Government use of facial recognition technology is already a daily reality at this Arizona border crossing
SAN LUIS, Ariz. – By the time the sun rises, there’s already a line of people waiting to cross into the United States. They stand near a smattering of small buildings that make up the port of entry separating two border towns named San Luis, one in the United States, the other in Mexico. Anabel Castorena, who has been here since 5:40 a.m., walks through the glass doors of the building where agents inspect people crossing the border by foot.
The goal of the program in San Luis is to test whether it’s possible to police America’s borders and airports with technology that’s better than humans at verifying identification. If it works, it could make crossing into and out of the United States easier and faster and give CBP a powerful new tool to identify the small minority of border crossers who pose a security threat.
The large open space of the new processing center resembles the Customs inspection area at an airport, but the technology is different. There aren’t any kiosks for travelers to stop and pose in front of while a camera snaps their picture. In San Luis, small cameras sit atop the glass partitions that wrap around each officer’s station, separating them from the masses. These cameras capture images in motion, as each person walks up.
Top: Anabel Castorena, 28, works the drive-thru line at the Jack in the Box restaurant in San Luis, Arizona. Castorena, a U.S. citizen, lives in Mexico and crosses the border each day to go to work. Castorena said having her photo taken has been a routine part of her day since Customs opened a new inspection building with facial recognition cameras. Bottom left and right: Castorena heads back through the border crossing at the end of her workday.
In the meantime, the realities of the San Luis crossing demonstrate just how embedded the technology has already become in U.S. security procedures, and how hard it is to opt out of even an optional scan.the development of facial recognition technology is the idea that humans aren’t as good as you might think at identifying faces. Benji Hutchinson, vice president of federal operations at NEC Corp.
Amazon called the latest ACLU test misleading because the group used the default confidence threshold in the face-matching software; the company said it recommends law enforcement agencies set the threshold at 99 on a 100-point scale, meaning the system will return matches only when the system is at least 99 percent certain of accuracy. ACLU’s test used a minimum confidence threshold of 80 percent.
CBP first launched a screening program to collect biometric data from foreign nationals in 2004. But in 2013, Congress made CBP responsible for collecting data from travelers exiting the U.S. That’s when the agency first began considering a switch from fingerprint scanners to facial recognition, said Dan Tanciar, CBP’s deputy executive director of planning, program analysis and evaluation for the entry/exit program.
Yet, at the border, many citizens say Customs agents don’t give them options. POLITICO interviewed more than a dozen people as they exited the port of San Luis and received a mix of responses to questions about their understanding of the facial recognition process. The lives of residents of San Luis, Arizona, and San Luis, Mexico, are deeply entwined. Top and middle left: Worshippers and musicians at Gethsemani Baptist Church in San Luis, Arizona. Middle right: Lupita Dominguez, who lives in Yuma, Arizona, waits for her boyfriend to drive across the border from Mexico. Bottom: Children play in the streets of San Luis, Arizona.
When asked to comment, Justin Winburn, a spokesman for CBP at the port of San Luis, points to the signs posted around the building in English and Spanish notifying people that cameras are in use as an additional border security measure. Photos of U.S. citizens will be deleted “after the individual’s identity is verified and CBP will not retain photos of U.S. citizens,” the sign reads.
Top: Customs agents chat in a passage way at the San Luis Arizona port-of-entry on June 24, 2019. Bottom left: A camera used to capture the photos of people passing through customs sits above an agent’s glass partition. Bottom right: Justin Winburn, chief of commercial operations and public affairs at the San Luis port of entry, stands in a conference room on site. He says most people he encounters “don’t really mind” having their photos taken to gain entry to the United States.
Meyer said it’s expected that CBP, like any agency, would advocate for as much authority as it thinks it needs through an aggressive interpretation of the law and for advocacy groups to take the opposite interpretation. Ultimately, he said, the limits on use of facial recognition will likely be set the same way they were for an earlier new technology – cellphones.
Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the group is opposed to government use of facial recognition “against a background that lacks any real federal regulation” and when “there’s been a lack of public involvement and debate about its use.”
Scott called DHS’s use of passport photos for various facial recognition projects — including those at CBP, TSA, ICE and the Coast Guard – an example of “mission creep” that violates the spirit of the Privacy Act that established federal fair practices for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information.
Facial recognition also is facing a backlash among some policymakers who have raised privacy concerns and questions about the accuracy of the technology. The committee’s top Republican, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, has said that members of the panel are discussing restricting existing uses of the technology at federal agencies, though Hill staffers have said current CBP activities might be omitted from the legislation.
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