So, grift for a private contractor, but otherwise no change to the status quo. How efficient.

The festival of bad ideas continues. Despite facial recognition having proven over and over again it’s not really the solution to speedy ID verification that far too many people think it is, government agencies (along with retailers, sports arenas, and bored billionaires) seem to believe the real problem is that there just hasn’t been enough failure.

In 2021, facial recognition tech used by the DHS and its components scanned more than 23 million people. While the number of inputs was depressingly impressive, the end result of all this biometric gathering was merely disappointing:

The report indicates that the system caught no imposters traveling through airports last year and fewer than 100 new pedestrian imposters.

The CBP’s numbers were even worse. More than 50 million face scans between 2018 and 2021, with only a total of 292 imposters caught by the always-on surveillance.