Wired – “…The facial recognition plan in US airports is built around the Customs and Border Protection Biometric Exit Program, which utilizes face-scanning technology to verify a traveler’s identity. CBP partners with airlines—including Delta, JetBlue, American Airlines, and others—to photograph each traveler while boarding. That image gets compared to one stored in a cloud-based photo-matching service populated with photos from visas, passports, or related immigration applications.

 The Biometric Exit Program is used in at least 17 airports, and a recently-released Department of Homeland Security report states that CBP anticipates having the ability to scan the faces of 97 percent of commercial air passengers departing the United States by 2023. This rapid deployment of facial recognition in airports follows a 2017 executive order in which President Trump expedited former President Obama’s efforts to use biometric technology. The Transportation Security Administration has since unveiled its own plan to improve partnership with CBP and to introduce the technology throughout the airport. The opportunity for this kind of biometric collection infrastructure to feed into a broader system of mass surveillance is staggering, as is its ability to erode privacy…”