I don’t know but we will lose if we just give up the fight.
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I can totally see someone at DHS thinking this would be a “great idea” to expand to domestic flights too; no doubt with the urgent enthusiasm of whatever federal contractor makes the devices…
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Cue the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” crowd… 
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“I am, in fact, excited. Recent senior management could not think outside the box. It is my hope that a new perspective will ‘overturn’ years of stagnation and inactivity,” - A DHS Employee on Leadership Vacancy
perhaps we need to make gun permits RealID compliant as well … then we’d see people up in arms (no pun intended) about this (and maybe catch a few real terrorists)
hey, i didn’t say that.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you did, just that the people who do say that would predictably say that again in response to your (IMO accurate) statement, “our illusion of privacy ended years ago.”
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oh, got it. no worries. : ) tips hat
I see a lot of discussion that starts from the position that this is obviously a dark portent of abuses to come. I’m honestly confused why that’s the case, so maybe somebody can ELI5 for me.
Now, assuming that what looks like the consensus upthread of how this works is accurate – DHS has passport biometrics on file, the airline sends your facial-scan hash (or whatever) and a manifest of the passport numbers for the flight in question to DHS, and gets back a response indicating if the face belongs to one of those numbers (and presumably which one) – how is that, specifically, worse than what came before? Keep in mind, we’re not talking about whether DHS should have all those biometrics in the first place, we’re talking about how it’s used.
I assume that under the normal system (i.e. what’s in use today by the other airlines), the airline still has to tell DHS who’s flying where, for no-fly-list compliance. Maybe it’s not in real-time, but I’d be astonished if it’s not happening at all. When I’ve flown international, they do an RFID scan of my (biometric-laden) passport. Probably some kind of PKI challenge/response to verify authenticity, and for all I know they could be checking my “faceprint” against those stored on the passport without asking. Point is, in the existing system they’re validating that my passport is real, and telling DHS who is flying. What does the new system do differently that’s a new threat to civil liberties?
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