Brandi Vincent reports how Customs and Border Protection claims to be using facial recognition technology these days:
Today, Hardin said the agency’s main use for facial recognition is to confirm that people are who they say they are as they move in, out and around the nation.
“It’s a huge advantage for us now, not just because the machine can perform better than the human in the actual matching, but also because it frees up the person to do other law enforcement activities in a small amount of time, which is really all they have,” he said.
Benji Hutchinson, vice president of federal operations at the information technology company NEC Corporation, also differentiated between how facial recognition has come to be used across law enforcement versus how Hardin and others are implementing it across immigration services. Hutchinson said it’s used in family reunification to identify matches of children that have been kidnapped, it helps dispel people who are wrongfully convicted and it supports officials in developing investigatory leads.
Read more on NextGov.
Sounds so benign when you put it that way, doesn’t it?