ACLU Calls On Fresno Airport to Stop Using Face ID System

It’s not often that overlooked Fresno breaks new ground.

But as airports across the country consider installing face recognition technology to snare would-be hijackers, Fresno’s modest municipal airport can boast that it has been using the technology for almost a month.

For the American Civil Liberties Union, that is a month too long. Today, the ACLU is sending a letter to the city of Fresno demanding that the technology be shut down.

“This is the wrong technology in the wrong place,” said Barry Steinhardt, the ACLU’s national associate director. “This is a feel-good system that’s not going to make us any safer. It’s going to let the bad guys go, and you’ll wind up with innocent people being falsely accused.”

Patty Miller, a spokeswoman for Fresno Yosemite Airport, said Monday that the system scanning passengers entering the baggage screening area has had some “false positives.”

In general, though, she said, “it seems to be functioning fine.” They haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet, “but if he came through, we’d be ready,” she said.

The technology, called biometrics, scans the faces of passengers as they step through the usual airport metal detector, or magnetometer, and then compares the images with a database of hundreds of possible terrorists supplied by the FBI. Recently, said Ron Cadle, a vice president of Pelco Inc. of Clovis, pictures of suspected Colombian drug dealers have been added.

“It’s just a matter of time” before the system catches a high-profile criminal, he said.

A good deal of one-upmanship is in play among U.S. airports trying to stake a claim to being the first to install the security system. Fresno claims to be the first; Steinhardt said “it appears Fresno is first.”

The system is being tested or is about to be at airports from Boston’s Logan to Oakland International, Iceland’s Keflavik Airport and Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

The system works by matching features of passengers to pictures in the database at 26 points on the face. When a certain percentage is reached, the technology makes a match and an alarm sounds.

“It goes whoop, whoop, whoop,” Miller said.

So far, she said, all the matches have been false. Cadle said one of Pelco’s own executives set it off once because his picture somehow was in the database.

These events point out the problem with face recognition, Steinhardt said. He said there are too many false readings. The reason is that the technology is subject to too many variables: “Aging makes a difference. Facial hair makes a difference. Whether you wear sunglasses makes a difference.”

He said there is not an adequate database of terrorists available to authorities. Referring to Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski, he said, “until they committed their acts, we didn’t have photos of them.”

Pictures of the 19 terrorists suspected of crashing planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside were not gathered until after the fact.

“The probability of success is very, very low,” Steinhardt said. “The probability of invading people’s privacy is very, very high.”

He said the ACLU has not received any complaints from people going through the screening process in Fresno, which serves 1.2 million passengers a year and offers 46 flights daily on seven airlines.

Cadle said his company has stationed officials to monitor the system at the airport to ensure people are not unduly inconvenienced. He said that if the alarm sounds, the person is asked to go through a second time. Then, the technology presents a score showing how close the person’s face matches the picture in the database.

Miller said some passengers have been questioned, but all were let go. And none was seriously inconvenienced.

Pelco chose Fresno for the test, Cadle said, because of its proximity to company offices.