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.
Personally, I’m a brown skinned long haired Native Canadian. I fluently speak English and I’m as Canadian as anyone that’s lived in this country all their lives.
I’ve also done quite a bit of traveling over the years. My wife and I have been too Europe over a dozen times, Caribbean, Asia and South America.
She’s white and always breezes through immigration anywhere. About half the time, I get held up, questioned longer and a few times taken aside to be searched.
My favorite was arriving for a transit stop in Halifax on our way to Toronto. Almost the entire 300 passenger flight was older retirees … all of them white Canadians. They all got through security, but four people were singled out to be searched … myself, a black couple and an Indian woman … we were the only ethnic looking people on the whole flight. The Indian lady was a second generation Canadian who grew up in Toronto and she gave everyone shit and berated them as they made us open up our luggage.
We delayed the flight to Toronto and when we boarded, they all looked at us like it had all been our fault.
This is the reason why I asked about your ethnic background and sex. Racial profiling is a very normal thing in security and immigration … and most people don’t notice it unless you are part of an ethnic group that is considered questionable.
I fully believe racial profiling is real and as a white male I look like the maga demographic and benefit from the institutionalized racism. Although in the particular immigration experience I posted about I was also traveling with someone US-naturalized South Asian-born with heavy accent and someone with dark skin and stereotypical “black hair” and all of us sailed through. So did everyone else in the line with us.
It was a stark contrast to the fascist paramilitary abduction videos we’ve been seeing from all across the country (see !gestapo_usa@lemmy.dbzer0.com). I’m not sure what to think of it.
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.
You make a interesting point but unfortunately facial recognition is known for being racist
This is what I’ve always said about AI and the future of technology … if it’s programmed and being run by racists, misogynists and psychopaths … will it be any surprise if we end up with a racist, misogynistic, psychopathic AI?