Times Record News

Human touch still needed at borders

February 14, 2003
By Lance Gay

When it comes to rooting out terrorists from among the estimated 500 million people who cross America's borders each year, there is no magic technology that can substitute for the tried and true border agent checking papers, making eye-contact and coming up with human assessments, biometrics industry officials say.

Denny Carlton, director of Washington operations for the International Biometric Group, a New York consulting group, said there are still major technological problems to be overcome before reliance can be put on computerized systems like facial recognition, iris scans and fingerprint matching systems.

Under the terms of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, and the Enhanced Border Security Act of 2002, Congress set a deadline of October 2004 for using biometrics at America's ports. Biometrics involves translating pictures into mathematical formulas, which are stored in computers and used later to match other pictures.

Carlton said in a telephone conference that the deadline can't be met, and warned that if unreliable systems currently available are rushed into service, high error rates will just result in customs and border agents ignoring what the machines are telling them.

Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology told a biometrics conference here earlier this week that fingerprint and facial-recognition technologies they have examined have problems, but using the two together could produce a usable system. The data from two fingerprints and a facial recognition technology could be stored on a smart card, they said.

Fingerprint matching is the most mature technology and has a 90 percent rate of success in making matches. The accuracy rate of facial recognition technology is far less, and some studies found it accurate only 47 percent of the time identifying people in its database if used in regular outdoor lighting, the institute said.

Civil libertarian groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which is trying to block the program, say a more accurate system would be to toss a coin since there is only a 50-50 chance of being right. Australia, which is experimenting with facial recognition technology to check the identity of people coming into the country, concluded there is a 20 percent error rate in the systems it has tried.

Carlton said none of the technologies are mature enough to replace U.S. inspectors at the borders manually checking documents and making case-by-case assessments of the individuals they are processing.

"The technologies can augment, but not replace, inspector discretion," he said.

At the receiving end, it would require a lot of machines and redrawing of traffic patterns at borders and airports to avoid backlogs of people waiting to have their documents screened.

Carlton said the technology would have to work at 422 ports of entry into the United States, and operate equally well in the cold and white winter light of America's border with Canada as in the sunlight and desert heat of America's border with Mexico. Each year, 140 million passenger vehicles, 11 million trucks and 7,500 foreign-flagged vessels bring people and cargo into the United States, he estimated.

Carlton said there also is an unresolved issue over how or where the data from foreigners would be collected before visas are issued. He noted there are currently only 212 U.S. embassies in the world issuing visas, and it could be a hardship for some foreigners to arrange to get to the embassy and give the biometric data needed. He said some foreigners also are reluctant to have their fingerprints included in U.S. databanks.

Because of the congressional mandate, Carlton said he expects biometrics will be deployed in steps.