The following report is from Tech Explore:
Dubai’s airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, can already feel surreal, with its cavernous duty-free stores, artificial palm trees, gleaming terminals, water cascades and near-Arctic levels of air conditioning.
Now, the key east-west transit hub is rolling out another addition from the realm of science fiction—an iris-scanner that verifies one’s identity and eliminates the need for any human interaction when entering or leaving the country.
It’s the latest artificial intelligence program the United Arab Emirates has launched amid the surging coronavirus pandemic, contact-less technology the government promotes as helping to stem the spread of the virus. But the efforts also have renewed questions about mass surveillance in the federation of seven sheikhdoms, which experts believe has among the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world.
Dubai’s airport started offering the program to all passengers last month. On Sunday, travelers stepped up to an iris scanner after checking in, gave it a good look and breezed through passport control within seconds. Gone were the days of paper tickets or unwieldy phone apps.
In recent years, airports across the world have accelerated their use of timesaving facial recognition technology to move passengers to their flights. But Dubai’s iris scan improves on the more commonplace automated gates seen elsewhere, authorities said, connecting the iris data to the country’s facial recognition databases so the passenger needs no identifying documents or boarding pass. The unusual partnership between long-haul carrier Emirates, owned by a Dubai sovereign wealth fund, and the Dubai immigration office integrates the data and carries travelers from check-in to boarding in one fell swoop, they added.
The future is coming. Now, all the procedures have become ‘smart,’ around five to six seconds.
Major Gen. Obaid Mehayer Bin Suroor. Deputy director of the General Directorate of Residency and Foreign Affairs
But like all facial recognition technology, the program adds to fears of vanishing privacy in the country, which has faced international criticism for targeting journalists and human rights activists.
According to Emirates’ biometric privacy statement, the airline links passengers’ faces with other personally identifying data, including passport and flight information, retaining it for “as long as it is reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it was collected.” The agreement offered few details about how the data will be used and stored, beyond saying that while the company didn’t make copies of passengers’ faces, other personal data “can be processed in other Emirates’ systems.
Bin Suroor stressed that Dubai’s immigration office “completely protects” passengers’ personal data so that “no third party can see it.”
But without more information about how data will be used or stored, biometric technology raises the possibility of misuse, experts say.
Any kind of surveillance technology raises red flags, regardless of what kind of country it’s in. But in a democratic country, if the surveillance technology is used transparently, at least there’s an opportunity to have a public conversation about it.
Jonathan Frankle. A doctoral student in artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Iris scans, requiring people to stare into a camera as though they’re offering a fingerprint, have become more widespread worldwide in recent years as questions have arisen over the accuracy of facial recognition technology. Iris biometrics are considered more reliable than surveillance cameras that scan people’s faces from a distance without their knowledge or consent.
Despite concerns about overzealous surveillance in the UAE, the country’s vast facial recognition network only shows signs of expanding. Last month, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who also serves as Dubai’s ruler, announced the country would begin trials of new facial recognition technology to cut down on paperwork in “some private sector services,” without elaborating.
During the pandemic, the skyscrapper-studded city of Dubai has advanced an array of technological tools to fight the virus in malls and on streets, including disinfectant foggers, thermal cameras and face scans that check for masks and take temperatures. The programs similarly use cameras that can record and upload people’s data, potentially feeding the information into the city-state’s wider biometric databases.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Two main points I wish to note:
[16] And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: [17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. [18] Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.Revelations 13:16-18
WinePress readers already know what I am going to say: this scamdemic is nothing to do with a virus, but to further and greatly implement the mark of the beast and antichrist systems. As all of these new passports and cashless scanners are spreading like rabbits, the continued alibi we keep seeing is to blame it on the “pandemic.” Hence this is why the lockdowns were necessary to wreck the world economies so the fiat currencies could be removed and the world uses digital dollars and crypto currencies.
All of this is to condition the broad masses for the final endgame, the mark. This will be, I believe, one of the major propaganda pushes once the economy gets the artificial bounce and subsequent collapse to follow.
I also to note, how western national media dares not to report on the immense technological advances and wealth the eastern nations have. Have you seen Dubai? It is something from the Jetsons. The “prophecy preachers” continually point to the European powers as being the dominant enforcers in the time of Jacob’s trouble (“the tribulation”) for the antichrist kingdom. And while I do not believe the European nations will be totally out of the picture, the great emphasis placed on their prevalence is certainly an overstatement, and gross negligence on these eastern nations.
The book of Revelation makes note of the “kings of the east” (Revelation 16:12) and their role in that time; and what is known as the battle of Gog-Magog in Ezekiel 38 and 39 are centered around the middle eastern nations, along with the likes of Russia, some African nations, and I greatly suspect China too. More will become clearer as we continually approach the days before the church is finally removed before the Lamb, Jesus Christ, unleashes his wrath on a world that hates him.
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