How Hard Is It to Catch a Fake Passport?

Assume you are a bouncer in a college town, checking IDs at the entrance to a popular pub. Outside the door, it's a little gloomy, there are lots of distractions—loud music is playing—and your job demands you to keep an eye out for danger in the crowd as well. Additionally, many of the customers appear to be dressed differently from their ID images because they are out for the evening. Despite all of these difficulties, you probably have a gut feeling that matching faces to ID photographs is simple and precise. If you look at the person and the photo, they either match or they don't. But it turns out that this intuition is flawed. False IDs are surprisingly hard to spot, especially since they don't happen very often.

The cost of missing one is pretty low: an underage student sneaks into a bar, and the bar makes more money. A bouncer for a college bar should probably expect to capture about a dozen fake IDs in a night.

Now picture yourself doing ID checks for airport security. Again, there is a time constraint to keep the line going as you verify IDs and watch the audience for suspicious conduct. Additionally, passengers' ages and appearances vary greatly, their IDs and passports are from other countries, and there may be significant discrepancies between a person's appearance in their photo and their actual appearance. Most importantly, there is a very small chance that someone would try to use a fake ID to board an airline, and the repercussions of missing that individual may be disastrous.

Attention has been drawn to this potential security lapse in light of the recent missing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and accusations that two men boarded the aircraft using stolen passports (although they were later ruled out as potential terrorists). The Interpol database of reported missing or stolen documents is scanned against passenger passports in numerous airports around the world to prevent those with stolen IDs from passing through security. In spite of the fact that 3.1 billion individuals flew in 2013, Interpol calculates that travelers boarded planes successfully 1 billion times without having their passports checked against their database.

This oversight may be the result of carelessness or a lack of technology, but it emphasizes the importance of comprehending the second line of defense against fraudulent identity documents: facial recognition software. It is surprising to learn that decades of research have shown face matching's remarkable fallibility given the variety of contexts in which society uses it.