Federal facial recognition for babies? How the border is fueling a surveillance state

Tech that recognizes faces, enabling the user to permanently track, say, you, is becoming ubiquitous — now a fixture of airport security, with stadiums the next big “market.” However, the full potential of facial recognition is unrealized due to a simple obstacle: children.

Now, in the name of border security, that may be about to change — for everyone.

“Facial recognition technology (FRT) has traditionally not been applied to children,” observed the MIT Technology Review in an extensive report this month, “largely because training data sets of real children’s faces are few and far between, and consist of either low-quality images drawn from the internet or small sample sizes with little diversity. Such limitations reflect the significant sensitivities regarding privacy and consent when it comes to minors.”

Democrats have abandoned the party’s historically anti-corporate, pro-civil-liberties core, which considered the strong central government to be the people’s only bulwark against systematic injustice and exploitation.

But the current thinking at the Department of Homeland Security, aired over the summer during at least one conference, suggests bureaucrats are committed to breaking the taboo on minor facial recognition. Despite denials that minor scanning is taking place, insiders approached by the Review warned that the practice could already be under way.

At June’s Federal Identity Forum and Exposition, a yearly confab drawing together government employees and contractors in what’s called the “identity management” space, the assistant director of the DHS Office of Biometric Identity Management — one John Boyd — openly speculated that the agency’s so-called craniofacial structural progression initiative could soon be applied “down to the infant” at locations where the United States government receives and processes immigrants.

“If we pick up someone from Panama at the southern border at age 4,” he asked, “and then pick them up at age 6, are we going to recognize them?”

But “the border” effectively transcends the line between the U.S. and Mexico stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. Since last year, according to the Review, Customs and Border Protection “has been using a mobile app, CBP One, for asylum seekers to submit biometric data even before they enter the United States. ... After crossing into the United States, migrants submit to collection of more biometric data, including DNA.” Citing a Georgetown Law School report, the Review tallies at least 1.5 million DNA profiles in the CBP One database, “primarily from migrants crossing the border, to law enforcement databases since it began collecting DNA 'from any person in CBP custody subject to fingerprinting' in January 2020.”

In stark terms, the “border” of the United States of America is becoming any place United States government technology digitally harvests the biometric identity of people considered to be entering or exiting its territory or jurisdiction.

The transformation raises intense questions about the constitutionality of the identity-based surveillance and tracking model to which this approach to “border” security applies — one that, it’s all too easy to see, can promptly be scaled to incorporate any and all Americans, especially those targeted politically by the government or singled out for suspicion and enhanced scrutiny.

For those on the political left, the use of the border to feed the biometric borg underscores how much establishment Democrats have abandoned the party’s historically anti-corporate, pro-civil-liberties core, which considered the strong central government to be the people’s only bulwark against systematic injustice and exploitation.

But for those on the political right, who have long considered heightened border security a necessity in reclaiming American sovereignty from established elites bent on flouting the rule of law to strengthen their political and economic interests, the border-to-borg pipeline dramatizes how leading-edge security technology is being used in ways the regime can and does repurpose to nullify constitutional protections for citizens, especially critics of the regime itself.

The DHS told MIT Tech Review it “ensures all technologies, regardless of type, are operated under the established authorities and within the scope of the law” while “protecting the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of all individuals who may be subject to the technology we use to keep the nation safe and secure.” What’s more, according to the statement, it “does not collect facial images from minors under 14 and has no current plans to do so for either operational or research purposes.”

Yet an anonymous former CBP official familiar with immigrant processing centers told the Review that each center he visited “had biometric identity collection, and everybody was going through it” without the facility “separating out children.”