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Bill Would Permit DNA Collection From All Those Arrested
Suspects arrested or detained by federal authorities could be forced to provide samples of their DNA that would be recorded in a central database under a provision of a Senate bill to expand government collection of personal data. Sponsors insist that adding DNA from people arrested or detained would lead to prevention of some crimes, and help solve others more quickly. "When police retrace the history of a serial predator after he is finally caught, they often find that he never had a prior criminal conviction, but did have a prior arrest," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said in a statement. "That means the only way they are likely to catch such a perpetrator after his first crime -- rather than his 10th -- is if authorities can maintain a comprehensive database of all those who are arrested, just as we do with fingerprints." Originally, the federal DNA database was limited to convicted sex offenders, who often repeat their crimes. Then it was expanded to include violent felons. Several states, including Virginia, also collect DNA from those arrested for violent crimes. "It's a classic mission-creep situation," said Jim Harper, a privacy specialist with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "These guys are playing a great law and order game . . . and in the process creating a database that could be converted into something quite dangerous." The Kyl measure was added to a bill to strengthen penalties for violent acts against women and was approved without a roll-call vote.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301665_pf.html |
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Biometric Passports Set to Take Flight
Biometric passports have made it out of the discussion and testing phase. The State Department's Office of Passport Policy, Planning, and Advisory Services recently announced that it is ready to begin issuing biometric passports. These passports, which feature an RFID chip, will bring about speedier and more secure entry into and exit from the United States, the government says. That chip includes all the personal data found on the information page of today's passports. It also contains a biometric component--a digital facial image.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120112,00.asp |
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Biometric Security Barely Skin-Deep
With just $10 in materials and less than an hour to complete his work, a Japanese researcher molded fake fingerprints that could overwhelmingly deceive biometric thumb scanners, a security technology expert reported at the BlackHat Briefings conference [in 2002]. It was just one of several failures in biometric technology related by Rick Smith, who has worked in federal research programs on information security and cyberdefense, including a project for the National Security Agency. Smith described several ways the most common types of biometric identification devices--iris scanners, face and voice recognition systems, and thumbprint readers--could be fooled.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,103535,00.asp |
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Biometrics
Biometrics is used widely today, for reasons such as restricting access to places like government and military sites or safeguarding ATMs. "…Bank United […] has placed iris recognition devices in ATMs within Kroger supermarkets in Texas and also a project demonstrated at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in North Carolina" (Retinal, 2003). The CIA, FBI, and NASA have all placed retinal scanning devices into their high security access facilities. The IRS has used signature verification in the electronically filed tax returns and "…pharmaceutical companies are using it to reduce the overall cost and administration of drug regulatory submissions to the FDA" (Signature, 2003). Since 2001, Kroger supermarkets have also implemented equipment that allows shoppers to purchase items by pressing their finger on a scanner (Black, 2001). There are many other current users, but one of the biggest concerns today is airport safety. "More than two million people travel to Israel each year, and many go through Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, one of the world's busiest air terminals" (Mesenbrink, Airport, 2002). Each traveler is given an ID card and is required to register their hand print before proceeding. This process allows the airport security to focus more on the unknown travelers giving them more flexibility.
http://www.ifpo.org/articlebank/biometrics.htm |
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CIA Seeks to Capture Eye I.D. from a Distance
The CIA is trying to improve facial recognition technology which can be notoriously inaccurate, and also develop ways to identify from a distance a target in motion by the iris of the person's eye, a CIA scientist said. Differences in simple factors like lighting and expression can impede identification of someone using current facial recognition technology, said Andrew Kirby, senior physical scientist at CIA's Intelligence Technology and Innovation Center. Those differences are so significant that my own picture taken in two different places at two different times is actually more difficult to match than it would be to match me with someone in this audience, he said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum on biometrics.
http://castlecops.com/article4010.html |
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CIA Venture Group And Motorola Arm Invest In Emerging 3-D Biometrics
An emerging area of biometric-security technology got a lift Monday when a CIA-backed venture group and the venture-capital arm of Motorola Inc. disclosed about $6 million in investments in A4Vision Inc., a provider of 3-D facial-scanning and -recognition software and equipment. Biometric hardware and software are key elements of homeland security, and sales are expected to reach $4.6 billion in 2008, up from an estimated $1.9 billion this year, according to International Biometric Group, a biometric security consulting and technology services firm. The technology's improved accuracy and ease of use, along with lower costs, are fueling the market's rapid growth, says David Fisch, an International Biometric Group consultant. Improvements in 3-D facial recognition make it more accurate than 2-D and very promising for surveillance where iris or finger scanning isn't possible, Fisch says. Casinos, airports, and high-security facilities are likely candidates for facial-recognition technology. More work remains before facial recognition, much less 3-D facial recognition, becomes a mainstream technology for securing access to facilities or identifying people captured by video surveillance. "In video-surveillance environments, facial recognition requires very specific lighting and very specific facial poses," Fisch says. "I'm not sure how ready 3-D is to replace 2-D facial recognition."
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60407780 |
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Fujitsu Ships Palm-Vein Security System Overseas
[A] system, which relies on the pattern of veins inside a person's hand to verify identity, has been available in Japan since the middle of [2004] and is already in use in some high-profile applications. The Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Japan's third-largest retail bank, began rolling out the system last October and it's available as an alternative to personal identification numbers for ATM transactions in all of the bank's 267 branches. About half of its 3000 ATMs will have the system by September. Other major national and regional banks have also said they're adopting the system. The system relies on a scanner that is similar to a digital still camera. This takes a picture of the palm of a user's hand and the image is then matched against a database as a means of verification. The camera works in the near-infrared range so it can detect the veins present under the skin and a proprietary algorithm is used to help confirm identity. The system takes into account identifying features such as the number of veins, their position, and the points at which they cross. Fujitsu says its palm-vein system will incorrectly reject an authorized user about once every 10,000 scans and incorrectly accept an unauthorized user about once every 1.25 million scans. In contrast fingerprint sensors erroneously accept an unauthorized user about once every 100,000 scans, according to Fujitsu.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/120897 |
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International Biometric Group
IBG is the biometric security industry's leading consulting and technology services firm. Since 1996, IBG has provided technology-neutral and vendor-independent biometrics services, strategy, and solutions to financial institutions, integrators, government agencies, and high-tech firms.
http://www.biometricgroup.com/ |
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Iris Recognition: How it Works
Iris recognition is based on visible (via regular and/or infrared light) qualities of the iris. A primary visible characteristic is the trabecular meshwork (permanently formed by the 8th month of gestation), a tissue which gives the appearance of dividing the iris in a radial fashion. Other visible characteristics include rings, furrows, freckles, and the corona, to cite only the more familiar. IrisCodeTM -- Expressed simply, iris recognition technology converts these visible characteristics as a phase sequence into a 512 byte IrisCode(tm), a template stored for future identification attempts. From the iris' 11mm diameter, Dr. Daugman's algorithms provide 3.4 bits of data per square mm. This density of information is such that each iris can be said to have 266 'degrees of freedom', as opposed to 13-60 for traditional biometric technologies. This '266' measurement is cited in most iris recognition literature; after allowing for the algorithm's correlative functions and for characteristics inherent to most human eyes, Dr. Daugman concludes that 173 "independent binary degrees-of-freedom" can be extracted from his algorithm - an exceptionally large number for a biometric. A key differentiator of iris-scan technology is the fact that 512 byte templates are generated for every iris, which facilitates match speed (capable of matching over 500,000 templates per second)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia_tradecraft/message/476 |
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Lending Disney a hand
After the ticket line and a bag-search checkpoint, visitors to Walt Disney World now have to make one more stop before entering one of its theme parks: at a finger scanner. Disney guests must now put their index and middle fingers into a device at the turnstile that assigns a code to link the image of their fingers with their name and ticket. Privacy advocates say the practice is troubling because it moves consumers a step closer to eventual acceptance of a national ID card or a drivers license that stores biometric data. The system, known as Ticket Tag, uses "finger geometry" rather than traditional fingerprints, [Disney spokeswoman Kim Prunty] said. A camera takes a picture of several points on each person's index and middle fingers and assigns a number value to the image, she said. If a crime were to occur inside a park, police would not be able to use the images to match a fingerprint to a person, Prunty said, because the numerical values -- not fingerprints -- are saved in Disney's system.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/orl-bizdisneyfingerprint14071405jul14,0,650904.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines |
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Mobile phones get facial recognition
Mobile phones could soon be equipped with facial recognition technology, if some biometric sensor software launched by Japanese firm OMRON...is commercially successful. OMRON's OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor software can compare the face of the user of a PDA, mobile phone or other handheld device with a photo of the user using the device's built-in camera. Checking the authenticity of a person in this way could bring greater security to a device.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/mobile/0,39020360,39189739,00.htm |
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Rand report: Facecams can thwart terrorism, install them now!
"Biometric facial recognition can provide significant benefits to society," [the Rand Organization] says, and adds that "we should not let the fear of potential but inchoate threats to privacy, such as super surveillance, deter us from using facial recognition where it can produce positive benefits." ( http://www.rand.org/publications/IP/IP209/IP209.pdf ) Chief among these are the detection of terrorists and pedophiles.
http://seclists.org/lists/politech/2001/Aug/0049.html |
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Smart Card IDs On The Way For Federal Workers
As part of the Bush administration's effort to tighten security at federal facilities, millions of federal employees and contractors will...start receiving ID badges with chips storing information such as digital fingerprints. The "smart card" IDs will have security features designed to keep outsiders from breaking into federal buildings or computer systems. But some computer security experts say the new standard was rushed through a six-month-long development process after President Bush issued a smart card directive [in 2004]. For instance, a biometric standard more stringent that fingerprints, such as scans of a user's iris, was not used, said Susan Landau, a staff engineer for Sun Microsystems and a member of a National Institute of Standards and Technology advisory panel that reviewed the standard.
http://www.compliancepipeline.com/160900549 |
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U.S. Pushes For Advances In Facial Recognition
Biometrics are poised to play a key role in the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, which began early last year and calls for using technology to better track foreigners entering and leaving the United States. Biometric technology is used throughout the federal government, including in the Defense Department's Common Access Card identification program and the State Department's Biometrics Logical Access Development and Execution program.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159401600&tid=5978 |
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Walk This Way
Interest in surveillance and recognition technologies since the September 11 attacks has thrust the spotlight on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) two-year-old $50-million Human ID at a Distance program. And while automated face recognition) receives the most attention, DARPA is also funding efforts at a handful of universities to identify people through their body language. The theory is simple: in the same way that each person has a unique signature or fingerprint, each person also has a unique walk. The trick is to take this body language and translate it into numbers that a computer can recognize. One approach is to create a "movement signature" for each person. [Another] uses a method called structural analysis to measure properties like a person's stride length and leg spread. Gait recognition researchers face many challenges. One of the toughest: so far all database images are two-dimensional and depend greatly on the angle of the camera. When a system tries to compare two shots of the same person, taken from different angle, it is far less effective.
http://www.jihadunspun.com/TechnologyAndWar/articles/ |
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Webpage for JOHN DAUGMAN, Cambridge University
Iris Recognition links
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jgd1000/ |
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Wikipedia -- Biometrics
The first effective biometrics system was the anthropometric system designed by Alphonse Bertillon in 1883, the first precise, scientific system widely used to identify criminals. It worked by precisely measuring certain lengths and widths of the head and body.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics |
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