Senators urge DHS to evaluate budding facial recognition ‘regime’ at airports

Twelve senators on Wednesday signed a letter addressed to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, urging investigation into the Transportation Security Administration’s facial recognition technology “regime” as it looks to expand to more airports.

Leading the bipartisan group was Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon. Their call for investigation follows TSA plans to introduce credential authentication technologies, or CAT units equipped with facial recognition and deployed at airport security checkpoints, at more than 430 airports.

Units without facial recognition capabilities, which can spot fraudulent documents, are already used at airports. Senators wrote that they’re concerned, however, that the technology’s expansion is progressing without oversight.

“This technology will soon be in use at hundreds of major and mid-size airports without an independent evaluation of the technology’s precision or an audit of whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect passenger privacy,” the letter reads. 

The letter references a statement made by TSA Administrator David Pekoske at the South by Southwest conference last year in Austin, Texas, that “we will get to the point where we will require biometrics across the board.”

“If that happens, this program could become one of the largest federal surveillance databases overnight without authorization from Congress,” the letter continues.

The expansion would come as a record number of Americans are expected to travel through the country’s airports this upcoming holiday season, the senators said, meaning more people may be subjected to facial recognition technology than ever before.

This is not the first effort by lawmakers to wrangle TSA efforts to deploy facial recognition technology. Last year, Merkley introduced the Traveler Privacy Protection Act, a bill that would prohibit TSA from using facial recognition or matching technology in airports. The bill, which received an endorsement from the American Civil Liberties Union, was referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, but has not made it out of the committee this year.