DHS Pushing to Facial Recognition Tech for Every Airline Passenger Within 4 Years

As Americans, we have a right to our privacy that can be easily interpreted as a right to protect it as well.

In the Bill of Rights we have the Fourth Amendment protecting us from “unlawful search and seizure”, the gist of which is that the police and the government can’t just show up looking around, trying to see if maybe you committed a crime they could arrest you for.

It’s why we have search warrants, in short.

And just as the Fourth Amendment protects us, there should be a reasonable expectation that we cannot be otherwise ensnared by law enforcement in a similarly haphazard fashion.  This is precisely the ethos that has many concerned about the latest maneuver from the Department of Homeland Security.

Lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt plans to begin using facial recognition technology on nearly all departing air passengers within the next four years.

The agency’s plan has reignited the fight over the sensitive technology. Critics say facial recognition technology is not ready for large-scale deployment and that DHS has failed to establish specific rules to prevent abuses and policies for handling the collected data.