Right now there's no in-person scrutiny upon exit, so I don't see how this would cut down the costs.
DHS needs to justify the benefits and costs of creating such a system. That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system, and what failure rate is acceptable?
If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.
While many people overstay their visa, the vast majority are not going to get someone else to depart the country on their passport, which is what this system is supposed to prevent.
Remember, even 10 seconds per passenger adds up. There were 243,195,022 international passengers in the year ending March. Figure 1/2 of them were departures. That's 121 million people.
At 10 seconds per passenger that's 38 years of additional waiting. If we figure everyone's time is worth $7.25/hour then that's about $2.5 million of additional wasted time.
How much fraud do we need to stop to make this time and money worthwhile?
I'd rather spend that money on reducing a much bigger sort of fraud - the tens of billions in wage theft each year.
> If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile.
Well, it's probably not really for safety or security, and they clearly don't give a hoot if you're inconvenienced or not.
Consider instead:
- Government contracts routed to political constituents (follow the money -- we know the millimeter scanners were corruptly funded)
- Tons of ground-truth data for further development and deployment. It'd be interesting to find out if they correlate against images captured by vanilla airport security cameras, as well as the cameras on the roadways or public transportation to the airport, and in rental car lots. This helps answer the question of "do we have to upgrade all the crappy domestic cameras to get ubiquitous surveillance, or can we get away with what's out there now?"
A billion or two spent to catch one or two terrorists isn't the point; actual bad guys are utterly optional, and maybe even a distraction.
I agree with your assessment. But I don't think that's a terrible outcome. Certainly we want to minimize hassle at the airport, but it's easy to imagine biometric solutions for some current sources of hassle -- carrying passports and checking passengers against the no-fly list, for example.
>"That is, is visa overstay travel fraud enough to justify spending $1 billion on a system"
Not sure how this applies specifically to visa-overstays? A visa overstay need not check your facial identification. It just needs to check that your document + visa overstayed the alloted time period or whatever rule it's comprised of.
Sounds like a business rule a code-monkey could implement within a couple programming hours.
Because the article says: "DHS says that airport face scans are designed to verify the identities of travelers as they leave the country and stop impostors traveling under someone else’s identity." and "DHS now claims the program is designed to detect a particular type of fraud defined in this report as “visa overstay travel fraud”"
That's the only justification given for the program.
It's not simply visa overstay. Sidebar 2 explains it as:
> “Visa overstay travel fraud” refers to a situation in which a foreign national wishes to remain in the United States undetected past the expiration of his visa and, to do so, arranges to have a conspirator leave the country in his place using the visa holder’s credentials. This creates an “exit record” in the visa holder’s name, fraudulently leading the government to believe that the visa holder has left the country, when in fact he has remained past the expiration of the visa, or “overstayed.”
That requires some sort of comparison between the documents and the body of the person leaving. It cannot be done in only a couple of programming hours.
If you read the article, it's about someone else using that passport to create an exit record, even though the original person is remaining in the country.
