What the TSA Has Planned for Us

in the day. But you know, the TSA came to be right after nine to eleven, and both its establishment, you know, the seeming necessity of it, and the kind of impositions into personal privacy that it made commonplace. We're both harbingers of the very fucked up era we find ourselves in now. And the TSA is an interesting law enforcement agency to me from the perspective of a normal person.

I think they're kind of the least objectionable of our federal law enforce spin agencies, right They at least, I should say, of all of the cops that we have in this country, they're the ones you're least likely to have a serious problem with, right, Like, they're not real cops in the way that most cops are. They don't like ticket or arrest you generally, unless you're one of the startling number of Americans who gets caught with a

loaded handgun trying to go through airport security. Mostly, and I've flown way more often than I want to remember. Mostly my experience with TSA agents is they check your ID, you know, they stare at an X ray machine where your shit goes through it. Sometimes they alert and swab some stuff. But you know, for me, it's usually not that big a deal. For most people, I know it's not that big a deal obviously, you know, the degree to which it's a problem is going to vary widely

depending on whether or not you're a white dude. But that said, still less potential for things going horribly violently wrong and with a lot of police interactions. So I'll give them that. And it's interesting to me that kind of given this fact, the TSA is so hated, not by I think most Americans. I think we're all kind of frustrated by them. We know, you know, they're not great at their jobs. They get caught in tests, letting shit through all the time. It's kind of a pain

in the butt. But there's a chunk of Americans who fucking hate the TSA, and they hate it because of how invasive it is. And it's a little weird if you're a regular person, because going through airport security is still less invasive than like applying for an apartment, which a lot of people do more regularly than they fly, or taking a trip to the DMV, which again a

lot of people do more regularly than they fly. But people, you know, with money, upper middle class and rich people, that's where you really get most of the hate from the TSA. Now, obviously there's some from principled libertarians, and I tend to think they have a point there, but there's a lot of people who really hate the TSA specifically because it's kind of the only law enforcement friction

they deal with on a day to day basis. You know, they live in a neighbor hood where they're not getting pulled over. You know, the cops their job is not to fuck with the people who have money, So the only time they're going to get padded down and deal with that thing that is a pretty common experience for Americans and a lot of cities is when they go through the airport. When they fly, and they also fly

often because they have more money. So I find myself in this interesting position when reporting on the TSA of there's real abuses there, there's a lot of real threats there. The fact that they do get so much up in our business and that we've normalized it is an issue. And at the same time, like I always know when I do something like this, the people who get angriest about whatever I write about the TSA are going to be the worst pieces of shit in the country. So

it's a fun balancing act. Now, obviously, as I'm trying not to gloss over, there are some really good reasons to be pissed at the TSA, like this twenty fifteen story from Denver of several agents who were caught running a groping scam. Basically, one female crew member would point out the men that she found attractive, and a colleague would signal that person out for a pat down, and they basically say, like, oh, it's alerting something around your

growing or inner thighs, so that like she could bottle them. Essentially, Now these people got fired. The TSA went after them when they got caught, but who knows how many people they groped in the interim period. Video in twenty twenty three caught TSA agents at Miami International Airport stealing from passenger bags in the security lines. There's like footage of it. Obviously, the people who do this are going to be very, very stupid, because, like you know, as a tsagent, there's

cameras all over the place. You're in the fucking TSA, and the video is just this guy like reaching his hand into a bag pulling out cash. It's not hard to find headlines that are similar though, going back about as long as the TSA has existed, what interests me more are the massive violations of privacy and the potential involvement of the TSA and their normalization of those invasions of privacy has in the expansion of the survey state.

So this year at CEES twenty twenty four, when we found out the TSA had a booth and they were there to talk about their new facial recognition scanners, Garrison and I had to go check it out, and the interview that we conducted is going to kind of be the heart of this episode, but I wanted to get over a little bit more of a preamble first, So the TSA started testing facial recognition scanners on a voluntary basis at sixteen domestic airports, and I think twenty twenty

two they expanded it to twenty five airports or so last year twenty twenty three, they are in twenty seven now, according to what we were told by a representative, and the goal is for this technology to go nationwide. Obviously, not everyone is thrilled with that idea. And I'm going to quote from a June twenty twenty three article on CBS News. Five US senators sent a letter demanding the

TSA halt the program. You don't have to compromise people's biometric security in order to provide physical security at airports, said Senor ed Marky. Pokowski, who is the TSA representative, says he agrees with senators and that he wants to protect privacy for every passenger. I want to deploy technology that's accurate and doesn't disadvantage anybody. Privacy advocates worry about the lack of regulations around facial recognition and its tendency

to be less accurate with people of color. Most images are deleted after use, but some information is encrypted and retained. For up to twenty four months as part of the ongoing review of how the technology performs. What's left out of that article is that the TSA is also allowed to maintain biometric data taken from non citizens people entering the country from foreign countries, migrants and the like, and

they're able to keep that and share it. It's kind of unclear the extent of that, but they're not bound by the same rules with those people that they are for citizens. And there are other issues as well, as we'll get into. So Garrison and I were with excited to have a chance to chat with a TSA representative. This guy was less excited to see us, and we will get into that story, but before we do, it's time for an ad break and we're back. So Garrison and I show up at the CEES booth and it's

kind of a small one. You might imagine it's about the size of like three normal office cubicles. Maybe there's a couple of tables. There's like a little podium thing

in the front that's got their logo on it. They have some stickers, including one that's like it's like peanut butter is a liquid and it's a cartoon of peanut butter, which I was informed when I commented on it by one of the TSA people that yes, peanut butter is a liquid, which is one of those things that it's both absurd and also like, well, actually, I don't know how else you'd categorize peanut butter if you're the TSA. So I guess it's something I can't have much of

an issue with cream. But is a cream different from a liquid? I don't know. That's for the philosopher to decide. So Garrison and I come up to this booth and there's a guy standing behind the pode. I mean, the way stuff works at CEES is you have generally a mix of actual officers from the company. Sometimes it'll be like a CEO or an executive in the case of

a smaller company. Other times it'll be regular employees or like engineers and stuff who can answer technical questions, and then a bunch of Most of the people that you talk to are like pr reps. I don't know who the guy was that was at the booth when we first showed up, because as soon as we said we wanted to talk about their facial recognition cameras he saw were media, and he instantly did the pr equivalent of throwing his buddy on a grenade. He like backed off.

He was like, let me get something for you. He pulled his coworker over and then he fucking vanished, And I'm going to play you a little bit of audio of that.

better job of evalidating the authenticity of that ID. And then the facial recognition component with a picture still image, taking a picture of the passenger standing in front of the travel document checker podium and then matching that picture of that person standing there live against the credential photo and making the match that way, so we know that the credential is valid, it's it's true, it's accurate. We know that the person standing there is also the person

on the credential. We can verify the boarding status and the screening status of that individual and can provide them with where they should go next for their screening because the officer is able to discern based on all of the information provided at the back end of the monitor that they reviewed.

would face a significant delay. Quote from the article. There was no delay, the spokeswoman said the senator showed his photo ID to the TSA agent in cleared security, so basically he was lied to. Somebody lied and said, you're going to if you don't want to like delayed and maybe miss your flight, you have to submit to a face scan, which is one of the things that privacy

advocates were worried about from the beginning. But you know what, privacy advocates aren't worried about the products and services that support this podcast and we're back, So I think when it gets right down to it, the silliest part of all of this to me is that the TSA isn't even claiming they need to run faces through like some futuristic database of terrorists, right like they want to scan our faces so they know if this like bad guy they're tracking is in the airport in disguised using a

fake passport or something that's not actually what it does. Facial recognition the TSA is using right now at least just takes the place of the TSA guy. You hand your ID before you go put your shit in bins, right like, you know, you go up and before you can go take your stuff out of your bags and put it in those bins. You hand a guy your license, sometimes your license and boarding pass, he looks at it in your face. If you wear at a mask, he tolls you to take it down for a second and

then he lets you go in. Right, that's what the facial recognition scanners are actually doing here. That Washington Post article also cites an anti facial recognition activist, Tijuana Petty, who says that she was told by a TSA agent at the same airport, Reagan, that undergoing facial recognition scanning was not optional. So people are already being told this

is a requirement. And obviously, as a spoiler for where this goes, the bigger, deeper question is like how long is that going to be the case?

But where is the TSA's biometric data or really, where is passenger biometric data actually going to go once the TSA has it?

But in twenty ten this was revealed to be a lie when we gained access to documents that included technical specifications and vendor contracts which indicated the TSA required vendors of these scanners to provide equipment that can store and send images of screen passengers. Now this was supposed to only be in testing mode, but if it can store and send images of screened passengers, it can store and

send images of screened passengers. In twenty twelve, a former TSA agent accused his coworkers of saving nude body images of passengers from the body scanner and making fun of them in back rooms. He said that safeguards were put in place to ensure the agents manning the scanners never saw the people they were scanning outside of the scanner, but that these policies were frequently violated. Basically, every privacy policy they had was frequently violated by agents so that

they could make fun of people's dicks. Right, that's the story. The TSA retired its old scanners the next year, replacing them with a device that showed less detail and particularly provided agents with less clear looks at people's dongs. In twenty twenty one, a TSA agent in Minneapolis was accused by airport police of taking dozens of photos of young

women going through flight screening. The TSA's record here, both in terms of the agency itself and in terms of its employees, is certainly not worse than numerous police departments right or the FBI. This is something to keep in mind. As frustrating as all this stuff is, literally every local and city law enforcement agency has worse cases, and by gods, so do the FEDS could make a case that as frustrating as a lot of this is the TSA is less of a threat to privacy than most other federal

law enforcement agencies. But that's beside the point. For one thing, normalizing facial recognition technology in the airports is a step towards normalizing it everywhere. The data that is gathered will not always be deleted, and more to the point, there's no way to know that the system isn't going to expand in directions that we all find deeply uncomfortable as it goes on. That's why you kind of have to nip this stuff in the bud, especially since they're not

really promising extra security here. When you look at the scandals of the TSA, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they'll be getting tested by some other law enforcement agency to see if they can sneak shit through, right, and the TSAO let a bunch of guns or a fake bomb or whatever through because people aren't paying attention. Facial scanners aren't going to catch that, and it's kind of unclear to me what they are

going to catch. My other bigger issue is that even though they say they're going to throw away biometric data, they're not going to keep it more than twenty four hours outside of special situations, which they do kind of leave themselves an end there. The fact that they say they're deleting this stuff doesn't mean they are going to delete that stuff. And I brought up this troubling history of lack of respect for privacy, violations of privacy by TSA agents in the past within the context of this

new system. And I want to play Carter's answer for you.

opt out of. And I do partly wonder how much of that is them looking for a way to get more data on people, maybe even to share to other law enforcement agencies, and how much of that is kind of the same reason all a lot of you know, AI style technology and kind of facial recognition does sort of fall under that umbrella. If you're going to have a general intelligence, one thing it has to be able

to do is recognize people's faces. So it is a piece of that and I think that, just like a lot of other applications of that kind of technology, are inevitably used to cut workforces. That's kind of probably the chief thing the TSA is looking to use it to do. Right, If you can replace the guy who has to look at your idea, or at least most of them, with facial recognition scanners that do the same thing, then you can save on your budget. Right now. The downside of that,

maybe to us. The upside is it could be faster. The downside, of course, is there's a really good chance it won't be. The robot will be even more racist than an ESA agent might be. You know, it's one less chance to deal with a human with whom you might be able to talk something through. Anyway. Well, I'll see where this goes, but for today, this has been it could happen here, and I have been Robert Evans.