Diane Sabatino, a federal law enforcement officer for almost three decades, oversees the nation’s 328 land, air, and seaports of entry as Executive Assistant Commissioner for the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection. Recently she was interviewed by the Washington Examiner about the future of contactless travel at airports. And that future is here, in some cases.
“In a few years … people with Global Entry are going to be walking through at all of our airports, unless a CBP officer wants to speak to that traveler,” Sabatino said. “They’re moving through without really any engagement that they perceive. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we haven’t thoroughly vetted them. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t monitoring or evaluating or looking at their luggage again because it’s come through and we’ve already seen the X-Ray, or that they don’t fall into kind of a category from a threat briefing that we want to talk to them.”
Customs officers screen 390,000 travelers daily. It is essential that travelers are processed in a safe and efficient manner. The use of facial recognition technology or fingerprints to identify travelers have been rolling out in phases for years now.
The future will see all airports have full contactless experiences.
Sabatino’s vision will be familiar to some frequent travelers; she has been working on Enhanced Passenger Processing, International Remote Baggage Screening, and Global Entry modernization for the agency. All with a goal of increasing efficiency and better utilizing technology, while freeing the agency’s workers to do what they do best, which is to talk with people and determine intent.
Sabatino also noted that the new technology has already shown that times for all categories of travelers are dropping.
“The reason that we’ve seen that drop is because again we can focus our resources on those travelers where we need to do more work and spend ... [fewer] resources because they move more efficiently again,” Sabatino said. And she noted that airlines really thrilled with the changes, as every minute spent in screening, “is a minute against the time they have to meet to a connecting flight or time to their final destination.”
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