Comply To Fly?

Comply To Fly? is a report published by the Algorithmic Justice League on 29 July 2025 on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's deployment of facial recognition technology at domestic airports. The report is the culminating output of AJL's Freedom Flyers campaign, launched in 2023, which invited everyday air travelers to opt out of TSA facial recognition at security checkpoints, document their experience, and submit a public scorecard. The report draws on 420 traveler-submitted scorecards from 91 U.S. airports collected between March 2024 and June 2025.

The report's central finding is that the TSA programme — described publicly by the agency as voluntary — is experienced as mandatory by the majority of travelers, and that those who attempt to exercise their right to opt out frequently encounter negative treatment from TSA officers. AJL's headline figures include that 99% of travelers did not receive verbal notice of their right to opt out, half did not report seeing signage, 74% did not receive any notice about the use of TSA facial recognition, and 67% of travelers who chose to opt out reported experiencing verbal abuse, public shaming, or perceived additional scrutiny. The report places these findings in the context of an aggressive expansion of the programme — over 250 airports as of issuance, with a 430-airport target — and notes alignment with the U.S. government's own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board oversight report of 9 May 2025. AJL recommends that TSA halt the programme to allow public deliberation, and proposes the establishment, by December 2025, of a dedicated biometrics complaint procedure for travelers to submit new and retroactive complaints related to TSA's use of facial recognition and any other experimental biometric pilot.

Within the corpus, Comply To Fly? is the report-shaped artefact that anchors AJL's Freedom Flyers campaign and is one of the clearest examples in the seed of an organisation's participatory-audit method producing a structured public output: the report is not a third-party study of TSA's programme, but a document produced from the testimony of ordinary travelers AJL recruited and equipped to act as the auditing public. In that respect it pairs naturally with Unmasking AI as a second AJL-anchored Publication — the book sets out the method (the "evocative audit," pairing quantitative measurement with first-person testimony from those misclassified, mis-served, or surveilled by AI systems) and the report exercises it at scale against a single federal facial-recognition deployment.