According to this report in the Boston Globe, a 40 year old foreign national from Ecuador used the passport of a 26 year old from the same country to board a plane in Boston shortly after murdering a woman and her child.
The US is so obsessed with security that we have introduced full body scans and yet somehow our security is not sophisticated enough to notice someone traveling on a passport when they don’t even really resemble person to whom the passport was issued.
Now, I would wager – and I am definitely am not a gambler – that any of the top 10 commercial facial recognition engines would have easily determined that the person in the photo was not the person going through the security line. And for a fraction of the billions invested post 9/11 in airport security.