Face to Face with Stepped-Up Security
New Airport Scanner Compares Passengers' Faces to Terrorists'

A diagram shows the face recognition system scanning airport visitors. Graphic: Pelco

Dec. 6, 2001 -- At central California's Fresno Yosemite International Airport, as passengers clear the metal detector, they see their own picture on a video monitor. That's nothing unusual -- but then, a shiny, five-foot-tall metal cylinder under the monitor starts talking to them: "Please stop. Look forward. Thank you."

The cylinder -- trade name, Pelco DX 9000 Plus -- is a face recognition device. It takes a series of pictures of the often surprised-looking passengers, then compares those pictures to its database of several hundred known terrorists. It's the first full deployment of such a system at a U.S. airport, as NPR's Andy Bowers reports for All Things Considered.

The Pelco face recognition device. Photo: Pelco

Ron Cadle, vice president of the company that makes the system, says it works by taking detailed measurements of certain facial features between the forehead and chin, then using the measurements to produce a unique profile that's "like a fingerprint of your face." Adding long hair, a mustache or glasses wouldn't fool the device, Cadle says; nor would a simple nose job, though radical plastic surgery might.

Bowers watched a test-run of the system, and describes what he saw. "To show what would happen if certain al Qaeda members tried to breach Fresno security, an employee of the Pelco Company walks up to the cylinder holding a photograph of Osama bin Laden in front of his own face." The machine emits a whooping sound and announces "Please stop." A computer on a nearby desk reports a suspected match between the picture it just captured and a mug shot of the world's most wanted man.

Some civil libertarians are troubled by the technology. Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, says one flaw with this system is that many terrorists -- such as most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- weren't even known to authorities until they committed their crimes. "So, the problem is that the chances of catching the bad guys here are very, very slim," Steinhardt says, "but there's a significant chance that we're going to finger innocent people who are going to be at the minimum hassled, at worst searched and perhaps arrested, while we really delude ourselves about the security benefit of this."

Though Fresno is the first to install the system, several bigger airports are starting tests, Bowers reports. Steinhardt also worries that once such systems are more common in airports, their use could be greatly expanded. "I think inevitably what's going to happen is that we're going to match it up against other databases, and the airports are going to become sort of an internal checkpoint, even for domestic flights. So that we're not only talking about people with outstanding criminal warrants, but deadbeat dads, or people who are late on their taxes, or young men who haven't registered for the military. All those sorts of things now become possible with the use of this technology."

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Other Resources

• Read the latest airport security laws in the text of the
   Airport Security Federalization Act of 2001.

• Visit the Federal Aviation Administration's
    Airport Security Certification List.

• See Aviation Week's Web site on
   Homeland Security & Defense.

• Check out the latest travel news on
   Virtually There - Travel Bulletin Central's Web site.