TSA facial recognition tech is latest security theater absurdity – New York Post

Opinion

editorial

By Post Editorial Board

Get ready for more TSA follies: The agency that oversees our Kafka-esque airport experiences is set to add another layer of security theater.

This time it’s plans for a wide-scale rollout of its controversial facial recognition tech at more than 400 airports.

The tech is purported to take real-time, photo-based biometric data on each traveler so it can be matched against their ID.

Color us skeptical: The Transportation Security Administration is a byword for government ineptitude. 

It’s accidentally published confidential guides to how passenger screening works. 

A Trump-era covert test by the Department of Homeland Security, TSA’s parent, showed that the TSA was letting close to 80% of weapons, drugs and explosives through, echoing pretty much every such exam since TSA’s founding.

Given how committed the Biden DHS is to letting people in — going so far as to let illegal migrants fly without ID — rather than keeping them out, we shudder to think what the failure rate is now. 

Remember: Someone got on a plane with not one but two boxcutters just in November.

This is the agency we’re going to trust to run complex biometric technology correctly? 

And while we generally don’t buy the “privacy concerns” here (airports are public places, after all), it’s hard to trust TSA’s vow that any info collected “will not be used for surveillance or any law enforcement purpose,” when it already got in hot water back in the Bush years for misappropriating airline passenger data and lying to Congress about it. 

Here’s the kicker: TSA estimates the tech could take until 2040 to fully roll out.

Sorry: Sixteen years is an eternity in tech development; it’ll be completely obsolete by then. 

TSA tries to be Big Brother, but its utter incompetence leaves it nothing but a bumbling Big Bubba.