TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction
By India McKinney
ActivistPost.com
DECEMBER 8, 2018
The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others.
The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which included language that we warned would provide implied Congressional endorsement to biometric screening of domestic travelers and U.S. citizens, became law in early October. The ink wasn’t even dry on that bill when the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published their Biometrics Roadmap for Aviation Security and the Passenger Experience, detailing TSA’s plans to work with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to roll out increased biometric collection and screening for all passengers, including Americans traveling domestically.
This roadmap appears to latch on to a perceived acceptance of biometrics as security keys while ignoring the pervasive challenges with accurately identifying individuals and the privacy risks associated with collecting massive amounts of biometric data. Furthermore, it provides no strategy for dealing with passengers who are unfairly misidentified.
Worst of all, while the roadmap explicitly mentions collaborating with airlines and other partners inside and outside the government, it is alarmingly silent on how TSA plans to protect a widely distributed honeypot of sensitive biometric information ripe for misuse by identity thieves, malicious actors, or even legitimate employees abusing their access privileges.
TSA PreCheck is Not a Blank Check
The roadmap proposes significant changes to what the government can do with data collected from more than 5 million people in the TSA PreCheck program. It also proposes new programs to collect and use biometric data from American travelers who haven’t opted into the PreCheck program.
The TSA PreCheck program has long been billed as a convenient way for travelers to cut down on security wait times and speed through airports. All a traveler has to do is to sign up, pay a fee, and allow TSA to collect fingerprints for a background check. However, the roadmap outlines TSA’s plans to expand use of those prints beyond the background check to other uses throughout the airport, such as for security at the bag drop or for identity verification at security check points.
TSA has already rolled this out as a pilot program. In 2017, at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and Denver International Airport, TSA used prints from the PreCheck database and a contactless fingerprint reader to verify the identity of PreCheck-approved travelers at security checkpoints at both airports. TSA now proposes to make the pilot program permanent and to widen the biometrics used to include face recognition, iris scans, and others.
Even more concerning, the roadmap outlines a strategy to capture biometrics from American travelers who haven’t enrolled in PreCheck and who never consented to any biometric data collection from TSA. Instead of giving passengers the option to opt in, TSA plans to partner and share information with other federal and state agencies like the FBI and state Departments of Motor Vehicles to get the biometric information they want.
While Congress has authorized a biometric data collection exit program for foreign visitors—supposedly to help monitor visa compliance by using biometrics to track foreigners leaving the country—the roadmap explicitly outlines plans for TSA and CBP to collect any biometrics they want from all travelers—American or foreign, international and domestic—wherever they are in the airport. That data will be stored in a widely shared database could be used to track people outside the airport context. For example, TSA’s Precheck as well as Clear have already begun using their technology at stadiums to “allow” visitors a faster entry.
This is a big, big change. It is unprecedented for the government to collect, store, and share this kind of data, with this level of detail, with this many agencies and private partners. We know that security lines are a huge pain, but we are concerned that travelers getting used to biometric tracking in the airport context will be less concerned about tracking in other contexts and eventually throughout society at large.
Device Security and National Security Are Not the Same
The Rest…HERE
