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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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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
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:
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.
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
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.
Aren't all fingerprints digital?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
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.
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?
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