Pakistan Cracks Down on High-Tech Identity Fraud
Pakistan invests in Viisage's recognition technology.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
August 29, 2005]
Technology identity vendor Viisage is announcing that the Government of Pakistan is using Viisage's face recognition technology and a fingerprint technology to uncover identify theft and fraud.
The National Database and Registration Authority, an independent corporate organization on contract to the Pakistani Government to run the country's smart passport and national ID program, has uncovered multiple instances of fraud to date.
NADRA has issued a country-wide alert in July 2005 through The News, Pakistan's English newspaper, notifying those holding fraudulent identity documents that they had been caught and will be pursued if they do not turn in their identity cards.
This reporter urges Pakistani officials to watch for anyone named "Osama bin Laden" caught using fraudulent documents. You might want to pay the gentleman a visit.
"Viisage's FaceTOOLS and FaceEXPLORER products are powerful investigative tools for exposing fraud in our national ID and passport programs," said Brigadier (Retd.) Saleem Ahmad Moeen, chairman of NADRA. "In less than a year, this solution has helped us define the extent of the identity fraud problem in Pakistan and increase security for the country."
Not everyone is confident in biometric technology. Given a tremendous boost by 9/11, face recognition technology was hustled as a way to pick known terrorists out of an airport line before they boarded the plane. It didn't actually work like that in practice, unfortunately.
A couple years ago British IT site The Register called it "a proven farce," noting that in early 2002 in a program in Tampa, Florida, the Visionics system used "has thus far failed to identify one single crook or pervert listed in the department's photographic database, while falsely identifying 'a large number' of innocent citizens."
Tampa police abandoned using the program to detect faces in crowds which matched the department's photo log of known criminals after two months. Proponents of the technology say it does better matching photos to photos, instead of picking live faces out of crowds that match photos -- which was, unfortunately, the capability marketed to the Tampa police.
NADRA has enrolled 34 million existing images and scanned them for duplicates in the past three months. Pakistan's database is expected to grow to 50 million records when the enrollment phase is completed. NADRA uses the face recognition technology to compare 21,000 new applicant images a day to the entire database, and is catching up to 109 fraudulent records daily.
Viisage and NADRA have signed an agreement to market their services to other Middle Eastern, South American and Asian countries looking for help managing a large national ID programs and databases.
The North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles is using a computerized face-recognition system to detect identity theft, and is asking people not to smile for their driver's license photos, since the $1.5 million system is thrown off if people smile in pictures.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
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