Face-first into dystopia

Flying into Dallas Fort Worth International Airport from Mexico in December, I queued in the immigration line for US citizens and was taken aback when – rather than request my passport – the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent simply instructed me to look at the camera and then pronounced my first name: “Maria?”

Feeling an abrupt violation of my entire bodily autonomy, I nodded – and reckoned that it was perhaps easy to lose track of the rapid dystopian devolution of the world when one had spent the past two years hanging out on a beach in Oaxaca.

A CBP poster promoting the transparent infringement on privacy was affixed to the airport wall, and featured a grey-haired man smiling suavely into the camera along with the text: “Our policies on privacy couldn’t be more transparent. Biometric Facial Comparison. Faster meets more secure.”

In my case, the process was not so fast, as I had to hand over my passport for physical scrutiny after I raised the agent’s suspicions by being unable to answer in any remotely coherent fashion the question of where I lived. My document was placed in a clunky plastic box, which I then had to cart over to a secondary inspection area for further interrogation. Channelling all of my energy into being as coherent and unsuspicious as possible, I was eventually sent on my way, the nation as secure as ever.

A special “Biometrics” section on the website of the CBP – a division of the US Department of Homeland Security – invites us to “Say hello to the new face of speed, security and safety”, and explains that “the use of Biometrics stems from the 9/11 Commission Report which instructed CBP to biometrically confirm visitors in and out of the US”.

Biometric facial comparison technology is currently “deployed at 205 airports for air entry” and 32 for departure, as well as at 12 seaports and at “virtually all pedestrian and bus processing facilities” along the country’s northern and southern land frontiers. Between June 2017 and November 2021, more than 117 million people got to “say hello” to Big Brother at the US border.

As befitting any good business, CBP is concerned with customer satisfaction, and the website offers two samples of “What travellers say about CBP Biometrics”. The first is from an anonymous “airline traveller” who applauds this “fantastic invention” and contends that “the more the better”. The second is from a “cruise line traveller” who gushes: “We did this today, let me say it is awesome!! Through customs and outside in under one minute.”

But not everyone has such rave reviews of the biometric surveillance technology that is speedily conquering the planet with little oversight – and countless opportunities for the evisceration of civil liberties.

Consider, for example, a 2020 dispatch from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), titled: “Wrongfully Arrested Because Face Recognition Can’t Tell Black People Apart”. It tells the story of Robert Williams, a Black man locked up in Detroit due to an error in the face recognition software used by Michigan State Police. He was subsequently released, but the episode had lasting repercussions – including on his two small daughters, who, after witnessing the arrest, had “even taken to playing games involving arresting people, and … accused Robert of stealing things from them”.

As if Black people did not already have enough to deal with in a country that effectively criminalises Blackness – and where cops have proven themselves accordingly trigger-happy.

Excerpted from: ‘Biometric surveillance: Face-first plunge into dystopia’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com