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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."
28 countries are exempt from this testing including a lot of western european countries where the Sept 11th terrorists moved around with impunity. This fingerprinting scheme aint going to fix anything.
Don't be mad when I offer the middle one.
I don't think this is a problem. I see how some people think this might be an invasion of privacy, and hey, if they put this thing in random public places, especially without letting us know, yes I'd be upset. But this is in AIRPORTS. You're required to check in before you ever get on the plane anyway. I think it's just another means of making sure that people who are on these planes really are who they say they are. That can't be a bad thing.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Anal probes ?????
Now, all we need to do is to have terrorists send us in a copy of their finger prints so we can keep em on file.
Supposedly, (supposedly) DoD was looking into this as a replacement for military dogtags, and the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) was supposedly looking into it. Now sounds far fetched but according to the companies press releases: September 29, 2003 - Applied Digital Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSX), an advanced technology development company, today announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, VeriChip Corporation, has retained the services of Stanley "Stan" L. Reid, a longtime technology industry executive and former congressional aide with extensive experience and wide contacts in Washington, D.C., to market VeriChip(TM) secure identification solutions to federal agencies.
...
Since 1996, Mr. Reid has served as president of Strategic Sciences, a Washington, D.C.-area consulting firm that specializes in marketing advanced technologies to the federal government. Mr. Reid has particular expertise in selling new, introductory technologies to government agencies, including the Departments of Defense (DoD), Energy (DoE) and State, as well as the agencies that have been incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security. (source)
Just think if they decided to do away with Social Security, or made this a standard for newer borns a-la vaccinations... Oh well that's why I'm glad I support the war on terror
MoFscker
Please excuse our xenophobic and jingoistic tendancies. Ya'll have a nice day now!
-psy
The Department of Homeland Security put out a PDF leaflet about the program, which contained their normal, almost incomprehensible pictograms like those on ready.gov
I thought they needed some better, and funnier, subtitles.
Well the US Govt has a stance of trust nobody, my question is whats going to stop a guy with three suitcases full of plastic explosives walking into an Airport and making a crater out of it. Fingerprints arent gonna help much then. All these security measures are just put in place to make the people feel safe, however a plane could come from a foreign country which doesnt have or cant afford to implement this technology. Osama is still to be caught, intelligence has done nothing, and you dont hear of any new breaks in locating him. All we see is his head on Al Jazeera threatening to eradicate the infidels. When Sept 11 occured, no one knew who these guys were, they could have been on the plane just as easily with the fingerprint technology implemented then. The real threat is knowing who your enemy is. All we have is one face, we dont have his many followers. This could just lead to a witch hunt of massive proportions
If all this nonsense actually DID increase security, then fair play. But it doesn't. From your statement you appear to believe that yet another privacy rape at the airport, in a climate where women have been forced to empty baby bottles because they might contain weapons, is worth it, do you? Would that be correct? It's all in the interests of national security...
Okay, then, over Christmas, the Bush regime (Heil Dubya!) raised the terror alert etc... saying an attack was likely.
Now let's see here, they claim this, which, to me, means ALL these new security measures have been a waste of time, effort and money, and done nothing other than strip American's of more and more of their rights. If there's a "clear and present danger" of an attack, the administration is admitting that all this nonsense at airports is rubbish because it has not stopped the potential for attacks.
In short: All this security at the airport is like the old adage.
"This rock in my hand keeps away all the lions."
"But there are no lions here."
"Exactly."
Let's look at it this way and assume the "threat" is real. The fingerprint system is ONLY as good as the intelligence it's received. If Joe Terrorist goes through and has never been fingerprinted before... Well woop de doo, when he flies a plane into a building, at least we'll know what his fingers looked like before they burnt up in the wreckage.
It's a useless security measure.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We got ours taken at the American Embassy in Israel when we were there a few weeks ago (were there to get a new visa stamp).
Anyone 14 or over is required to have their prints taken, and chcked every time they enter the US.
The article is right; it really didn't take that much longer than usual. As long as it doesn't slow the already crappy process to go through at 5 AM after a 12 hour flight, it doesn't really bother me.
Dehomag (the German branch of Hollerith - the ancestor of IBM) got its start assisting the Germans with a similar effort - using computing technology (punched cards) to track all kinds of things in the interest of security, efficiency, and thoroughness. They got their start automating the census, and wound up empowering governments with then unheard of levels of efficiency in attaining many of their goals, despite the changing nature of those goals.
Again we are seeing a watershed moment in the efficiency, security and thoroughness of states ability to enforce their policies. Lets hope that this time the population will gain a proportional increase in control over the agenda of the state.
The alternative will be no less than a repetition of history.
Problem is, faking a fingerprint - even when checking for pulse and body heat - is not all that difficult. Bad Guys(tm) will do so if needed. And they will of course preferentially use someone else's print (which again is quite doable to obtain). Then what do you do? Passwords, PIN codes and social security numbers can be changed if you've lost them or is a victim of identity theft. But how do you change your fingerprint?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This sounds like a place to rub a little anthrax.. well except for the fact that it would be targeting non-US citizens.
Seriously though, how many people will touch this same couple of cm of space within the same day, one right after another. I hope they have considered a way to keep this surface sterile - perhaps a UV backlight or something. Otherwise this sounds like an international virus hub.
ôó
Digital fingerprints? That's redundant. Fingers are also called digits.
How ya like dat?
... at Miami International. I just got back from winter break back home in Panama. The actual process is quite simple and none of the people I saw going through it seemed to have any problem with it, pretty much everyone seems to accept it as one more thing the US is doing in its effort to 'protect' itself.
It's almost business as usual at the airport, customs officers just have two new toys: the fingerprint scanner and a webcam. The added hassle is less than 20 seconds. Left index, right index, look at the camera, done.
Do I think it's a Good Thing? Not really, do I mind? Not really, after all, I'm not a terrorist!
Push the envelope. Watch it bend. -Tool
IIRC They were travelling under valid documentation.
Knowing who is on the plane or in the country would not have prevented September 11. They didn't know who was going to hijack a plane.
The scary part is focusing on foreigners isn't going to solve the problems. They end up harassing innocent people, and causing lots of bad will, but doesn't make it safer for anyone.
I can think of a few recent issues that really shocked & upset the US.
9/11
Columbine
Unabomber
Oklahoma city
The Sniper
Hmm, looks like picking on foreigners might not be the most effective way to decrease terrorism.
Is this REALLY about protection of US citizens? Then why does the current administration act the way it does, if this is the goal? I sure don't feel more secure, rather the opposite.
From Sorrows of Empire: An Interview we see that the administration is undermining security :
And the effects are not one might like :
yes it's invasive, yes it tacks on an additional 15 seconds, no we don't care if you don't like it
Oh yeah, the administration sendt that message too:
A fingerprint is just a fingerprint. It is, essentialy, just a fact with no meaning. The fingerprint itself holds no information about who the fingerprint belongs to, it's just a token.
DNA on the other hand holds a load of information in and of itself.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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").
OMG, you're right! Well, we might as well do nothing then, rather than take incremental steps to make things that much harder for people to slip through. After all, you wouldn't design a computer network with more than one level of security, why try to protect your borders that way?
If you re-read my post you'll see there are TWO parts to what I was saying. The first is that the system will not catch 100% of terrorists. In fact if some nerd like myself can see a flaw within 5 minutes, I'm sure that the actual effectiveness with be considerably less than 100%.
The second part of my post is prefaced with the words "On a related note" meaning that you are supposed to consider this in conjunction with the first point. The second point is that there WILL be false positives. Some innocents are going to get labeled as terrorists. And that's not too much fun for whoever gets the unlucky draw.
This pervasive "well, it's better than nothing!" mindset that I see so much of these days regarding our counter-terror efforts really spooks me. It sounds as though you're perfectly happy to disregard all those false positives as no big deal or, perhaps, an acceptable cost for some feeling of safety. In designing a system, an engineer will look carefully at the trade off of Pcc (probability of correct classification) versus Pfa (false alarms). Then it comes down to a judgement call, of course. What tradeoff are you willing to live with. The purpose of my original post was to ask if anyone has any feeling for what those numbers are! If we don't, then we're just doing a bunch of bullshit to make ourselves feel good.
And, personally, I won't be feeling too good about sending innocent people to Gitmo.
GMD
watch this
When you get offered five fingers wrapped in a latex glove in return!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This sort of statement fundamentally misunderstands the reasons for World War 2: one of the primary causes of it was the massive sense of resentment and anger on the part of the German people towards the nations that had defeated them so soundly during the first World War. As a result, their crushed economy as well as bruised egos left the people ripe for ideological exploitation like Hitler did. He created scapegoats for existing problems in the person of the Jew, and in doing so gave a strawman to the Germans.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Since there hasn't been a repeat of 9/11, it seems like the security precautions are working.
There are no elephants on my lawn, I guess it must be because the pepper I put down every night keeps them away.
The point is not to pick out people who are traveling under false papers, the point is to build a database of foreign nationals. 28 countries are exempt only because the United States could not diplomatically get away with insulting these exempt countries this way. The truth is that if GWB could get away with doing this for US citizens as well, he would. It's all about control.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Aren't all fingerprints digital?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
These "homeland security" measures that Bush and Ridge are saddling us with are a giant conjob. I travel around NYC, and they've reduced the NYPD to a bunch of overtime crossing guards. If I were sick enough to want to sabotage something big enough to get on TV, it would be really easy. The airports are just as porous. Meanwhile, the Sunday before New Year's Eve, somebody buzzed their small plane around the Statue of Liberty ( under a mile from the hole where the World Trade Center stood) for several minutes before the FAA even warned them away from that closed airspace. During a Christmas/New Year week of steady Orange Alert. Any heads roll? Any tightening of the security? Found any "evil doers"? No. This is a scam to keep us scared, obedient, and ignorant of the very real changes the Feds are pulling on us.
If you want to know why, just think about all those military contractors that Bush was going to hook up with "missile defense shield" contracts ($100s of billions - trillions). After the WTC planebombings, they couldn't convince anyone the #1 threat was missiles. So they turned their proposals and whitepapers into "TerrorWar" marketing and "Iraqmire" lobbying. Do you think all that Pentagon biz development just went away? They need that money! And they're getting it. But they don't have actual TerrorWar products, so they're just keeping up the smokescreens and scapegoats while they retool. By the time we catch on and get tired of just rounding up foreign looking people, their systematic abuse of every possible fringe group will probably have produced actual nuts who will follow Osama bin Laden's career highlight. Then the contractors will be able to say "I warned you", and keep business rolling. Unless we start calling them on it, and stop playing along by watching their TerrorTV and taking them seriously.
--
make install -not war
One problem is that even if you can correctly identify every single person entering the country, you can't stop any terrorists until they have a known terror record.
Still, this should effectively put a stop to anyone attempting their second suicide bombing! And that's no worse than most of these anti terror programs.
"Security"? How's that going to help? You just may be able to prevent a single person from being murdered by erecting walls around them (read: the president) but how are you going to protect an entire country?
Don't you see that something else is wrong here? For one, maybe the US shouldn't be training terrorists like Osama Bin laden, the world would already be safer then.
So stop nagging about security, get your head out of your ass, and start thinking about why this trrorism is taking place.. It's just a symptom of a bigger issue and digging trenches or shutting your eyes to reality (and calling it 'security') is not going to help.
What we need is open minds to face the world of tomorrow. Not a reactionary, "we are better than the rest so it's okay for us to kill other people" and then expect that everyone will like you for it.
I won't call you a moron because I don't want to offend real morons.
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.
There were several terrorist incidents when we were stationed overseas - I witnessed one, my family avoided one thanks to our chronically late mother (Thanks, Mom!), and some escaped Basque nationalists stole our car (that was not fun). Three in three years if you discount the occassional ass-beating by local teens who hated Americans (well, us anyway), a riot (my bad), and the consequences of unwise activities by myself and fellow American teens (often misguided patriotism or plain mischief).
Nevertheless, the other 99.5% of the time we were as safe and sound as bugs in a rug, living in a great country with kind and friendly people, immersed in a rich culture, surrounded by millennia of history, and had a fantastic time. Those are the times that I remember and cherish - going to the Prado, walking through El Escorial, marveling at the Valley of the Fallen, visiting the tombs of Saints, roaming through ancient castles, seeing the Hanging Gardens, touching Queen Isabella's jewelry box (it was about the size of my Shuttle XPC), meeting Queen Sofia...and tons more great experiences.
Even at the height of tensions between American military folks and Spanish civilians (during the biological warfare accident/linseed oil poisoning of olive oil) we - the Americans - were never subject to the invasive 'security checks' foreign visitors experience coming to the United States.
Fast forward exactly 20 years from January of 1984 (when we settled into our new stateside duty station)...
The Patriot Act I and II, fingerprint scanning, CAP fighter and Apache patrols over American cities, "orange" terrorist alerts, "war on terrorism" with ever-shifting definitions of "terrorist", jailing of American citizens without charge for years, propoganda in American media ---
After one terrorist incident in three years (albeit a terrible one) wrecking the peaceful tranquility of the nation's daily domestic tragedies, America is moving toward a police state. Even as hopping Spain was with machinegun toting Spanish military dudes and several terrorist incidents (bombings, shootings, mass poisonings), 99.5% of the time everything was cool and there wasn't nearly the level of hysterical anti-democratic overreaction we've seen here in the United States. Nobody got on TV to talk about how terribly vulnerable to terrorism we were; everyone knew it. Nobody went out to fingerprint, track, and data-mine everyone in the world - you just needed proper ID; match face to picture and signature to signature.
All the security in the world isn't going to stop terrorism; just ask Israel - it probably has the best-trained and equipped security forces on the face of the planet. By their own figures they stop 90% of suicide bombers, but nobody can stop them all. The Palestinian resistance has demonstrated its capability to carry out a 'successful' bombing on a daily basis - killing a dozen or more civilians and wounding scores - terrorizing millions.
Even if we could wall up everything, put cops on every street corner, monitor and surveille whoever we wished - we cannot stop terrorism, not without addressing the root cause that motivates people to kill themselves and a bunch of people. And I'm not talking religion here.
I'm talking a sane foreign policy that doesn't make enemies out of everyone we walk over or steal from to 'protect our national interests' - or enemies of the 'friends and allies' with whom we used to divvy up the spoils.
Instead, we need a policy that simultaneously roots out genuine terrorists while helping those who have a legitimate beef with us for having trampled all over them. We need to focus on reducing the environment that breeds terrorists and terrorism, not fueling it.
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.
Looking at all this ruckus about fingerprinter etc from a European (UK) perspective, and having spent 30 years of my life before that in South Africa, I think that all these measures are nothing more than a Dog & Pony show: smoke and mirrors . ..
In the bad old days of South African Apartheid, the white government legislated all kinds of things, pumped millions into the security forces, and spent huge chunks of the budget on trying to prevent attacks by "terrorists" from the banned liberation organisations such as the ANC and PAC. What good did that do? Sweet blue blow-all. All it did was challenge those organisations to be more creative about infiltrating their cadre's and hitmen & women into society, and the bombings continued, as did the agitation. Leaders of these organisations were identified and incarcerated, to no avail. It just didn't work, despite the fact that it turned the country into a police state.
Likewise, there is SBFA that the American administration can do to prevent determined terrorists from getting into the country and committing acts of terrorism - nothing at all. Personally, if I were an American citizen, I'd be protesting about the pointless waste of my tax dollars.
The only way the USA can make itself less of a target, is to change its arrogant attitude toward the rest of the world: realise that not everyone wants to live like an average American, and not everyone defines freedom and democracy in the same way as the USA does. In the same way that the freedom movements in South Africa were rebelling against the arrogant tyrany of the white government, who considered its world-view to be normative, there are nations out there who see the USA's attitude in much the same light.
I don't in any way condone the use of violence as a means of protest, and what happenned on 911 was just not on, not for any reason, but once again drawing a parallel with what happened in apartheid South Africa: put yourself in the shoes of the average oppressed black man for just a moment. Your back is to the wall: there's no more room for manuever. What option do you have but to resort to violence? Especially if that is all the government understands?
In this respect the USA (and Tony Blah) is supremely guilty: the WMD ruse was just an excuse to use an option that should have been an absolute last resort. What options do those nations have where the USA and other western nations have interfered but to resort to violence?
Bush should have followed up on the warnings by placing the FBI, State and INS on a higher state of alert (i.e., look carefully at middle eastern visitors and what they are doing). If such a state was in place, the warnings raised earlier in the year may not have been ignored.
See my journal, I write things there