Security News > 2020 > March > ACLU Sues Over U.S. Airport Facial-Recognition Technology
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit the Department of Homeland Security over its use of facial recognition technology in airports, decrying the government's "Extraordinarily dangerous path" to normalize facial surveillance as well as its secrecy in making specific details of the plan public.
"Our lawsuit seeks to make public the government's contracts with airlines, airports, and other entities pertaining to the use of face recognition at the airport and the border; policies and procedures concerning the acquisition, processing, and retention of our biometric information; and analyses of the effectiveness of facial recognition technology," Ashley Gorski, a state attorney for the ACLU, wrote in a blog post about the lawsuit published online Thursday.
The ACLU also wants the government to provide more clarity on how American citizens can opt out of using the facial surveillance system when passing through an airport that uses it, which the organization said is not always the case nor are people aware of how they can enact this option.
The service involves photographing travelers during entry or exit from the United States and using facial recognition technology to compare those photographs with images from government records, according to the ACLU. Currently, 22 airports are using the TVS program, which as of June 2019 had scanned the faces of more than 20 million travelers entering and exiting the country, the civil-liberties union said.
In its filing, the ACLU said DHS activity when it comes to TVS has shown a pattern of trying to normalize facial surveillance, allowing them to practice "Undetectable, persistent government surveillance on a massive scale."