No One Will Go Uncounted
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that starting January 5, 2004, a new high-tech entry registration system, US-VISIT, will be put into operation at all sea and air ports of the country. Land border crossing points will be equipped with a similar system in two stages. By December 31, 2004 – the 50 largest border crossing points, and by December 31, 2005 – all the rest. When crossing the border, fingerprints and a digital photograph of a person will be permanently entered into a single database. The entire procedure of taking biometric data will take a few seconds, and even for taking fingerprints there will be no need to put ink on fingers.
For citizens of countries with which the United States has concluded visa waiver agreements (Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brunei), the entry rules are different. From October 1, 2004, they must have an electronic passport. But given that old-style paper passports remain with a third of residents of Spain and France and most citizens of Switzerland, and in the UK the transition to new documents has been postponed until 2006, the U.S. State Department will have to delay the introduction of the rules for another couple of years.
In Europe, smart cards for personal identification are so far used voluntarily. For example, at one of Amsterdam's airports, frequent flyers can get a plastic document on which the owner's name and a pattern of the iris are recorded. Card holders pass through control almost instantly – they just need to insert the document into a slot in the turnstile and look into a video camera. The system compares the pattern of the person's iris with the one recorded on the microchip, and if they match, it opens the passage. Those who use paper documents the old-fashioned way have to stand in line.
At the end of October, at a meeting of interior ministers of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the UK, a preliminary decision was made to introduce biometric indicators into the Schengen visa system. The new visa is a standard-sized plastic card with an embedded microchip. Personal data, digitized fingerprints, and a photo will be recorded on the chip. More precisely, a digital photo plus the main facial parameters, which the computer will determine from the photo and subsequently use to identify a person if, for example, they change their hairstyle, get a tan at a resort, or grow a beard. However, the tentative date for introducing new visas and a pan-European electronic passport is 2007. The reason is resistance from human rights activists, who see in the "universal counting" an invasion of privacy, as well as technical difficulties and the high cost of the novelty (about $70 per person).
German Interior Minister Otto Schily said at the meeting: "We must avoid the coexistence of different biometric systems – Russian, European, and any other. Therefore, it is very important that we agree on an international standardization procedure."
Technology on the Edge of Science Fiction
The first stage of the Great Recounting of Peoples is universal scanning. Citizens of a country introducing electronic passports will have to put their fingers into scanners and their faces in front of video cameras. Within a few minutes, your data will be entered into the electronic passport and simultaneously into a nationwide database (eventually, a worldwide one). Then you will be issued a smart card.
Facial scanning lasts 20-30 seconds. After this procedure, the computer can compare the passport holder's face with the photo recorded on the microchip. In stores, airports, stadiums, railway stations, and streets, video cameras of the system will be installed that recognize faces of passersby in real time and check their facial similarity against images of terrorists stored in the database. As soon as the electronics detects a suspicious person, it will immediately sound an alarm. Such a system has been implemented in Belgium, is being tested at U.S. airports and in the Florida city of Tampa, but has not yet yielded any results. According to official information, it correctly identifies people in 90% of cases, and according to the American Civil Liberties Union, only in 53%.
Almost everyone knows how and why fingerprints are taken. Less well known is that papillary patterns are used not only to catch criminals but also to pay in stores. An interesting system operates in some U.S. supermarkets. A purchase is made like this: a person selects a product, puts a finger on a scanner, which recognizes the owner's identity by the print and then debits the corresponding amount from his or her bank account. Modern devices read a fingerprint in 0.1 seconds, recognize it and grant access in 0.2 seconds, and make a mistake no more than once in a thousand.
The pattern of the iris is just as unique as fingerprints. But while a dummy can theoretically be pressed against a scanner instead of a real finger, or the skin of one's hands can be burned with acid to hinder identification, changing the iris is much more difficult. Iris scanning is familiar to us from Hollywood films, where a person presses an eye to a video camera, but in real life the reading can be done from a distance of up to 1.5 meters. Moreover, neither weak eyesight nor cataracts interfere with identifying a person.
The distribution of blood vessels in the facial skin is another suitable parameter. The pattern of vessels is not visible from the outside, but a thermal imager can easily show it. A computer with a video camera sensitive to thermal radiation can determine a person's identity even in the dark from a distance of several meters. The accuracy of a thermogram is not affected by elevated body temperature, nor by cooling of the skin in frosty weather, nor by the aging of the body.
If you write data about insurance, military obligations, etc. onto a smart card, then visiting the military enlistment office or housing office will be reduced to inserting a piece of plastic into a computer slot. In the future, an electronic passport may take on the functions of a credit card, and then you will be able to pay with it in stores.