Airport Passenger Processing Technology: A Biometric Airport Journey

A passengers’ traveling journey throughout the airport is anything but simple. A passenger goes through numerous hoops and hurdles before safely boarding the aircraft. Many airports today are implementing isolated solutions for passenger processing. Some of these technologies include automated self-service kiosks and bag tag, self-service bag drop-off, along with automated self-service gates for boarding and border control. These solutions can be integrated with biometric systems to enhance passenger handling. This thesis analyzes the current passenger processing technology implemented at airports around the world and their associated challenges that passengers face. A new passenger processing technology called a biometric single token identification (ID) is presented as a solution to help alleviate current issues. By using a medium-sized international airport as a case study, the results show that a single token ID is beneficial to the time it takes to process a passenger. Furthermore, it demonstrates that implementation of a single token ID with self-service technology can provide enhanced passenger travel experience, improving operational process efficiency, all while ensuring safety and security

Suspicious Infrastructures: Automating Border Control and the Multiplication of Mistrust through Biometric E-Gates

In recent years, practices of control at EU border crossing points have been progressively transferred to electronic gates, or what is often called Automated Border Control (ABC). In this paper, I unpack ABC’s infrastructure and argue that e-gates enact three distinct modes of suspicion: First, they address the mistrust towards travellers’ identity claims and promise to better detect identity fraud and the misuse of other persons’ ID documents. Second, they replace the manual work of border guards, which has itself been suspected of being unreliable and error-prone. Third, however, ABC has also raised suspicion among border guards and data protection advocates alike, due to its opaque mode of operation. To examine how these three modes of suspicion unfold, I first show that automating border control relies on a heterogeneous entanglement of material devices, calculative practices and new forms of data. Drawing on document analysis and participant observation of ABC, I then trace the socio-technical controversies that its proliferation has sparked, arguing that e-gates have significantly reconfigured how suspicion at the EU borders is enacted and led to a multiplication of mistrust in the European border regime

INQUIRY OVER BIOMETRIC PASSPORTS

The biometric passport is the new type of passports, which from October 2006 are required for entry to the US by the VWP (see also later on the section Types of biometric passports). The passports must contain an RFID-chip, which holds digitized information about the passport’s owner. The individual government decides much of the specific digital information, but certain demands are made by the US and the ICAO standard.biometric, rfid, icao, vwp

Biometric ID Cybersurveillance

The implementation of a universal digitalized biometric ID system risks normalizing and integrating mass cybersurveillance into the daily lives of ordinary citizens. ID documents such as driver’s licenses in some states and all U.S. passports are now implanted with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. In recent proposals, Congress has considered implementing a digitalized biometric identification card—such as a biometric-based, “high-tech” Social Security Card—which may eventually lead to the development of a universal multimodal biometric database (e.g., the collection of the digital photos, fingerprints, iris scans, and/or DNA of all citizens and noncitizens). Such “hightech” IDs, once merged with GPS-RFID tracking technology, would facilitate exponentially a convergence of cybersurveillance-body tracking and data surveillance, or dataveillance-biographical tracking. Yet, the existing Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is tethered to a “reasonable expectation of privacy” test that does not appear to restrain the comprehensive, suspicionless amassing of databases that concern the biometric data, movements, activities, and other personally identifiable information of individuals. In this Article, I initiate a project to explore the constitutional and other legal consequences of big data cybersurveillance generally and mass biometric dataveillance in particular. This Article focuses on how biometric data is increasingly incorporated into identity management systems through bureaucratized cybersurveillance or the normalization of cybersurveillance through the daily course of business and integrated forms of governance