pretty impotent and generally has to deal with the bill of rights. There is no 10x10 cell in the Colorado desert. Nobody "disappears" from the TSA. Nobody is "disappearing" at all in the US.
The worst thing that happens to you is what the DoJ has been doing to the Jan 6 arrests - you get kept in solitary for a year before your trial or until you complain that your rights are being violated.
>The TSA operates on American soil and the CIA can't disappear you from there
In theory...
So they blow themselves up at the terminal instead of on the airplane.
Once one gets caught, everything gets grounded and security beefs the fuck up for at least six months. Happy terrorist times if it’s guy #10 but if it’s guy #1, that’s operational funding totally in the trash and now the FBI will be looking for you and they have your guy as a lead.
No, nothing gets grounded when someone it caught
Reductio ad absurdum: We could just imprison everyone, that way there's a deterring effect to committing most crimes. After all, can't commit wire fraud if you don't have access to any wires.
You're not wrong to point out that it does _something_, but the thing we need to balance the negative effects, and I don't think we've done that.
The CIA does not take people who get detained at the airport to "black sites." The CIA does not even police airports. Local police work with agencies to pick up most of the people who are going to be arrested and charged. Suspects are not "enemies of the state," either.
If you lived in a country where that kind of thing actually happened, you would not be writing on the internet about it.
So on the one hand, it is a very popular, and perhaps justified, belief that the TSA violates our rights every single day.
But at the same time, since this is America... it's absurd to suggest someone could be illegally detained if they are suspected of bringing a bomb on a flight?
Local law enforcement and the FBI will be doing the detaining, and there will be a huge paper trail. It will not be a mystical "CIA disappearance."
The CIA only gets involved if you attempt to bring a Magic 8 Ball in your carry-on.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
Counterpoint: you could probably have a greater impact by detonating the explosives in the TSA line, which is often the most crowded bottleneck in any given airport. If you make one target less appealing but introduce a new appealing target, how much have you solved?
I agree that the TSA is a jobs program. I don't think that necessarily justifies its existence, but I have accepted that employing people is the TSA's only functional purpose and anything else is just propaganda.
And yet, has that scenario ever, ever happened?
Because not many people actually want to blow themselves up?
The TSA only really exists at this point because the flight attendant unions are scared someone might be able to hurt them while they enforce increasingly absurd rules mandated by their airlines meant to extract money from passengers
Surely there's a better deterrent than wide scale violations of millions of people's fourth amendment rights every single day.
The effectiveness of a deterrent has very little to do with the degree of consequences once caught and very much to do with the likelihood of getting caught.
Therefore, the TSA is not an effective deterrent.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
I think we are in agreement there. My point is those odds of getting caught are not too terrible if you compare them with the general clearance rate of violent crime in America.
> The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment
That seems prima facie absurd, or in need of heavy qualification. Even if the probability of being caught is 100%, a sufficiently low punishment might make it still worthwhile. If we always caught murderers but the punishment were only a month in jail, do you really think the murder rate would be lower?
You seem to be equating success with charging someone with crime and a harsh punishment. This is not the case. Success could simply be a bottle of volatile liquid thrown in the trash. Success could be an 'oops, someone forgot about ammo in their carry on luggage again'.
Second point. It is no longer necessary for a terrorist to board the plane at all. Suicide bomber on a busy day at the security check point could kill far more than a plane load of passengers.
> they are looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds that they are caught and potentially deemed an enemy of the state, taken to a CIA black site, etc
As opposed to what odds if they blow themselves and a plane up?
Or rather, they would just blow themselves up anyway in the middle of the crowded security area if they got found out. So you're looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds of blowing up the security area rather than the plane.
>Air carriers collect a fee of $5.60 per one-way trip originating in the U.S., or up to $11.20 per round trip, and then send the money to the TSA. In 2020, this fee accounted for about 32% of the TSA's budget.
> but I do think that that even with those odds there is a deterring effect.
Now consider the size of the crowd gathering at these "security" checkpoints, and ask yourself: why would a terrorist bother with passing it?
Perhaps credit to TSA they did not trigger false positives of the mock explosives, we kinda want that? If the news media had tried to sneak actual explosives would be a fair test
It's not journalists doing the testing, it's Homeland Security officials.
100%. Other than the millions of innocent we killed, this is the worst part of 9/11. This and surveillance... 9/11 really opened up the flood gates to abuse.
“In a 2013 hearing on Capitol Hill, then-TSA administrator John Pistole, described the Red Team as “super terrorists,” who know precisely which weaknesses to exploit.”
“[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.
Good ol security through obscurity
“The pen-testers know exactly what our code is. They can create and devise attacks that not even the best hackers would be able to create”
Just fire this guy already. Shameful that he can’t spout out these pathetic excuses with a straight face
> “[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.
It seems reasonable to tailor your defense to the threats you're realistically likely to face.
We're supposed to believe that terrorists can't get jobs in airport security? Have you seen who they hire?
You’re aware of them hiring people with extensive connections to terrorist organizations?
Because that’s who typically commits terrorism.
They managed to hire 73 people with confirmed or suspected links to terrorism by 2015.
73 of how many?
According to Wikipedia, about 54,000.
Just saying, there was a reason the 9/11 hijackers were clean-shaven and wearing suits.
It's not as if they'd make their patsys obvious.
Okay I admit it, I have morbid curiosity as to what exactly you're implying here.
Terrorists aren't morons. In fact, they typically have engineering degrees.
I would think if they're so smart, and the TSA is so useless, we'd be seeing a lot more terrorist attacks happen on/with planes.
Terrorists: so smart and so common and the TSA so useless that there have been zero successful attacks on air travel since 9/11.
Zero.
In the United States, you mean?
Because other countries adopted similar security protocols and still MH370 and Germanwings Flight 9525 happened. And the 2004 Russian bombings.
You do have a point insofar as that 9/11 changed the game: previously a hijacking just meant you'd get an unscheduled vacation and would likely be released unharmed. Now the assumption is that it's a suicide mission so passengers will fight back.
This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.
To think overwhise is "my magic rock keeps away heffalumps" levels of reasoning.
Because there have been zero heffalump attacks since 9/11.
Zero.
What on earth are you talking about with MH370 and Germanwings 9525? Do you believe I'm claiming that the TSA prevents mentally unstable pilots from crashing passenger aircraft? In case that's actually what you understood me to be saying: no, that's not what I said.
> This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.
There are plenty of aspiring terrorists who are perfectly fine dying during their attacks... obviously...
Even worse, he used to be a deputy director of the FBI lol
Thankfully he's no longer at the TSA and the president of a university now.
>John S. Pistole (born June 1, 1956) is the former administrator of the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[1] He is currently the president of Anderson University.
I don't disagree with you, but what does this have to do with the linked article?
I literally brought a knife with me through DFW a couple months ago on accident.
For 2 years as a student, I carried a 4" gravity knife through a lot of airport security terminals. It was completely by accident and when I realized it was in my backpack, I was surprised.
At least they found my toothpaste last time. ;-)
This is great; I hope it passes, even with our dysfunctional Congress. I've kinda given up on opting out at the airport because it's a bit of a pain to get shunted to a different line. (Yes, clearly I care a lot about this /s)
The facial recognition doesn't actually seem to save much (if any) time; the TSA people still run my ID through their little scanner thing. I don't have to scan my boarding pass, but I'd usually do that while they were dealing with my ID, and be done before they were anyway.
Clearly this is just a surveillance play. Or they think the facial recognition is going to weed out people using someone else's ID. Or it's a "cute" way to funnel tax dollars to whoever manufactures this tech.
> I've kinda given up on opting out at the airport because it's a bit of a pain
Probably by design. One of my favorite memories is after defcon (can't remember which), I arrived at the airport at the same time as some several hundred other attendees not going to other security conferences that week, and the sheer volume of people rejecting going through the lemme-see-your-genitals machine, requesting pat-downs, or simply refusing to show ID (this is allowed for domestic flights), utterly overwhelmed TSA causing a many hours line that also trapped the hundreds of normies heading home after their vacations.
If I sound like I'm blaming the hackers I'm not - it's the fault of TSA for being unprepared to handle a situation where every traveler exercises their rights. Much like the justice system, which would utterly collapse if everyone exercised their right to a trial by a jury of their peers, the TSA would collapse if everyone exercised their rights to not be subjected to any more search than is necessary to determine they aren't a threat to the airplane (the mission statement upon which TSA's authority is derived). This worries me because it means our government agencies and branches are incentivized to convince people to not exercise their rights, or restrict people's rights.
I flew out of Boston last month and the TSA agent chewed me out for opting out of the photo scan. He seemed convinced that it would be required in the future and that I was in the wrong for attempting to resist the inevitable.
First of all, I love Boston, but this was probably the most stereotypically Boston experience I've ever had. Second of all, it's really gross that he felt ok with trying to intimidate me into giving up my rights because it posed a minor inconvenience to him.
It annoys me when they act annoyed with us for maintaining our rights. I offer them the bear minimum of respect by not ranting about how they're part of a system slowly restricting our rights into nothingness, the least they can do is not offer backhanded comments back about how I'm making their job harder. One time I refused to do the pointless facial surveillance thing next to a plane boarding gate, and the flight attendant loudly said to another, "ugh, why do they refuse," and the other loudly replied, "I don't know." Never been more tempted to play the part of the horrifyingly obnoxious sovereign citizen and educate my fed up comrades on the other side of the counter.
> refusing to show ID (this is allowed for domestic flights)
There's a procedure for people who don't have a valid ID with them--but I'm not sure it is legal to use it otherwise. Presumably it requires making some statement to the effect of "I don't have an ID with me," or "I forgot my license at home," etc. which could be subject to the incredibly broad 18 USC 1001 statute if they really wanted to try, or more likely, they would mail you a civil penalty notice or put you on a list for additional questions in the future.
Of course you could say you didn't realize the statement was false because the ID is so small that you can't even feel if its in your pocket, or you could conveniently put it in your checked bag by mistake, etc. But still, it's probably not a great look if they manage to find it somewhere when you said you forgot it.