Two people were arrested for allegedly conducting a'hazardous drone operation' near a Massachusetts airport as people in New Jersey demand answers for similar sightings. Robert Duffy, 42, of Charlestown, and Jeremy Folcik, 32, of Bridgewater, were taken into custody Saturday evening after flying an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) near Boston's Logan Airport. The incident began at 4.30pm ET when a police officer specializing in real-time crime surveillance detected the UAS, which was smaller than the crafts being reported in New Jersey. 'Leveraging advanced UAS monitoring technology, the Officer identified the drone's location, altitude, flight history, and the operators' position on Long Island,' which is located in the Boston Harbor on the approach to the airport, the department added. Officers were dispatched to that location and found three individuals inside the decommissioned Long Island Health Campus, finding a drone inside a backpack carried by Duffy.

Americans will soon be subjected to facial recognition screening in airports as a new program that is quietly rolling out the technology to 400 locations across the US. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is'in the beginning stages of integrating automated facial recognition capability' to current systems that scan flyers' credentials but won't be fully operational until 2030 or 2040. The upgrade, which claims to capture'minimum data' will match the traveler's face to their identification document, flight status and vetting status - and the facial recognition system is already used at 25 airports. While TSA touts the program as a way to'improve security effectiveness and efficiency,' US government officials have called it'a precursor to a full-blown national surveillance state.' Americans will soon be subjected to facial recognition screening in airports as a new program that is quietly rolling out the technology to 400 locations across the US.

In November, voters in Bellingham, Washington, passed a ballot measure banning government use of face recognition technology. It added to a streak of such laws that started with San Francisco in 2019 and now number around two dozen. The spread of such bans has inspired hope from campaigners and policy experts of a turn against an artificial intelligence technology that can lead to invasions of privacy or even wrongful arrest. Such feelings got a boost when Facebook unexpectedly announced on the day of the Bellingham vote that it would shutter its own face recognition system for identifying people in photos and videos, due to "growing societal concerns." Yet a few months earlier and about 100 miles from Bellingham, the commission that runs Seattle-Tacoma International Airport passed its own face recognition restrictions that leave airlines free to use the technology for functions like bag drop and check in, although it promised to provide some oversight and barred the technology's use by port police.

Facial-recognition algorithms from Los Angeles startup TrueFace are good enough that the US Air Force uses them to speed security checks at base entrances. But CEO Shaun Moore says he's facing a new question: How good is TrueFace's technology when people are wearing face masks? "It's something we don't know yet because it's not been deployed in that environment," Moore says. His engineers are testing their technology on masked faces and are hurriedly gathering images of masked faces to tune their machine-learning algorithms for pandemic times. Facial recognition has become more widespread and accurate in recent years, as an artificial intelligence technology called deep learning made computers much better at interpreting images.

The'biometric verification of identities' of all travelers crossing US borders is set for a 2021 start date, with Homeland Security scrambling to get the system in place after Trump issued an executive order in March 2017 expediting the process

Many airports hope to start using biometric scanners in lieu of passports to identify travelers. Buzz60's Tony Spitz has the details. The next time you go to the airport you might notice something different as part of the security process: A machine scanning your face to verify your identity. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been working with airlines to implement biometric face scanners in domestic airports to better streamline security. But how does the process work?

If you board a flight out of the United States four years from now, chances are the government is going to scan your face -- an ambitious timeline that has privacy experts reeling. That's according to a recent Department of Homeland Security report, which says that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to dramatically expand its Biometric Exit program to cover 97 percent of outbound air passengers within four years. Through this program, which was already in place in 15 U.S. airports at the end of 2018, passengers have their faces scanned by cameras before boarding flights out of the nation. If the AI-powered system determines that the photo doesn't match one on file, CBP officials can look into it. The goal of these airport face scans is purportedly to catch people who have overstayed their visas, but civil liberties expert Edward Hasbrouck sees them as potentially giving the government increased control over American citizens.

The facial recognition technology the US is testing for airports has caught its first imposter merely three days after Washington Dulles International started using it. According to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a 26-year-old man from Sao Paulo, Brazil successfully fooled people with a French passport until he presented it to a Dulles officer who used the new facial comparison biometric technology. The system determined that his face wasn't a match with the person in the passport, and he was sent for a comprehensive check, which revealed the Republic of Congo ID hidden inside his shoe. While privacy advocates are concerned that the technology could be used to track people and could put law-abiding citizens and visitors it can't recognize in trouble, CBP believes it will significantly bolster airport security and also speed up processing time for travelers. According to The Star, it already reduced international travelers' wait times by four minutes at the Mineta San Jose International Airport. Dulles first tested the use of facial recognition as a security measure back in 2015, but it has only just implemented the fledgling technology on August 20th.