US citizen here. I recently returned from my first international travel in a few years, and I was unpleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get back into the country.
In the returning citizens line, everyone was directed by an officer to one of three tablets each on a stand about 3-4 feet high. You stuck your face in the right spot for the camera and the tablet turned green. And that was it, free to go. No conversation with a human about where you went, no human verifying your passport, no need for the passport at all. Just a face scan (presumably matching a database of digitized passport photos) and you’re done.
Makes me wonder what the bar is for various local law enforcement or different federal agencies to get access to the database and hook in with surveillance cameras.
That mentality (and I’ve been guilty of it myself) is part of the problem. The belief or perspective that if it isn’t happening to me, near me or in places where I can see … then it doesn’t affect me.
If others are reporting it, showing it, displaying it, talking about it in another part of the country, then it should ring alarm bells for all of us. Just because it isn’t happening to us, it does not mean that there is no problem.
The worry is that once we all normalize this kind of behaviour and control by government and public institutions, eventually over time, the more we allow it all … it will eventually affect us directly as well.
It all harkens back to the poem written by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller in Post WWII Germany … ‘First They Came’
If we sit idly by and watch them bully immigrants, then eventually they’ll move on to another minority, then another, then another and eventually it will become the group of people you are seen as being part of.
Oh you’ve misread my mentality. I’m very concerned about all of the terrible things happening in the country and I have plenty of friends in marginalized groups to believe.
The point of this post was actually about how creepy it is that USCIS has fully embraced facial recognition and feels it has a sufficiently low error rate to use it with no secondary validation for approving citizen reentry (at least at airports where all passengers are sufficiently well off to afford plane tickets). That gives a lot of credibility to otherwise unsubstantiated concerns about government surveillance and the consequences thereof.