The Prospect MAX runs more reliably than most of the fleet, which is why so many people on the east side build their mornings around it. The woman heading to a hospital shift, the teenager riding to school, the man going to dialysis. This fall, if the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority gets its way, every one of them will have their face scanned by an artificial intelligence system the moment they board, and run against a watchlist before they reach their stop. What Kansas City is building, just months or years ago we likely would have described as dystopian. Kansas City wants to be the first, and that is exactly why the rest of the country is watching. “The idea of running face recognition on a camera that is pointed on live spaces in public is a line that until recently has never really been crossed in the last 25 years,” – Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Associated Press The World Cup Was the Excuse for Scanning Riders’ Faces KCATA tried this once already. It told the public the cameras were about the World Cup, about finding missing people and stopping trafficking during a tournament that draws the whole world to the city. As we know, the tournament is here right now, the matches are being played this month, and the cameras are not on the buses. The reason the agency gave the public (that it is needed for the World Cup) will be over before the cameras go up, yet, KCATA wants to return in the fall with the program more than three times its original size, up to thirty buses. When the program was first announced, the KCATA Board of Commissioners was informed at a finance committee meeting, rather