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Saturday, October 6, 2001

An anti-terrorism bill, H.R. 2975, passed the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday night with a manager's amendment that would require the Department of Justice, in conjunction with others, to study the feasibility of using so-called biometric scanning systems to take fingerprints of people wishing to enter the United States and match them with an FBI database of criminals.

The system could help U.S. officials perform the gargantuan task of identifying aliens wanted in connection with criminal or terrorist investigations.

It is unclear to what degree the scanning system would cause processing delays. Steve Fischer, an FBI spokesman, said a typical search for a fingerprint match takes about two hours.

The FBI's database, known as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System or IAFIS, came on-line in 1999 and currently contains some 42 million criminal records.

"During the last fiscal year we had roughly 14.8 million fingerprint (search requests) of which roughly 52 percent were criminal and 48 percent civil," Fischer said. "That's about 42,000 submissions per day."

Requests for criminal print matches are sent to the FBI by approximately 80,000 law enforcement organizations, he said.

Fischer said the system was built to handle peak loads of 60,000 to 70,000 per day and is due for "technical refreshments" over the next year and every two years after that.

A Senate anti-terrorism bill, however, could beef up the system beyond scheduled upgrades. That bill instructs the Justice Department to study the feasibility of enhancing IAFIS.

Widely used in many sectors, biometric systems - computer scanning technologies that use body features such as iris patterns, facial structure and hand geometry as identifiers - may be a fulcrum for the balancing act between security needs and privacy infringements.

Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have condemned facial recognition technologies in particular as Orwellian tools of state intrusion. But the American propensity to embrace technology, combined with terrorist worries, has caused national interest in biometrics to increase exponentially, said John Woodward, a former CIA officer and a senior policy analyst at RAND, a Washington think tank.

Biometric fingerprinting systems are more immune to counterfeiting than identification cards but are not perfect.

"They aren't foolproof. When you acquire fingerprints at different times, for example, they could be slightly different due to cuts or bruises," said Anil Jain, a computer scientist and biometrics expert at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "Also, the current systems that are available commercially are not as accurate as they are promoted as being. That means that inevitably some people will be wrongly identified and falsely rejected."

Even so, the demand will continue. Bill Spence, director of marketing for Recognition Systems Inc., a Campbell, Calif.-based manufacturer of biometric hand readers, said at a recent conference on industrial security he met with at least 15 different airport organizations looking at ways to maintain or increase levels of security using biometric systems.

-- Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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