US immigration turns to technology for security

US immigration turns to technology for security

Identification documents will include a person's unique facial characteristics or fingerprints

Reprinted from The Irish Times, March 10,2003

By Carol Powers

Since the war on terrorism began, the United States government has really clamped down on foreigners entering and leaving the country. Part of its plan for enhanced security is to use new technologies at its borders.

The USA Patriot Act and Border Security Act direct that the Attorney General and the Secretary of State jointly, through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "develop and certify a technology standard, including appropriate biometric identifier standards, that can be used to verify the identity of persons applying for a United States visa".

A biometric is a physical characteristic that is unique to an individual. The standards would be used in all documents issued to foreigners by the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, including student visas, green cards and border-crossing cards.

Foreigners from about 180 countries require an immigrant or non-immigrant visa to enter the United States. For more than a century, the entry-exit policies and processes were largely intended to deter illegal entry and citizenship claims, regulate legal migration to meet labour-market needs and administer benefit programmes.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the US is facing the challenge of having to identify, out of the millions of foreign nationals who come to the country each year, those who might be a threat to national security.

At the moment, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) has the authority to perform an inspection of each person who arrives at the US border and to grant or deny admission.

Usually an INS inspector manually examines the person's travel documents, which can often be falsified through photograph substitution. The biometric identifiers used today range from a photograph for most US government-issued travel documents to a photograph and two fingerprints for Mexican border-crossing cards.

In addition, the INS issues an INSPASS card that allows low-risk travellers to use an automated kiosk and is based on hand geometry. The FBI has more than 45 million sets of 10 rolled fingerprints, the majority of which belong to US citizens. Over the past year, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology looked at what is involved in issuing aliens with machine-readable, tamper-resistant visas and other travel documents with biometric identifiers.

Its Information Technology Laboratory measured fingerprint performance on an INS database of 1.2 million prints of 620,000 individuals.

The Face Recognition Vendor Tests 2002 measured the face recognition performance of 10 vendors on a Department of State database of 121,000 images of 37,000 individuals.

Based on the evaluations, the institute recommends that a dual biometric system including two fingerprint images combined with facial scanning be used for verification. The biometrics would assist identity enrolment, background checks and identity verification. Each government agency would choose its own vendors.

The institute (which, as a federal agency, is part of the Department of Commerce) in conjunction with the Departments of Justice and State made the recommendations in a report transmitted to Congress last month.

It recommends that public key infrastructure, which is not used today, be used to uniquely authenticate the source of the travel document, to ensure the electronic data has not been altered and to protect the privacy of the data. Biometric readers and scanners would have to be installed at 300 land, sea and air ports of entry.

A central electronic database or series of interoperable databases would contain information on foreign nationals seeking entry to the United States.

The foreign national's record would contain a unique alphanumeric identifier, biometric data, biographical information and other information such as current and previous addresses. A watch list would contain names of individuals who are identified as national security threats, criminals and immigration violators.

In the report, Mr Charles Wilson, manager of the image group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, said the enhancements would involve major construction.

"We will need to introduce more lanes at ports of entry, hire more inspectors and train them, and have more buildings," he said.

With regard to the biometric technologies, "if you get good illumination on a face, then there's a 90 per cent recognition rate", Mr Wilson said. "Fingerprints are more robust and are much less sensitive to the environment."

The government envisions a gradual conversion to the new travel documents and biometrics over 10 years, where people will receive new documents when their existing ones expire.