CBP Expands Biometric Screening to JFK Airport

The US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) is expanding its use of facial recognition at airports. Such a system has now been implemented at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York.

The move appears to be a limited expansion of the system first tested at Virginia’s Dulles International Airport. The pilot project wrapped up last summer, with the CBP and partner Unisys expressing interest in expanding the system to other airports; thus it has now arrived at JFK, but at present the plan is to use the system only with US citizens and travelers under the Visa Waiver Program. With respect to the latter, the development should help the authorities to move toward compliance with tightened regulations in the wake of last fall’s Paris terror attacks.

Indeed, unlike most other airport deployments of biometric passenger screening, the CBP’s initiative seems primarily aimed at improving security, with little attention paid to the benefits such technology can offer in processing efficiency. Fox 5 New York resorts that the CBP “claims the biometric reader will add little or no delay to the entry process,” a sharp contrast against programs like Aruba Happy Flow, which use biometric identification to speed up the airport security screening process.

Sources: Fox 5 New York, CBS New York

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January 20, 2016 – by Alex Perala