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U.S. Begins Digital Fingerprinting In Airports
lemist writes "Cross Match has rolled out digital fingerprinting at major airports in the United States according to MSNBC. It's designed to increase border security. They appear to be using Cross Match's Verifier 300 LC. Note that the actual capture of the fingerprint requires no interaction with the device. It determines when the image quality is excellent and grabs it."
What I really like is Brazil's answer to this: they are now stopping and fingerprinting and photographing all US visitors. Tit-for-tat, the way it should be. And it wouldn't at all stop me from visting Brazil, just as it probably won't stop many Brazilians from coming here.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
There's only one major difference between Facist dictatorships and Communist dictatorships -- does the government own and control all industry (Communist) or is it controlled by a few private citizens who are close friends with the administration (Facist)? The methods of control and the usurping of democracy work the same no matter what econmics lie behind your totalitarian system whether we arrive there through bloody revolution like the Soviets or warmongering, security obsession like the Nazis.
(Yeah, yeah, f--- Godwin's Law. Remove the racist purges and replace zealous worship with apathetic inaction by the masses and you've got a good model of where we could be going if Bush were honestly an evil man instead of being mostly misguided. Read German history. The parallels are terrifying, and yet reassuring in that we did not step off that chasm that presented itself so many times.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Good for you! I personally don't have the need or desire for lethal weapons likely to be used to commit crimes. All I'd like is to visit my American friends and see more of your beautiful country.
Says Anonymous Coward. Anyone else see the irony of the situation here? Anyway, I will think long and hard before visiting the US again, even though I am from one of the 28 excluded countries, since customs and immigration seems to be ignoring their instructions at will and just fingerprint the hell out of everybody anyway. I visited relatives in what was at the time held as part of the Soviet Union with less invasion of my privacy back in the 80s. It's really sad to see such a beautiful country fall victim to such totalitarianism.
The reason I am "bitching" about it is that this is a highly unusual procedure conducted on foreign nationals merely for the fact that they are just that, and I hope more countries follow Brazil's excellent example. Perhaps we could also get American travellers to wear something... a little yellow star, say, with the word American printed on it, you know, just in case, just so we know who they are.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
Which actually raises a good question. What is the US comparing fingerprints against? Do we have terrorist fingerprints on file? I would guess that we don't have too many.
While I love Brazil (lived there for two years) I think this policy of knee-jerk reciprocity is a bit immature. Brazil needs to realize that people visiting the USA from Brazil are far more likely to simply make their visit permanent (illegally) than people visiting Brazil from the USA. Once that situation has changed then we can start talking about lifting visa requirements. Somehow I don't think that Lula is going to make much progress on the matter, but I wish him the best of luck.
Lasers Controlled Games!
It probably will start as a voluntary, convenience measure - that proverbial carrot. There are enough people who do not care, or do not understand what they are subjected to. Many people today are just consumers of goods and services, and they will gladly take 10% discount on airfares (or something) for using a fingerprint-based identity check.
Once part of the population is hooked, that will be played against the rest of people, placating them as "OBL's helpers" or something else, equally ridiculous and equally effective. A "Red Corridor" can be set up for refusniks, for example, and it will be much slower. The attrition will move the plank from the original 30% to maybe 80%, since people will just submit and continue with their lives.
The rest, 20% or less, will be then forced into the new groove. A mandatory body cavity probing, complete with X-ray, in every airport would be a good start; after some time, cumulative dose of X rays will be deadly anyhow. And to clean things up, a little-known rider will be inserted into an agriculture bill to completely outlaw travel and some other activities unless positively ID'ed with biometrics.
You may say it is too dark a future. I say, if it can be done, it will be done.
The waiver skips fingerprinting only if you are visiting briefly, with only sightseeing purpose, or for very limited business activities (like a trade show.)
...and tonight, as I was trying to rush through customs from one flight to a connecting flight, the entire validation system went down for about 15 minutes, leaving me and about 200 other people in a panic of nailbiting anxiety. The customs agent told me that the crash was due to their having installed the new software needed for the fingerprinting and photo database, and apparently the system had gone down all over the US. All the agents were issued backup CDs to boot up from (although my agent seemed to be having a hard time figuring out how to put the CD into the drive) and then things were back to normal, although presumably without the new photo/fingerprinting system. All the computers were running W2K Professional and had a cool (tho ominous) Department of Homeland Security logo on them.
The USSR wouldn't have survived without proxy-armies battling its expansion?
What armies and what expansion? Since USSR was founded, Finland separated from it, and the only army that actually fought for USSR Communists was their own (sometimes "helping" governments that didn't ask them, though that was quite rare, and limited to the immediate neighbors). USSR had its sphere of influence, but for the whole its history it didn't do anything to expand it, with the exception of WWII when it became inevitable. Its economy was closed, it could get no benefit from trying to be a robber baron, so its military policy was defensive (and shut up about Afghanistan already, it shared the border with USSR, and was massively messed with by some very hostile groups of people -- not that the situation changed much since then). "Support" of Iraq and other "allies" in the Middle East and Africa was a drain on the USSR, and even now those countries owe huge amounts of money to Russia, that they have no intention to pay back.
US on the other hand, did everything that you accuse USSR for -- supported foreign wars, created proxy armies, expanded its military presence to pretty much everything from Japan to Germany to Cuba, not to mention that its involvement with other countries always ended up providing benefits for American big businesses at everyone else's expense.
I have a long list of things I blame Communists/former USSR government/current Russian government for, but the things you have mentioned just aren't there, and to put it simply, you are ignorant about history.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm a US citizen who lives in Germany. My US state of residence is Texas. So when I went in to renew my driver's license while I was on vacation visiting my parents, the DMV insisted on fingerprints. I had to give up my fingerprints to get a freaking driver's license.
I'm not quite sure how that can harm me, but it really makes my skin crawl. If I had it to do over again without the surpise factor, I would have refused, and done without a US driver's license. I was in the process of getting my German license anyways.
On a related note: does anyone know if there are other states which require fingerprints for a driver's license? Does anyone know what happens if you actually refuse?
remember this slashdot article that reffered to that
:
crypto-gram issue ???
quote
Fun with Fingerprint Readers
Tsutomu Matsumoto, a Japanese cryptographer, recently decided to look at biometric fingerprint devices. These are security systems that attempt to identify people based on their fingerprint. For years the companies selling these devices have claimed that they are very secure, and that it is almost impossible to fool them into accepting a fake finger as genuine. Matsumoto, along with his students at the Yokohama National University, showed that they can be reliably fooled with a little ingenuity and $10 worth of household supplies.
Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.
His more interesting experiment involves latent fingerprints. He takes a fingerprint left on a piece of glass, enhances it with a cyanoacrylate adhesive, and then photographs it with a digital camera. Using PhotoShop, he improves the contrast and prints the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet. Then, he takes a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (PCB) and uses the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper, making it three-dimensional. (You can find photo-sensitive PCBs, along with instructions for use, in most electronics hobby shops.) Finally, he makes a gelatin finger using the print on the PCB. This also fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.
Gummy fingers can even fool sensors being watched by guards. Simply form the clear gelatin finger over your own. This lets you hide it as you press your own finger onto the sensor. After it lets you in, eat the evidence.
Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them. The results are enough to scrap the systems completely, and to send the various fingerprint biometric companies packing. Impressive is an understatement.
There's both a specific and a general moral to take away from this result. Matsumoto is not a professional fake-finger scientist; he's a mathematician. He didn't use expensive equipment or a specialized laboratory. He used $10 of ingredients you could buy, and whipped up his gummy fingers in the equivalent of a home kitchen. And he defeated eleven different commercial fingerprint readers, with both optical and capacitive sensors, and some with "live finger detection" features. (Moistening the gummy finger helps defeat sensors that measure moisture or electrical resistance; it takes some practice to get it right.) If he could do this, then any semi-professional can almost certainly do much much more.
More generally, be very careful before believing claims from security companies. All the fingerprint companies have claimed for years that this kind of thing is impossible. When they read Matsumoto's results, they're going to claim that they don't really work, or that they don't apply to them, or that they've fixed the problem. Think twice before believing them.
Matsumoto's paper is not on the Web. You can get a copy by asking:
Tsutomu Matsumoto
Here's the reference:
T. Matsumoto, H. Matsumoto, K. Yamada, S. Hoshino, "Impact of Artificial Gummy Fingers on Fingerprint Systems," Proceedings of SPIE Vol. #4677, Optical Security and Counterfeit Deterrence Techniques IV, 2002.
Some slides from the presentation are here:
presentati
The fingerprinting system may or may not prevent terrorist attacks - it's really impossible to say. In a way, it makes sense to get the visa system clean first (or at least try to clean up this horrible mess).
But what has apparently be overlooked by American authorities / officials is the psychological impact. It really pisses people off. Even here in europe.
I have dealt with the US immigrations authorities a lot (i was studying there) and it's hard to describe the feeling when you are at the receiving end of it. Maybe prison is comparable. You talk to people behind bullet-proof glass, watched by marines with M16s, go through security scans like at the airport, the place is filled with posters that show handcuffed people who broke some immigration law (implying: YOU could be one of them), and, what's worst, the immigration officers do not believe a single word you say - regardless of what it is they always suspect some kind of scam. Even the holy pope himsef would wonder if he had done something illegal.
And that's in Europe! Other places are probably even worse.
Fingerprinting and taking pictures is not improving this situation.
You reap what you sow. And american immigration sows distrust and suspicion. In order to win peace in the world, the USA must win the hearts and minds of people. As it is, America is doing the opposite, most visibly at its outposts all over the world. The free world, looking like a prison or fortress...
I am not against checks, but there has got to be a way to make this humane, and to remove this aura of complete and utter paranoia. (European newspapers were reporting of "snipers on roofs and marines in attack-helicopters on new year's even in NY... )
Bush should have followed up on the warnings by placing the FBI, State and INS on a higher state of alert...
Just curious...what were your thoughts when we were recently placed on "a higher state of alert"?
Evil is the money of root.