A case study and post-pandemic holday travel horror story: https://papersplease.org/wp/2022/11/23/the-airport-of-the-future-is-the-airport-of-today-and-thats-not-good/ Today, the day before Thanksgiving, will probably be the busiest day for air travel in the USA since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. If you are flying this week for the first time in three years, what will you see that has changed? Unfortunately, many of the most significant changes made during the pandemic are deliberately invisible—which is part of that makes them so evil. During the pandemic, largely unnoticed, the dystopian surveillance-by design airport of the future that we've been worried and warning about for many years has become, in many places, the airport of today. While travelers were sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, airports have taken advantage of the opportunity to move ahead with expansion and renovation projects. While passenger traffic was reduced, and terminals and other airport facilities were operating well below capacity, disruptions due to construction could be minimized. A characteristic feature of almost all new or newly-renovated major airports in the U.S. and around the world is that they are designed and built on the assumption that all passengers' movements within the airport will be tracked at all times, and that all phases of passenger processing will be carried out automatically using facial recognition. In the airport of the future, or in a growing number of present-day airports, there's no need for a government agency or airline that wants to use facial recognition to install cameras or data links for that purpose. As in the new International Arrivals Facility at Sea-Tac Airport, which opened this year, the cameras and connectivity are built into the facility as common-use public-private infrastructure shared by airlines, government agencies, and the operator of the airport—whether that's a public agency (as with almost all U.S. airports) or a private company (as with many foreign airports). This integrated and as-invisible-as-possible surveillance infrastructure exemplifies the malign convergence of interests between government agencies that want to identify and track travelers for pre-crime predictive profiling and control, and airlines and airports (motivated by business efficiency even when they are operated by instrumentalities of state and local governments) that want to use the same hardware, and data from government ID databases, for business process automation and revenue maximization. That malign convergence of interests extends to an interest in making surveillance tech inconspicuous and, if it is visible at all, making it appear normal and unavoidable. Neither government agencies nor travel companies nor airports want travelers to notice or question what is happening, or want to take responsibility for it. If travelers ask questions, airlines want to be able to answer, “the Federal government made us do it'', even if that isn't true (as it unquestionably isn't for U.S. citizens or any domestic flyers within the U.S.). The integration of facial recognition into the airport structure makes these surveillance systems and practices much less visible—by design—than retrofitted or standalone surveillance cameras. Their positioning along the flow of passengers from airport entrance to aircraft door makes it almost impossible to pass through the airport and board a plane without being photographed, identified, and tracked. Opting out is, in these new airports and terminals, a purely theoretical option for travelers who already know their rights (without being given notice of them), figure out how to assert them (again without notice) and who are willing to put up with additional questioning, search, and/or delay. More: https://papersplease.org/wp/2022/11/23/the-airport-of-the-future-is-the-airport-of-today-and-thats-not-good/
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