Congress Pushes Biometrics

Posted by Jim Harper

The Federal Trade Commission has no jurisdiction over government entities so when it looks with concern at the use of facial recognition technology, it’s looking at the private sector.

Facial recognition is only one of many biometric technologies, of course, and Congress is pushing hard for biometrics that can help track and control us for various purposes. If anyone should be looking with concern, it should be us looking at the federal government.

There are legitimate uses for biometrics, of course, and well-designed implementations will undoubtedly benefit us all. But biometrics programs implemented for the government will tend to prioritize hoovering up federal cash over striking delicate balances among cost, effectiveness, privacy, and civil liberties.

So let’s look at how Congress is pressing—and in one case insufficiently restraining—the rapid advance of biometrics.

H.R. 658, the FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2011, has passed the House and awaits action in the Senate. It says that “improved pilot licenses” must be capable “of accommodating a digital photograph, a biometric identifier, and any other unique identifier that the Administrator considers necessary.”

H.R. 1690, the MODERN Security Credentials Act, establishes that air carriers, airport operators, and governments may not employ or contract for the services of a person who has been denied a TWIC card. “TWIC” stands for “Transportation Worker Identity Card,” the vain post-9/11 effort to secure transportation facilities from bad people. TWIC cards use biometrics.

Read the rest of this post »

Congress on Privacy: Schizophrenic or Lagging?

Posted by Jim Harper

In the same bill that Congress limited the use of whole-body imaging or “strip-search machines” at airports (text of the amendment here), it required the Transportation Security Administration to study using facial and iris recognition to identify people in line for airport security checkpoints (Sec. 242 of House-passed version here).

So glimpses at de-identified bodies are a privacy outrage while massive biometric databases and records of people’s travels are good to go?

Not necessarily. Average people (and members of Congress) understand better what a look at the body is, but they don’t understand as well what biometric tracking and databasing of our movements means. So they’re quick to object to the former and lagging on the latter.

Those of us who understand the privacy consequences of government-deployed facial recognition and tracking must press to educate our less-well-versed fellow Americans.