He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
Facial recognition probably relies on visible wavelengths, but you could probably train a neural network to plausibly convert an IR image to visible if paired with a visible light image of the unmasked portion. While generated images on their own aren’t useful for recognition, I think an IR image would probably give enough information to make the generation useful.
All face recognition is unreliable though, so no one, especially not a government agency, should use it as a single point of proof about the actual identity of the photographed person.
TSA and Customs both scan your face instead of your ID/ passport now for adults. It seems like the government has confidence in it?
They know who you claim to be and are checking whether your face matches that passport photo. They’re not just letting anyone in who looks like one of the 330M Americans.