Delta Airlines launches creepy biometric terminal at nation’s busiest airport

Delta Airlines has created the nation’s first biometric air terminal based on facial-recognition software embedded at points throughout its “Terminal F” in Atlanta.

The Atlanta-based carrier announced plans Thursday to bring the same technology to its Detroit hub in 2019.

In partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the TSA, Delta said it unveiled the completed biometric terminal Thursday at the world’s busiest airport in Atlanta.

Customers flying direct to an international destination on Delta, or its partner airlines such as Aeromexico, Air France, KLM or Virgin Atlantic Airways, can breeze through the airport as they are identified by facial-recognition technology. The system starts at the airport curb and follows them to the ticket kiosks, security checkpoints, baggage checks, and all the way to their gate.

While consumers looking to speed up their airport experience will undoubtedly see this as a gift from the technology gods, the convenience will come with a cost, warn privacy advocates. Some predict that the choice to “opt out” of the “service” will at some point result in an added fee and eventually that choice could be taken away all together.

It’s no secret that U.S. corporate giants operating everything from cell phones to grocery stores, subway systems, inter-office security systems and car companies are all looking with envious eyes at biometric technology.

If this sounds creepy, think of the possibility for abuse by governments and/or corporations when combined with other technologies used every day by almost everyone, such as social media, where users broadcast their likes, dislikes, family situations, and post their opinions on issues of the day.

This is conjecture on my part but I don’t see this type of technology resulting in a good outcome for everyday normal people. The airports will make this all about “security” and who among us is not for security? They want us to evaluate the worth of an invasive program like this in a bubble, in isolation, without looking at all of the invasive technologies as a whole, without considering the undeniable human tendency, whether in government or in large corporations, toward “mission creep.” This is where the original mission of a technological advance gets expanded into hitherto unforeseen areas of our lives. It happens all the time.

China is already re-imagining its society along these lines. The city of Beijing is experimenting with a new ‘social scoring’ system under which citizens are rewarded for behaviors approved by the government and punished for attitudes, values and beliefs deemed unproductive or inappropriate.

According to a Beijing government website: “Those who violate the law and lose trust will pay a heavy price.” The government website adds that China will “improve the blacklist system” and residents deemed “untrustworthy” will find themselves “limited everywhere, and difficult to move.”

The business community, including Google, is cooperating with the Chinese government on the social-scoring project, which Beijing plans to have fully implemented by 2020.

This is the point at which the world truly becomes a nightmare society that even Orwell and Huxley could not have imagined, says Patrick Wood, the nation’s foremost expert on the global technocracy movement. He says China is the model for many of the technocrats working in Silicon Valley and their allies in government.

“All the major corporations that are embedded in technology are using one form or another of surveillance technology to monitor their workforce,” Wood told me.

“They all say this is good for business and ‘we’re improving our earnings’ but the technology is draconian in its impact,” he said. “Amazon surveilles its workforce down to how much time they spend in the bathroom.”

This is why many Amazon employees participated in mass protests in the U.K and across Europe, many walking off the job, on Black Friday. They said they were protesting working conditions described as “inhuman” and raised signs that read “We are not robots.”

“These people don’t know what’s going on, they just know they’ve got a job and they’re under pressure, and Amazon makes them cry,” said Wood, who just released a new book, Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order.

“It’s a sign of the times. Everyone is jumping into this stuff but they don’t think beyond their nose in what they are creating, and nobody is really taking a national dialogue to it, to try to sort it out,” Wood said. “Every little company is doing their own thing, the technology is there and they can buy it off the shelf, and it’s like ‘oh we’ve got to stay competitive, everyone else is doing it.'”

That brings us back to Delta Airlines.

If Delta is implementing biometric terminals in Atlanta and Detroit you can bet all the other airlines are working on the same thing.

“None are going to say ‘oh we’re worried about privacy issues.’ They’re all going to jump on it like fleas on a dog,” Wood said. “And then they will point the finger at the other guy when folks start to complain and ask how we got here. They will all end up with a biometric database and every single terminal will be connected to the other terminals.”

Those terminals will be connected with the train or the subway and with the self-driving cabs that await passengers outside the airport, taking them to hotels where more cameras outfitted with facial-recognition software are ready to great them.

“This is exactly what I’ve been warning about for years,” Wood added. “You could just see the train coming down the track and now it’s starting to arrive.”

I asked Wood: What’s the end-game of the technocratic elites, who are collecting more and more data on American citizens in every facet of human activity?

He didn’t hesitate.

“Total domination,” he said. “Total control.”

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Leo Hohmann is a veteran journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.” If you appreciate this type of original, fact-based and independent reporting, please consider a donation of any size to this website. We accept no advertising and are beholden to no one.