It’s literally a mug shot, a photograph (shot) of your face (mug) for official record. For the express purpose of identification by a law enforcement agency, no less.
> Travelers who volunteer to use the new system are directed to insert their drivers license, ID card, or passport into the appropriate reader, stand on a marked spot in front of the webcam, and remove their face mask, so that the image from the ID (or, more likely, from some back-end image database linked to the ID, although that hasn’t been disclosed) and the image from the webcam can be compared by some undisclosed algorithm.
Right in the most literal interpretation of the term, there is alignment. In other news, I can’t believe the yearbook committee wanted to take mugshots of my kid!
As you can see, there is what something colloquially means, and what something literally means. But I know you know that
