Biometrics a needed weapon in the battle against new threats
Tom Colatosti
March 22, 2004
Terrorism hit Main Street Madrid this month, leaving more than 200 dead and hundreds wounded from a coordinated, rush-hour attack on the city's train system.
This brutal assault, which exacted massive personal loss and changed the political direction of a nation, again reminds us of our vulnerabilities. There are no imaginable limits to the time, place and scale of the next attack launched by a very few fanatics who wish to visit harm upon a free people.
The security imperative is to identify the very small number of potential terrorists who walk and ride among the millions of us as we go about our daily lives in school, work and travel.
Can we find the needle in the haystack? Can we risk not trying?
While terror is our society's greatest fear, identity theft is America's fastest-growing crime. Its 10 million victims typically spend about 18 months reclaiming their identity and lose thousands of dollars in the ordeal.
Technology is providing answers to both these new-age threats in the form of biometric identification. Biometrics identify individuals using uniquely personal physical characteristics such as fingerprints, face characteristics, iris features, hand geometry and voice patterns.
Biometrics are emerging as a significant technology and are poised to replace, or augment, current identification methods, which are woefully inadequate, easy to duplicate and rife with fraud.
Already several airports are using biometric technology to track employee access. San Francisco International and Toledo Express Airport use hand scanners for access to the tarmac. The recently deployed U.S. VISIT (Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) program uses facial images and fingerprint scans at 115 international airports (including the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport) and 14 seaports. Biometrics authenticate the visitor's identity, allowing customs agents to identify foreign visitors against criminal records and known terrorist lists.
This same technology is being used in a wide variety of commercial and consumer applications to accurately protect personal identities from being stolen or misappropriated. The La Crescent, Minn., school system uses biometrics to move hundreds of children rapidly through lunch lines and accurately account for the reimbursement of tax dollars from the federal school lunch program.
Biometrics are being used to verify identities of ATM, check cashing and credit card users, as well as controlling physical access to offices and high-security facilities.
In many cases, biometrics are replacing today's identification systems -- documents, cards, and keys that are often lost, stolen or easily forged and passwords that are readily forgotten or hacked.
Identification systems based primarily on something you know, such as passwords, or something you carry, such as a card or a document, are inherently problematic because they can so easily be replicated and compromised.
Robust identification cannot be achieved based on what you carry or know, but based on who you really are.
Biometrics vary in terms of scalability, accuracy, ease-of-use and cost, but each has an important role to play -- fingerprints for low-cost, high-accuracy; face for surveillance, and iris scan for high-security applications. They can be used in natural combination with each other like fingerprint and face or in unique situations such as voice with telephone applications.
Privacy concerns overstated
Change never comes easily or without resistance. The threats of identity theft and terrorism were minuscule notions just five years ago; new-age problems require new solutions. Like all new technologies, once adopted, it will be unimaginable to think about how we survived without them.
Yet this capability is being questioned by some as an unnecessary risk to personal privacy. The misguided have not yet come to realize that the real threat to privacy is not biometrics, which can harmlessly authenticate who we are, but the financial and personal risks posed by identity theft and terrorism. These threats can be mitigated by identifying wanted or known suspects before they can carry out their dastardly plans.
We cannot allow those full of unfounded fears, those resistant to change or those anxious about adopting new technology to hamper the potential to both better protect privacy and improve security. When people can accurately, cost-effectively and conveniently validate that they are who they claim to be, privacy will be protected and so will our lives and way of life.
Biometric technology can do that today.
Tom Colatosti is chairman of Eagan-based Bio-key International, which develops software that reads fingerprints and identifies the individual seeking access to physical locations or computer networks. Colatosti was also CEO and president of Viisage, a facial recognition biometrics software company
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