Unwrapping the Biometric Present

Congressional funding for a biometric system to track potential terrorists isn't likely to have much impact on the bad guys. But it will likely help the government keep track of you.

Congress gave a sizable Christmas present to the nations biometrics industry last month.

The word biometrics appears 35 times throughout the National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, and it establishes the use of biometrics for aviation security, creates a biometric center of excellence, expands an FBI biometric system for criminal background checks, requires friendly visa waiver countries to add a biometric to their passports, and mandates the collection of biometric exit data for people leaving the United States.

Signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 17, the legislation also allocates $20 million to the Transportation Security Administration for research and development of an advanced biometric system that has applications to aviation security, including mass identification technology. That includes a requirement that airports adopt biometrics in their access control systems, and it requires that the Attorney General create a law enforcement officer travel credential with a biometric identifier for all federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government law enforcement agencies.

Biometrics refers to a range of technologies that use physical measurements of the human body to identify individuals. Fingerprints are one of the best known biometrics, but they are by no means the only. Foot and palm prints have been used throughout the years as well. 

Todays interest in biometrics, though, is driven by efforts to fight terrorism and secure the nations borders. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, a standard technique used by Islamic terrorists to defeat so-called watchlists is for the person on the list to lose or destroy their passport, then to obtain a new passport with a slightly different English spelling of their name.

The current lack of a single convention for transliterating Arabic names enabled the 19 hijackers to vary the spelling of their names to defeat name-based watchlist systems and confuse any potential efforts to locate them, notes the report.

But the real future in counter-terrorism identification technology is not standardized spelling, the Commission noted, but a unified national system that uses biometric technology to detect and weed out the terrorists when they try to enter the United States or gain access to a secure facility. Travelers are repeatedly screened.

Each of these checkpoints or portals is a screening -- a chance to establish that people are who they say they are and are seeking access for their stated purpose, to intercept identifiable suspects, and to take effective action," the Commission states in the report.

Hence the interest in biometrics.

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The theory is simple: if the fingerprints of every known terrorist are recorded in some databank, then all we need to do is to fingerprint every person as they enter the United States, walk through the front door of a court house, or try to pick up radiological waste at a medical facility. Since people cant change their fingerprints, sooner or later this massive identification procedure will catch all of the terrorists, and then the war on terrorism will be over.

This is, of course, a caricature of the governments position. But it nevertheless represents the hopes of those who authored the Intelligence Reform Act.