Notice the female American accent -
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Microchips off the Old Block
By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent, PA News
Latest tests of the “biometric” technology required for ID cards have shown it takes about five minutes to register each client’s details.
With 2.9 million passports issued in the UK each year, excluding child passports, that will create more than 240,000 hours of extra work for the passport service.
It will also mean postal passport applications and renewals will no longer be possible.
plicants will have to attend a passport office or another centre to have biometric details such as a facial scan, iris scan and fingerprints imprinted in a microchip smartcard.
Immigration Minister Des Browne took part in a trial at the UK Passport Service’s London office.
Hi-tech scanners measure characteristics of the face – such as the distance between the eyes and mouth – and take a photograph of the unique patterns of the iris.
The information is recorded on the chip and, crucially, it is also stored on a central database.
This will allow each person’s ID card to be verified against the database to check they are who they say they are.
It is this verification procedure which ministers believe will make the biometric card almost impossible to forge.
Clients sit in a “biometric enrolment pod” and, instructed by an operator, look into a device which takes their photograph and then scans their face and takes the iris scan.
The machine gives spoken instructions, in a female American accent, asking sitters to “Please move a little to the left” or “Please move back a little”.
They then place their hands – first the four fingers and then the thumb of each hand in turn – on a fingerprint scanner.
Illuminated by a red light, the scanner instantly produces an image of the fingerprints on the operator’s computer screen.
The system then checks the fingerprints against a database of one million prints which have been given by volunteers.
A set of prints which had already been given by a previous sitter would be refused by the system because it would indicate that someone was trying to register a second identity on the database.
Finally, the client signs his or her signature on an electronic pad.
All the information is recorded on a smartcard, along with name and postcode.
The card then takes several minutes to print.
Volunteers from within the civil service have already taken part in a trial to capture biometric details of 10,000 people.
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