Here's how facial recognition is changing travel through Bay Area airports

For speedier entry into the U.S., your most important travel tool is now your face. All three of the Bay Area's airports are deploying new facial recognition technology, called Simplified Arrival, to screen incoming international passengers and testing it in San Jose to track some departing passengers too. "You get instant verification," said James Hutton of U.S. Customs and Border Protection on a recent morning as hordes of bleary-eyed travelers streamed through San Francisco International Airport's immigration control booths and paused for a snapshot. "The camera does immediate identification," he said, "telling the customs officer that, 'This is the person that's in front of me.' " The old approach we've long relied on -- passport scanning and stamping -- has vanished. Instead, in a major overhaul of its strategy of processing travelers, government officials have installed cameras next to customs officers at all 238 international airports, 13 seaports and every pedestrian and bus processing facility along the nation's northern and southern land borders.