After five years of foot-dragging in responding to our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has finally released the pitch it made to the Future Travel Experience airline industry conference in 2019 on why airlines and airport operators should “partner” with CBP on automated facial recognition of airline passengers.

CBP claims in its presentation that “THIS IS *NOT* A SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM”. Its vision, however, is for CBP’s Traveler Verification Service (TVS) facial recognition system to provide automated identification of travelers at every stage of their journeys.

Airlines and airport operators won’t need to operate their own facial recognition software or databases. CBP will do that for them, allowing them to use TVS (which “integrates into airport infrastructure”, CBP boasts) for any of their business process automation, traveler profiling, personalized pricing, etc. purposes. Airlines and airport operators won’t need to store mug shots, since CBP will re-identify travelers for them as often as they want.

And that’s not all. The TVS facial recognition service will also be made available to cruise lines, bus companies, etc., to automatically identify travelers using all modes of transportation:

CBP will use a traveler’s face as the primary way of identifying the traveler…. This will create the opportunity for CBP to transform air travel by enabling all parties in the travel system to match travelers to their data via biometrics, thus unlocking benefits that… enhances the entire traveler experience.

The CBP “Biometric Pathway” will utilize biometrics to streamline passenger processes throughout the air travel continuum, and will provide airport and airline entities with the opportunity to validate identities against DHS information systems using the data available. CBP will partner with airlines, airports, and TSA to build a device independent, vendor neutral back­end system called the Traveler Verification Service (TVS) that allows for private sector investment in front end infrastructure, such as self­service baggage drop off kiosks, facial recognition self­boarding gates, and other equipment; this service will ultimately enable a biometric­ based entry/exit system to provide significant benefits to air travel partners…. The TVS will also be able to support future biometric deployments in the land and sea environments and throughout the traveler continuum. Figure 4 shows the different environments and touchpoints that will interact with the TVS.

Let’s make a deal”, CBP says to airlines and airport operators. “You provide the camera infrastructure embedded in passenger terminals at airports, and we’ll provide the facial recognition service.” It’s a Faustian bargain in which travelers are the losers, but already by 2019 many airlines and airports had taken CBP up on its offer. In the five years since, many more airlines and airports have joined CBP as collaborators in traveler identification, surveillance, and tracking.

We’re not surprised. All of this confirms what we’ve been saying about the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to identify travelers (or force us to identify ourselves or submit to automated identification) for surveillance and control, and airlines and airports that want to identify and track travelers for commercial purposes.

Meanwhile, CBP has posted a jumbled and unindexed collection of additional documents about its facial recognition system in its electronic FOIA reading room.

These files about facial recognition were quietly posted by CBP in April of 2024, but we weren’t notified until six months later that these were intended to constitute a partial response to the FOIA request we made in 2018 for these and other related records. To date, we’ve been given no explanation for the belated notice or of when, if ever, we can expect to receive the rest of the records we requested. Whenever three or more individuals or entities request the same records, a Federal agency is required by FOIA to post the responsive recrods in its FOIA Reading Room. We assume that this means that at least two other individuals or organizations (possibly the ACLU and EPIC) later made requests overlapping with ours.

Each of the PDF files posted by CBP contains a concatenation in seemingly random order of PDFs generated from numerous underlying unnamed records found in unspecified locations in CBP files. This method of release appears calculated to minimize the usefulness of these files.

We’ve extracted some excerpts from these files, as discussed below, that may be helpful to US citizens who don’t want to submit to facial recognition in airports.

There are no publicly-disclosed rules requiring US citizens to submit to mug shots as a condition of air travel, but neither are there any publicly-disclosed rules — other than, of course, the Fourth Amendment and the laws requiring airlines to operate as common carriers and accept all would-be passengers — prohibiting airlines, airport operators, CBP, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), or their contractors  from requiring travelers to be photographed as a condition of carriage.

CBP’s (internal, non-binding, previously undisclosed) standard operating procedures and training materials instruct CBP staff, contractors, and airline  and airport “partners” that US citizens can opt out of facial recognition and must not be denied passage for doing so.

According to a CBP training presentation, “If a U.S. citizen refuses to participate, allow the traveler to bypass the TVS camera and verify their identity manually. Allow the traveler to board.”

In practice, both government agents and travel industry staff and contractors often say or imply that facial recognition is required as a condition of carriage, even for US citizens.

Just say no! It may help to carry and show them copies of these documents if they won’t let you opt out:

• CBP Biometric Air Exit: Standard Operating Procedures (excerpt on opt-outs)
• Memorandum for CBP Field Operations Directors: US Citizen Opt Outs of Facial Comparison
• CBP Training: Exception Processing for U.S. Citizen Travelers and Diplomats
• CBP Simplified Arrival Training: Guidelines for Photo Capture

CBP training for facial photo capture and storage for staff, contractors, and industry partners says that, for US citizens who opt out, “If the camera has automatically taken a photo, you must delete it”. In practice, wearing a mask in the airport, and lowering it only when you are sure you aren’t being phtographed, may help reduce the chances that your photo will be taken before you are even aware of the camera or given a chance to opt out.