THE NEW YORK TIMES – René Rodriguez accompanied his daughter to Ireland last month as she prepared for a fall semester abroad.
As he boarded the flight from Boston Logan International Airport to Shannon Airport, he found two federal officers in the Jetway taking photos of passengers with their cellphones.
“It was an ambush,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It really caught me by surprise, and really I felt violated in a lot of ways, because I didn’t give permission.”
[EDITOR’S NOTE: It is never legally required to get your permission before taking your picture in public.]
Those officers were part of an expanding federal program called biometric exit, which involves taking photos of passengers leaving the country and applying facial recognition technology to ensure that travelers match their identification documents. This process is known as facial comparison.
For foreign nationals, the photos can remain in a database for up to 75 years. For U.S. citizens, the photos are matched to their passports and deleted within 12 hours, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
On Sept. 15, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs approved a proposed rule, clearing the way for the program to expand to all airports, seaports and land crossings across the country.
While the approval formalized the expansion, in reality the program has been growing for years and is now in use at dozens of airports and at seaports. It has not yet been put in place at most points of entry on land, but the rule will permit that as well, said Daniel P. Tanciar, a deputy director at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Mr. Tanciar said that the process usually takes place at the airport boarding gate, using a camera on a stick bought by the airlines. For some smaller foreign airlines, C.B.P. will provide officers with cellphones equipped with a specific application to take the photos in place of the machines.
Keith Jeffries, the former federal security director of Los Angeles International Airport, said that because people’s appearances can change from the time they take their passport photos, biometric exit is a way to double-check a passenger’s identity …
