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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/protectingid/0,3800002220,39117633,00.htm

Want to visit the US? Now you have to show your biometrics...
Passport authorities ask for the finger

By Jo Best

Published: Tuesday 06 January 2004

Travellers to the US will now be subject to a biometric inspection every time they journey through or to the States – being digitally photographed and fingerprinted by officials.

The scheme, known as US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT), will apply to everyone visiting the country with a visa and is being introduced primarily to counter the post-9/11 terrorist threat, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.

On reaching the US, along with handing over passports at the immigration desks, visa holders will have both their index fingers scanned and photo taken and used to verify their identity and, the security forces are hoping, turn up a terrorist or two into the bargain.

It's far more likely, however, that the system will be more successful in tracking more everyday wanted criminals or those with fraudulent or out of date visas. A test programme, run at Atlanta's airport in Georgia airport, turned up 21 individuals on wanted lists.

So will the new US security be a headache for British travellers? Only two per cent of travellers from the UK travel with a visa and those that do won't be held up too long, according to the US authorities, with the additional biometrics testing expected to add an extra 15 seconds to immigration procedures.

However, there are fears that it won't all be plain sailing for travellers, with concerns raised over the security and accuracy of the biometrics. The US government is tight-lipped over how long the data will be retained, saying that it will be held and destroyed in "accordance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements" but doesn't detail which statutes will actually apply to the data.

There are accuracy issues with such systems too. While the government has acknowledged there will be a 0.1 per cent rate of false positives – which translates to around 24,000 people a year in total this year – it appears that other flaws in the technology could throw a spanner in the works.

Barclays ran trials of similar biometric technology for possible use at ATMs and at the point of sale but encountered problems with relatively common scenarios.

David Taylor, technology consultant at Barclaycard, said: "We definitely encountered problems with some Asian women who have fine skin where we had difficulty with the scanner technology at the time being able to read a clear pattern. We found the same issues with women who had recently used skin cream and a proportion of the population that carry out manual labour - even keen gardeners were not immune."

Barclays also found that scarring or scratches on people's fingers created problems for the technology.

Taylor added that while biometrics had been unable to deal with some "real world scenarios", the Barclays trials were some years ago and he expected that technology would have moved on since then but would still need to be significantly more robust.

While the UK government is in the process of setting up its own trials to investigate the effectiveness of using biometrics in passports, the US hopes its scheme will lead the way for global take-up. Tom Ridge, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement: "US-VISIT... will serve as a catalyst in the growing international use of biometrics to expedite processing of travellers."

A survey of 1,067 silicon.com readers has found they are incresingly familiar with biometric technology though there are concerns with how it is used.

The us biometric system, officially launched on Monday, is now in use at 115 airports as well as 14 seaports, with the US hoping to roll out the scheme in 50 of the busiest land entry ports by the end of 2004 and in all land ports by 31 December 2005.

Currently biometric identification is only in use at points of entry into the US. The government is looking at introducing similar checks at departure points, with a pilot programme launched yesterday in Baltimore-Washington airport and Miami cruise terminals requiring visitors to confirm their departure and identity using biometrics.

The contract to provide the entry-exit technology will be awarded in May 2004 and looks likely to be worth a hefty pile of cash – the systems already in place have cost the US government $710m to date.