YouSaid · the spoken record

Hugh C. McElroy

lines on the record: 75
first: 2022-06-29
most recent: 2022-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Pointing out the fact that a lot of this is what we do today. We're just elevating and we're calling attention to the fact we have people every day across government really driving innovation forward. And if anything, I hope this conversation is an ode to those government innovators so they know they're appreciated.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe we can have something akin to the Netflix model of constant reinvention and open transparency and open discussion at all levels of the workforce. We're all here. So as it seems, there's constant squabbles at every level of the government. Just rest assured, there are public servants working here that are just doing amazing work and they're doing it quietly and they're doing it with really noph or hype around what they're doing, but it truly is amazing every day to watch this Leviathan move swiftly as it does. And that's really what we did with the innovation doctrine, right? And that's what we did. And I know DOT has done.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is parts of this timeline, right? There's always parts of government timelines that revolve around who's taking control of the house, who's taking control of the White House. I'll say from the TSA perspective, in my experience in government, is public servants deserve way more credit than they ever have received. I don't know when the narrative shifted, but at some point it feels like it's shifted. There are people here that transition between administrations. There are people here that transition between different parties that are dedicated and focused on driving improved security and driving innovation forward, right? I am not a political appointee in this role. I am here as a career official with the focus on improving not just the innovations at the checkpoint, but really driving forward that culture of reinvention, that idea that”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The civil rights aspect and the privacy aspect of that, and those groups exist. But what we really hear is we want a less frictionful environment. That total recall anecdote is some way that we get there, but there would be layered protection on top of that. It's really future out there, and it's still based, again, on years of moving to that place with the idea that it's going to be trusted by the public. It's going to be just as secure. and it needs to be effective and again trustworthy in general.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't want to use the word cataloging, but I get the reference right, it's assessing. It's funny. I brought it up and I almost now feel like I regret doing it. But everybody asks me when we jump on our design thinking cohorts, when I talk to other folks, when's it going to be total recall? When's it going to be total recall? I applaud you, Neil, for being the first person to go, this is the dystopian view as compared to the frictionless view. And again, it's the technology we have today kind of moving it around. If it's not hitting the same levels of security and it's making it so people don't want to use it, then again, we would never deploy it, right? It's something that we would pull back and we'd go, whoa, this is creating a negative externality and adverse reaction that we weren't anticipating. The idea is people want to start going through the airport again with less friction. There's obviously you are clearly one of these people that's also balancing”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I will just connect this to a question I ask on decoder all the time, which is everybody wants air glasses and I'm going to buy them in one second if they can just tell me people's faces and names. But to build that, you need to build the worldwide facial recognition database. To do what you're saying, you need to turn the airport into a surveillance panopticon where you're watching everybody at all times and you're looking into their bags at all times. I'll just end there. And we're going over, I know. Thank you for the extra time, but I'll just end there. Like that. Seems like a dystopian outcome that you walk into the airport and dozens of cameras and computers are paying attention to you in a fairly intrusive way and like cataloging your bag.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go live. This is probably true of a lot of emerging technology. You always hear that it's sooner than you expect. But with air taxis and electrification, we're hearing it sooner than we expect. So we're trying to be as ready as possible for that to come alive.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Electric air taxis, advanced air mobility. So moving either interurban, so if you're moving, Miami is big on this, right, trying to understand how you can go from parts of Miami either to the airport or other parts. That's outside our current mission model, right? We have some overlap that we're looking at applying, but will we put checkpoints at these air taxi locations? Will we allow these air taxis to land directly on the secure side of TSA? We don't understand exactly what their business model is going to look like yet. They're, I think, still figuring that out as the technology grows, as they go through FAA certification. What we want to do from an innovation standpoint is we want to be as agile as they are. To your point before, startups are pivoting. We want to pivot alongside of them so that we're never in hindrance to the market, but we're ready to help bring in the security and safety aspect when that's finally ready to go.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of emergence that's in our line of sight right now. And this isn't necessarily a how will it impact TSA's kind of delivery of security, but it's how do we need to be prepared for it is advance air mobility in AAM. So if you're going to now have a whole new conveyance of travel and the promise of it is to decarbonize, which we are all pushing to do, the promise of it is connecting to disparate areas faster and reduce congestion. That's a whole new mission model for us, right? We don't have a one-for-one on how we would deliver against that.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over time works either to replace or is integrated in with our current technology. So computed tomography is really interesting because that in OneSpace is an AI playground, in my opinion, right? We can have down to the voxel level artificial intelligence looking at different items in a bag. Again, it will be secure. It's masked. It's not tied to any one person. It is an anonymous bag for the sake of this argument. But you can have that level of detection and AI is now doing the automatic threat recognition where you're no longer really stressing an officer. You have enough background information to say with a high level of fidelity, we think we know what this is and we think it's a problem. So grab that bag. That's going to have a tremendous impact on officers, how they spend their time and security outcomes as well. The other big”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is where I get to do my exact. This is the disruptive stuff, right? That my group really is looking at. So I think for us, right, everybody asks me, when do I get total recall? When do I get the process? I'm walking through the airport and they're scanning happening around me, but I don't break stride and I never slow down if there is an issue.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you mentioned the computed tomography scanners two to three years that might change the entire experience. What's the tech on the bleeding edge that you're looking at right now that might change the experience over a longer time?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a solution to one of our problems. What we need to get a little bit better at on the innovation side is having that catalog, that early pipeline of challenges, curating them down and then understanding where that ecosystem can help address some of them.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It de risks that process of bringing them on board. There are companies that I think have never worked in TSA directly, but maybe are in the aviation space. Maybe they're in the cyberspace that we are trying to regulate. Maybe they're in an AIML space that we're looking to grow into or at least understand the concepts. It will come down to where that pilot has them deployed. So we might work with a startup technology in AI and data where all we actually want them to do is help us better understand where we're treating data like exhausts, where we're capturing data, how we can effectively use it. Those lessons learned, right? The longevity of a startup, we hope that we can keep them through that valley and that we can provide funding to keep them alive and show their VCs that there's addressable market here. But we want to work with anybody who thinks that they”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't picked the seed round series A, right? The IP component of this, there is a risk tolerance in government. I came from this space in a prior life, right? When we would present companies to government clients and even do it myself now that I've transitioned, the first question somebody usually asks is, where else have you worked in government?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advanced air mobility and counter UAS, all of that was really born from the process of SBIR. We want to co-opt that model for TSA and really make TSA a place where people come in and emerging tech comes in and says, I understand your mission space. I saw your small business innovation grant. I understand it's a really nuance. It's a nascent area that you want us to work in. Let's do it. How can we help? And that's what we're building now through the doctrine is casting out that ecosystem and saying we're open for business. We want emerging tech to come in. It's far too often something other people in the agency say and other people in government say is, well, if these companies just knew how to work with us, they would be at our front door. But we don't really always make ourselves the easiest group to work with. And that is another key role of a chief innovation.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be years in the making and have these really high barriers of entry. Well, government's given us opportunities. It's given us authorities to go test new technology and engage with the startup ecosystem. So I'd mentioned previously the defense innovation unit uses a process called ATOs, which is other transaction authority. It's a much more available pathway to bring in emerging technology, which is their key focus, right? So how does that translate into TSA? Well, we have the same authority. What we need to do now is understand what companies we want to go after with our innovation pipeline, what are those emerging challenges that we want to use this method. If the message is in the medium, we want to go solve it in this manner. There's small business innovation research grants that DHS science and technology runs, Air Force has been amazing at running those. If you look at everything they've done with”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's more the latter today, but it's both, right? So these large procurements, the way that government strategically does big acquisition purchases right now, it's years out from when we kind of make that decision. So this award has been the generation of 10 years of thinking. Where's the technology going? How are we elevating the technology readiness level of the TRL? How is it getting done through R&D investment into the science? And then how is that being commercialized with other vendors? My team is now starting to think through, and again, we're relatively new in TSA of how we're approaching this. One thing we hear from startups and one thing we hear from venture capital is we would love to work with you. We understand, we think your mission space, we understand your problem areas, but we don't know how to work with you, right? And the traditional RFP process, as I outlined,”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not going to move into that direction. I would hope that they would, but it is a fair question. My first thing I learned moving into TSA had knowledge of it in the past. It is how expansive this entire transportation airport operators, civil rights groups, local law enforcement, tech vendors, the concessions groups within airports, multimodal, there are so many people involved that Yes, there's times we have to deconflict something, but I have maybe taken it might be Pollyanna, the concept that everybody is a partner for us because we all want to move in the right direction and we want it to be as effective, trustworthy, and secure as it can be. So that is Dan's opinion that all everybody we work with is a positive partner as we try to innovate forward in this space.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Structured so that they're not driving such a negative impact that it damages the trust that we're trying to build, nor has a negative security outcome. So it's nuance, but how we run pilots is incredibly important within TSA hitting that balancing act of effectually moving innovation forward.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had that decision framework because it empowers more people in TSA and around TSA to also be transparent but also understand this is the expectation. This is how we expect you to act and expect you to deliver. The other, and this is sometimes difficult, it's really familiar in industry. It's really familiar in tech. Failure has to be an option and available for us, right? Move fast breakthroughs isn't exactly how we can operate, but we need growing room to pilot and say this didn't work. And here's why. Let's pivot. This didn't work. Here's why. Let's pivot. In government that's sometimes really hard, right? Your mission's aligned to Six Sigma. Your mission is aligned to zero negative outcomes. But that holds innovation back. We have to be able to cleanly run pilots, admit when something didn't work. But all of our pilots need to be.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a partnership, right? This is something that they understand our mission scope. They understand where we're headed and kind of why TSA was born. So I don't like the idea of calling it adversarial. It's a perception that I know people have. I view it much more as a partnership where they're keeping us not that we're going to stray afar, but they're bringing the balanced perspective that we really do want to hear about these situations and about building trust. To your point around transparency, right, two of the main elements in the innovation doctrine we laid out, which is soon to be published across the ecosystem in the field, one is transparency. How are we making decisions around where we invest capital? How are we making decisions around what screening we do? How are we making decisions around our people movements and our staffing? All of that needs to be a little bit clearer in how we”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll hit on the latter point, but I do want to steer back to directly answer your question. I don't know if I would call it adversarial, right? They have a position and we want to be as close to that position as we can.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the machine fails in front of us, and we have people divert to the standard process, we'll have slower throughput time within the checkpoint itself. So there is a lot of attention paid to how effective is this platform at actually increasing passenger throughput and increasing match rates because that's really what we're looking at is this a mechanism not only to increase security, is this a mechanism to decrease Q wait times and increase passenger throughput. So a lot of attention is paid to that by the identity management team that's rolling it out. I think they published an identity management roadmap where this is very clearly addressed is the how do we make sure it works for everybody because we still at the end of the day serve everybody.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the pilot phase, right? That I kind of alluded to before. And it gets back again. We have, I think what the teams kind of classified, the triangle of trust with MDL and biometrics going between all of the groups that are involved with it, TSA, the issuing authority, the relaying party, right? That's in the specifics. But it gets back to that core point where if it is struggling with people of color different genders, if it's having these problems, it is not effective. And we don't want to ever field an ineffective solution that isn't going to yield either the value that we aspire for it to, or it's actually going to degrade what we're doing today. So that knowledge going into it, if this doesn't work on a large portion of the population, it's not actually going to be effective in the field. It's going to produce longer wait times. The cues will back up.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other challenging thing with all new technologies, especially ones that surreal people, you have no idea if they work equitably. Or, if they worked fairly until you deploy them, face recognition is actually a great example, right? Lots of cases where we see facial recognition systems just have challenges with people of color. Seems to be down the line. Where are you balancing that out? Where are you saying, okay, in our pipeline over the roadmaps we have, there's got to be a checkpoint where we say we have enough data and we know this is fair.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't necessarily, and this is something I think Secretary Buttig said, when he was on, is our successes are quiet. So there was one public shoe guy. There is still the need for the shoe scan, but within the innovation process that we're looking at, right, what's been asked of me of our leadership and I think this is where it goes, we want innovation at every level, right? There is business model innovation that shouldn't be living with me. It should be living in the business. People at that checkpoint, people in that space are always thinking about, should we be making a change here to increase security or passenger efficiency? Has some type of threat vector shifted that this is no longer such a requirement going forward? Can we make this change? Yes, no. That's being discussed. It's with.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's changes, right, that we look at where is there a model shift? And again, I think this would be one of them, that if we make a change in the way we conduct business, there will be a benefit. To your point about the shoe bomb, right? I can't say with positive or negative certainty, I can't confirm any of this, but there was one public shoe guy.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We will have hopefully one day water bottles coming through with you because we'll have better technology to scan it. I think one thing everybody should remind themselves of TSA, we don't do all of this because we really want to be doing this. These are based off of historical threats. They're based off of historical attacks that we've had that really give us the situation that we have today. To your point, we're always looking to make changes to that, both for the officer benefit and the traveling public benefit.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CT, which is computed tomography, that gives us a 3D rendering of the bag. It gives us a lot more insight into what's in it. The idea of moving to all of these technologies is not just that it provides the officer, right? Core of what we want to do is to provide a better environment for the officer to apply his or her main skill set, which is security and assessment that we train them on. All this new technology will also mean that passengers will start to see some changes as well as they come through. So CT opens the door for fewer items on the prohibited items list. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like. That is a risk calculation that gets done by other parts of TSA. But moving in that direction and in bringing in new and improved technology, yes, we will start to have people potentially leaving their shoes on with that new technology.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew it was coming. This is actually where we're moving to, right? And this is the promise of the innovation team. This is the promise of the technology we're working on. We have a pilot program today. We had an amazing partnership with one of our national laboratories to start rolling out a shoe scanner. The thing with pre-check today, that was a convenience of pre-check, right? Is that you're giving up some of that information so that you can have these conveyances as you go through the checkpoint, we are moving to make enhancements to the standard checkpoint as well. So shoe scanner technology is very nearly on the horizon pending year over year budget requirements from the hill. That's something that will be coming out probably within the next two to three years, I hope, at least in the pilot phase. We're moving away from AT, which is our current x-ray machinery and moving into”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what we need, is we just need to know you've entered the side, we've matched you to the person we expected to be showing up today, the facial recognition, the background, we don't need that. The algorithms will be worked out through commercial vendors who are doing a lot more in algorithm development and facial recognition, not necessarily for some of the other components of TSA that are a little bit more owned and operated by us, but for the facial recognition part of that data is gone the second you step away from the terminal.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we need to get, which is that was Nili. He presented himself, he is on, I can't say one of the vendors or all the other vendors will get mad at me. He's on a plane later today. And we know he's on that plane because 72 hours ago, we knew that he was going to get on that flight. So that's all we need to know is that you've now been granted access to the sterile side. And then what's next is that continued layered detection apparatus, which is, well, it's odd he has this bag of batteries in his carry-on bag. Most of us, I think, have moved to like a rat's nest of cords, but he wants batteries. He can have batteries as long as they're not on the prohibited items list. And then moving in to either walk through metal detector or advanced imagery technology, no, does you have anything on person? It's that layered approach, but”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. I mean, cars are computers now, just on wheels. Technology is naturally matriculating into more of the checkpoint. If it wasn't already there, right? And that's good from the security standpoint. The trust element that you're hitting on, I can say now in our pilot programs that we're running, this is back to grassroots. This is communications with the public as they go through. There is always the opt-out version right now for biometrics. That is very clear. Our identity management team has worked with standards boards. They've worked with trust teams like the ACLU to say there needs to be that opt-out strategy. And that is well documented when you go to one of our pilot sites today. The other assurance, and again, to your point that we just need to verify who's making it to the other side of the sterile area is all of that information is gone the second you step away from the terminal. So the picture of you that's captured on that device, we don't need to save it.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sorry. I would agree with that. If I miss that in your initial question, I apologize. Yes, understanding who has made it to the sterile side is critically important for us. And again, that now transitions to not just workers at the airport, but yes, folks on the flight, understanding who has gone through and who is on the flight is a security requirement in the environment that we live today.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that matching right, and it kind of working a little bit better to make sure that who the secure flight scan and who we're vetting against matches the person presenting themselves, biometric is better at that than the traditional matching that we have today. And again, it's only really for now a conversation around pre-check or a one-to-one match with the ID, but there is Again, and I can get more”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we are moving to a place with technology that matching a face by a machine versus a person is starting to be better. And again, for recognizing counterfeit documents, we're moving into a place where machines are doing it better. The biometric component adds that extra level of security that you're binding it to that document.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is an incredibly hard challenge, right? On one side, like I said, maintaining that trust, maintaining the operational effectiveness of the program with our passengers and with mainly our constituents, the rest of the U.S. citizens is incredibly important. But moving to this space does increase the security outcome that we're looking for, right? The promise of TSA is that the security is better today, really, than it was yesterday, either through lessons learned, new technology, enhanced processes going into effect, innovation is one that, you know, hey, the process is better. It's more secure today than it was yesterday. It sits right on that edge where we know the security benefits of biometrics, right? We know from our intelligence groups, we know that moving into this space, we yield some type of security benefit.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you mentioned earlier the concept of protection, right? So you've got this new pilot program. We're going to do more biometrics. We know we've got to trust it. But any project organization to get it moving, you need to protect it. At the same time, to make something like biometrics and facial recognition trusted, they need to be wildly transparent, right? And there's already a tension with groups like the ACLU, which is filing lawsuits about facial recognition records and how the systems work. That seems to me like, Well, you're never going to get started if you know the first thing that's going to happen is a lawsuit or you're never going to get all the way to the finish line and be as transparent as you think you need to be to gain the trust if releasing the documents results in a bad faith attacks or something. For a government agency, that seems like a really difficult problem. How are you thinking about that?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resiliency, then it isn't effective and it doesn't get fielded. The clear component is interesting, right? Because they do have their own. And you're right. If there's a breach at clear, they're going to lose customers and that's going to be existential. We don't necessarily have that, but what we do have is those failures become incredibly public. So we're aware of that. And again, we're making sure that this is getting piloted. We're gathering all the right information around it. We're working with groups dedicated to trust and resiliency. And until all of that lines up, it's not effective. It doesn't get fielded.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“ISO, NIST, where they're coming in and they're assessing the trustworthiness of this system. I've always said this of a lot of things in emerging tech, right? Whether it's AI, facial recognition, if it isn't trustworthy and you're going to lose participants because of it, it isn't effective, right? What we need to be talking about with facial recognition and AI is if it doesn't hit these components, if it isn't trustable, if it isn't securable, if it isn't locked up for some cyber vulnerabilities either today or on the horizon, what we're doing is putting into the field an ineffective system. We wouldn't do that when it comes to image scanning with CT and we wouldn't do that when it comes to on-person screening. Why do we think we would do it any different with AIML or with facial recognition if it doesn't hit that level of trust, that level of resilience?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're doing it in a process right now, right? So first step in this direction is our one-to-one matching. So where are you taking your ID and inserting it into the machine? And you're doing that one-for-one, the face on this ID as Nili. Neil has presented himself here. We're good. We're matching that. That's our first level. Over time, we are moving to a one-to-one match, which today is kind of in partnership with CBP Customs and Border Patrol, where they have a one-to-end system for re-entry into the United States that they use that's in a pilot phase, right? And this is why the innovation process is so important to not only get the technology right, but to get that trust right because we're in a pilot that we are constantly gathering feedback from civil liberties groups. We're constantly getting feedback from industry standards mechanisms.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or at least shift the mission model a little bit. There's been some change that we've seen at another agency. There's been some change that we've seen in industry, right? FinTech is a really secure and healthcare is a really data secure ecosystem that you give up a lot of data. If there's a change there, maybe it can apply to what we're doing. Our hope from the innovation team is that those people exist. They're educated on what we want them to do. They're empowered to do it. And then those new approaches that are, again, beneficial to the entire agency and the traveling public, those will take place where they should, which is in that business unit.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's fair, right? And this is the public kind of take on the way that we're working today. What my role is and what we've kind of talked about isn't necessarily injecting my presence into that space. How are we rebalancing this? I can't say, you know, I've been in a lot of the conversations around what does the future of biometric look like? What does the future of mobile look like? What are we doing with some of our background vetting systems as a party to those? My hope is that what you've laid out, right, that can we take a different approach to this? Can we shift the scales back one way or another? I'm not going to be the decision maker closest to that problem to know, but what we want to have happen is that someone in that area has the lens. They're our innovator in that space to go, maybe it is time to disrupt this a little bit.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. The criticism of the TSA has always been well, that's just a lot of security theater. You're just scaring the bad guys away with ineffective things. And I just wonder from your perspective, is the innovation officer, do you ever think, well, we can innovate on that? And maybe get through the very difficult balance of privacy and security Maybe change that equation and find ideas from throughout the agency to make that equation better for people in a way that I think has just over time gotten more intrusive.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I ask you directly to take your point, innovation is broadly not just new technologies. I certainly want to talk to you about new technologies, but innovation is not broadly about new technologies or, I don't know, machine learning and facial recognition, but it's how we do things. I would put squarely in that innovating on the balance between civil liberties and security, which is the age-old tension of government, right? I mean, how many misattributed quotes about civil peace and security can we listen to in our lives? And I just, I hear you that you want to deter things early.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Innovation in those responses are one for one in that the agility that we maintain is the only unwavering advantage we have going forward. So we want to make sure that as we are agile in developing new solutions and addressing new threats, that we're getting them out as fast as possible so that we can really say security is growing in capability. At any time that we do see, right, this is a decision for somebody who isn't Dan McCoy, chief innovation officer, that we can peel back from some of those vetting services, I'm sure that that is always in discussion, but it's not something I'm really read into and it's not something I think a lot of people would even let me into the conversation for.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Safe and secure. If I can drive a point to your question, right? I don't know if we're ever going to go back to only a goal line defense of screening for threats. I think we will always have, and we've seen the benefits of a multi-layered approach, which is that disrupts, deter, and detect. Detect is our goal line, right? It's a interception in the end zone on something that could have gone awry. The deterrence is we have new technology, we have new capabilities, we have trained officers, you probably shouldn't try anything in the aviation space. And then this disrupt is the whole national security ecosystem saying we have different things that you should think about what attack vectors, what vulnerabilities you target, because we want to disrupt those where they are. What's keen on my role in this from the innovation perspective,”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's again another kind of line, right? But if you ask somebody, if you ask an end user, design the best app and what features will it have, they want it to look slick, they want it to be frictionless as far as mobility and application development. But it's only until you probe them. Well, do you want your data to be secure? Do you want to know that you're not being tracked? That's kind of, I think, what I equate the TSA process to, right? For me, most of my life, TSA has been the way that we go through the airport. We want to maintain that level of security that we know we need in our post-911 environment. What we do want to do is make sure that we're building that level of clear trust with passengers. This is the data that we have. This is what we're working off of. But what I think most passengers want is less friction going through the process. And again, that back end understanding that that data is”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is definitely a hard one to answer from my perch, right? From the innovation perspective, there's intelligence and analysis in the back end that's doing a lot of this work. We have partnerships with the FBI for those background investigations that you're talking about.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT