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Germany Begins Iris Scans at Frankfurt Airport
securitas writes "Deutsche Welle reports that at Germany's Frankfurt airport biometric iris scans of airline passengers have begun. The German government says that the six-month pilot project is part of Europe's 18-country Automated and Biometrics-based Border Checks initiative to improve 'border control routines' and domestic security, with a full-scale system to follow. The system uses an iris scan embedded in a passenger's machine-readable passport, which is compared to the passenger's iris with an onsite scan. Travelers must 'sign a data security document' and agree to be checked by border guards. The article also references the capability of an iris scan to determine drug and alcohol consumption. The European Parliament is considering replacing all of its traditional passports with a new European biometric passport by 2005. The IRISPASS system (press release) was built by Byometric systems, Iridian and Oki Electric Industry. More coverage at CNet/ZDNet, AP/USA Today and mirrors at AJC, and CNN."
So you get a passport made with a fake iris scan, just like you would get one with a fake photo.
Or would it cryptographically check with a central office to make sure the passport iris scan is the same one you got when you applied for the passport? Whole other can of worms...
Wah!
What about using colored contact lenses to change identities. The only way to make brown eyes look blue is with a fake iris. A less suspicious person gets a passport wearing a pair of these and then gives that pair of contacts to another less-reputable person. I wonder if German authorities would even look twice at a nice artificially blond, artificially blue-eyed disguised terrorist.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I would think the scan will have to be renewed on a fairly regular basis.
Still, this leaves me wondering. We hear a lot of negative stuff about universal ID cards of one stripe or another (I won't go so far as to call it FUD, it may be quite reasonable). Most of the cautions expressed seem to revolve around duplication / forgery by criminals etc.
Anyone have any info on how hard it would be to fool an iris (or retina) scanner? Might be a good substitute for universal IDs. I mean, the ostensible principles of univeral IDs aren't all bad...
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Furthermore, the iris doesn't just betray the identity of the passenger, but can also tell much about his or her possible drug and alcohol consumption.
Cuff him, the computer says he might be high!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
What about the blind? People who use colored or distorted contacts (IE shaded contacts, contacts with designs on them), or other abnormalities of the eye. There might be a lot of ways people could potentially bypass a system like that.
I submit this idea, does it even matter? How many terrorist acts are commited by people who snuck, 9-11 was commited by people who came into the US legally
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I'm also curious about the ability to detect "drug and alcohol consumption." Is this done by checking iris/pupil characteristics?
And, drugs---you mean like antidepressants and anxiolytics, both of which are wont to induce mydriasis?
"I'm sorry, sir. Dilation says can't let you on the plane. You're either on speed, or you're on happy pills, and either way, we don't want you."
If there are other detectable characteristics in the iris area besides pupil dilatation, I'd love to know. Any ocular pharmacology researchers out there?
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I've always had a geeky dreamproject of supplementing my traditional lock and key entry to my house with biometric security devices. The idea being that in the event of a systems failure, instead of being locked out of the house I could fall back to the old lock-n-key method.
My idea would be to use either iris-scanning, breath analyzation or some combination of the two (ideally a choice so that if one were to fail, say the iris, the breath analyzer would let you in). Much more efficient than fumbling around for keys in the dark! And a blessing to the drunken Irishman I can sometimes be (not all, but SOME stereotypes certainly hold more than a little water...and occasionally some whiskey too!) I digress.
But the last time I checked, (this was a few years ago) such devices were not so readily available. And when you could find them they were exorbitantly expensive. Insult to injury drivers were only available for NT. Not that it would be that terrible to set up an NT box for this purpose, but Linux of course would be much preferable.
So my question is, has this situation changed? Has the price of this technology become more available and affordable? Still prohibitively expensive? Any sourceforgian opensource driver alternative for the devices that are?
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Er, given that every foreign national must now have their fingerprints and photograph taken when entering the USA, I don't think you have much of a vantage point for your pulpit...
Personally I object to both. I've never been a criminal, and don't see why I should be treated like one. The sad thing is that the UK are heading towards ID cards (completely useless) as well. Oh but you won't have to show them on demand, just present them at a police station within 7 days... As if there's a difference...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Once you've got a decent image of the iris, these systems are really rather good. This one in particular uses algorithms developed by John Daugman from the Computing Lab at Cambridge, who claims all-but-perfect results for his algorithms. While he's chosen to commercially exploit his work rather than make it widely available (as well he might), his basic techniques have been re-implemented by other researchers who've obtained similarly astounding results. The list of results from his webpage is really quite spooky - technology shouldn't rightly work this well.
As I understand it, the main challenge now is to ensure the genuine nature of the image obtained. You can do this by simply watching people using the checker, thus preventing them from holding up detailed iris photos, or you can check more subtly. Some systems shine lights through your pupil to check for a live retina, but this is also avoidable if you cut a little hole in the iris photo and look through it. It's an interesting topic...
To be honest, even in terrorist acts, i've not seen any threat to "freedom and way of life". I just hear rhetoric.
What is threatened by terrorism? Life, directly and the ability to be unafraid of being blown up. Maybe that is an effect on our way of life. However, it already is. No amount of air strikes nor surveillance will ever end the possibility of terrorism. In fact, strikes against other countries, seems only to create martyrs and increase the sense of injustice, even in some neutral countries. Also a lot of us seem less able to criticise ourselves. Surely if that happens, we're only creating new terrorists. Terrorists aren't just jealous of our country, they have causes, reasons to make them believe they're right no matter what they do.
It surprises me to find someone questioning someone else about being "against freedom and our way of life". Maybe its extreme irony on your part, but the Rosco *is* describing is an escalation of curbing civil liberties until they are menacing police states. That is threatening freedom and our way of life. Maybe, in a way that is exactly what the terrorists aim for. Many of them are educated and are probably aware that many of the worlds greatest civilisations weren't destroyed by outside threats, but from within.
seriously though, how do contacts (especially colored) affect this?
...remember good 'ol times when IP used to mean Internet Protocol....
And, maybe a few schools in the US should teach those that will be determining US foreign policy in the future, how not to take the side of murderous thugs and supply them with money and weapons to help further our economic interests. You know guys like, The Shaw of Iran, Noriega, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and some others have all been on the payroll or in-bed with our Government. Funny, how in the US this seems to be a big secret. In many foreign countries everyone knows where the guns and money come from.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
The whole biometrics discussion only became more
than a stupid idea after the 9th September. I
guess everyone knows by now that the
terrorists lived and studied in Germany before
thay attacked the world trade center (or some
of them, i forgot). But the point is, that
they haven't shown any suspicious behaviour
before their attack.
So most sane people have argued that the
problem wasn't identifying the terrorists, for
which this would be a possible solution. The
problem is to know who is a terrorist,
criminal etc while their actions still lie in
the future. Obviuosly this problem is not
solved at all.
The government is simply using this as a placebo
to soothe the fear of terrorism in the
gullible general public and as a neat side
effect they increase their control over people. imho of course
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
Well, don't know about France and Belgium, but in Denmark it's the same.
...
Of course, they don't hand you the passport when you leave. They don't send it to the address you specified. They send it to the address that is stored in the central registry of people.
Sure, you could probably change that address for a random person, but I'm fairly certain he'd notice in the two to four weeks it takes to get a passport.
Of course, the next step is then to fake a person who is out of the country for a month or so vacationing
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Not only that but when you die your blood pressure will go down. If you take the eyes out of somebodies head the eyes are probably going to deflate. I remember back in bio lab we were disecting some cow eyes and they were not all that around and the shape readily changed. I wonder about the macular degeneration and stuff though, that would change the retina and possibly make it reject the person unless they constantly update it.
I am not an eye scientist but I can say you are right because I have witnessed my grandfathers eyes changing from brown to blue as he got older.
This technology will never be applicable for identification from a database because of the base rate fallacy: i.e.
assuming that if a person is corretly identified 99.999% of the time. if there are 500M (roughly all of europe) people in the database, then the mistake rate would be approximately 500 ppl. So for every individual going through, there are 500 possible individuals which he could be. This is not even the full application of the base rate fallacy, there is not enough research published on iris recognition for it to be fully analized (this is a *very* rough estimate).
*this does make alot of sense for a passport comparator, b/c no one could then steal a passport and use it, unless they want to take the risk of prison on a single hand of poker: with only a royal flush being the way to win (roughly equivalent odds as getting through with some else's passport).
Which means that you can only be tracked IF:
The passport has a chip in it with your personal information upon it, and that information (after a verification of your iris) is sent to a data mining facility. No other means of tracking is possible.
-big brother is not watching you, he keeping your attention every moment of every day; making sure that you never think about anything except what he tells you to think. Making sure that you never feel anything that he doesnt tell you to feel.
"this is the gloaming"
radiohead
Black Hat gets on plane with faked ID and iris scan; knows the airport screener in Frankfurt is better then the one he left behind in Cyprus. Quick trip to the WC past the harried and underpaid seward, a quickly passed 500 Euro and.... Graft corruption, bribery greed these are the same as they always have been. All these security checks do is placate the cattle. The wolves still feast on the fringes of the herd and occasionally attack the middle. Menwhile, the sheepherd gently leads the rest of us towards the slaughterhouse...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
When saying "defending democracy" what is meant is indeed to defend the freedom to vote on a regularly basis, because that is the first freedom that Hitler took away. The ultimate check and balance is to vote a government out of office and our constitutions now mandates to go to whatever means necessary to preserve this fundamental democratic right.
I understand you concern for not granting a government the power to collect all sorts of information about it citizens. I think the Datenschutz (data-protection) law actually governs that any entity within Germany has to delete all data on you after six month if you have not interacted with this entity within that time-period. Officials of each German state called "Datenschutzbeauftragte" are supposed to ensure this law. Governmental agencies are usually pretty good in following it. On the other hand companies interested in doing database marketing are usually exploiting every loophole or simply ignore it when they are reasonably certain that they can get away with it.
For the Iris scan this probably means the individuals participating allow that a background check is run on them but at the end all the information that is stored is Iris pattern and name. If they don't fly for more than 6 months they will probably have to reapply.