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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."
...who is this "Iris?" Was she clothed when she was scanned and, most importantly is she seeing anyone?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
Honestly, this technology is scary.
I think that has probably been said by someone about pretty much every technology we use today. It isn't the technology that's scary, it's what people might do with it. Almost every new technology has the potential for good, as well as evil.
You probably shouldn't click this.
At least they aren't Frankfurt scanning.
My dad always thought that the best security meassure for these iris scans would be some sort of icepick-like tip that pokes you hard in the eye if the scan fails.
well think of it as free govt. sponsored testing that could lead to early warning signs of serious eye problems ..... or not
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.
...start using operatives who have no eyes. And then what will we do?
With each new device or method used in airports to catch or filter out terrorists, the barrier to commit terrorist acts is raised higher. What do you think will happen when it becomes virtually impossible to do anything even remotely odd near or inside airports and airplanes? well I'll tell you : terrorists will fall back on easier targets, chiefly trains. And then, once a train has been derailled, every government will start applying airport police-state methods to railway stations and trains, and so on ...
It's an endless battle. If countries carries on trying to defend themselves like they do now (mostly in the US, but also in other countries), they'll all turn into huge menacing police states. and terrorists will have won. If those countries don't defend themselves, terrorists will blow things up forever and will have won again.
What the world really needs is a true force of education in dangerous countries, a project that spans over 2 or 3 generations. The US is in Afghanistan and Iraq, why don't they set up schools to teach the current generation of kids there not to hate, and why terrorism is bad? They're not doing jack squat, and neither are any other countries concerned by terrorist threats. Instead of starting to implement that long-term, but only real solution to the terrorist problem, they barricade themselves and make life miserable for their own populations.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I actually worked with Iridian back when they were called "Iriscan" a few years ago. The technology was pretty cool; unlike fingerprint or voiceprints, which can only verify someone's identity after they tell you (via a username, prox card, etc) who they are, an iris scan can actually identify a user based off of their iris pattern.
A typical fingerprint has about 10 points that can be uniquely identified, and on a thumbprint scanner you're lucky to get 5 or 6 of them reliably. The iris has roughly 26 unique points that can be picked up every time. Back when I was working with Iridian's stuff they used a low light video camera to basically take a picture of your eye...no funky lasers or anything like that. Additionally, and perhaps morbidly so, they had built technology to help identify if the eye was live or not, so not only could you not just hold up a picture of an eye, but you couldn't take someone else's eye (a la Demolition Man, I believe) and hold it up to the scanner.
Additionally, the iris pattern (and thumbprint or voiceprint in other applications) is never held as an actual pattern; it's just a hash based off of what comes off the scanner, so privacy was not much of a concern.
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
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
younger generations of Germans should not be held responsible for what their grandparents might have done...no more than younger citizens of the US should be held responsible for slavery, or that Jews should be held responsible for the death of christ.
Your racist suggstion (sic) that the opposite is true is little better than the more blatant racism that you claim to oppose.
I'm afraid that you, in your haste to remove the racist label from Nazis and place it on me, missed my point.
I'm not saying that Germans born after the Nazi era are responsible for the Nazi sins of their ancestors.
What I am saying is that Germany went from awarding Iron Crosses, and otherwise accepting Jews into mainstream German society, circa World War I, to putting those same Jews on train to the East in 1942.
What I am saying is that even self-described "liberal" Germans today feel it's acceptable to refer to Turkish Gastarbeiteren as "Germany's niggers" while denying Turks born in Germany the franchise and full citizenship (as cited in Father/Land: A Personal Search for the New Germany by Wall Street Journal reporter and German-American author Frederick Kempe (I don't have the book at hand to give the page number, sorry)).
What I am saying is that as it was possible for Germany to slip from basic acceptance of Jews in 1914 to the Nuremberg laws by 1935 to genocide in 1942, Germans have a special responsibility, not so much to repent for the sins of their fathers, but to be watchful that they don't repeat similar sins today.
To be frank -- if not politically correct -- and with the risk of offending our German friends, the U.S. is far less likely to repeat slavery (or Native American genocide), than Germany is to oppress its Turkish or other minorities.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Having lived in Germany as well as the USA (currently back in the USA again). Being German and married to an American and I can hardly claim to be objective. For what it's worth I will share my oberservations with you anyway.
Never have I heard somebody using the N word for Turkish people, although in Eastern Germany I wouldn't completly rule it out, but where did you get the idea that this would be acceptable bahaviour in Germany?
Before coming back to the states my wife and I lived in Heidelberg for the last 4 years.
Our neighbors Wolfgang and Inchy were German and Turkish respectively. They had the cutest little boy who they raised bi-lingual. She is running her own hair salon while he is working as an Audi car mechanic. They are both great people and very much liked in the neighborhood.
Inchy being a self asserted, independent woman is maybe not your typical example, but she is very much representative for the 2nd generation of Turkish immigrants.
There are hot-spots were integration didn't happen and did not work. You will find these mostly in large cities such as Berlin, Hamburg etc. It is there were Islamic fundamentalism finds willing followers. Immigrants to distant lands tend to glorify and idealize the state of the culture that they left behind. That is why I find anything that is regarded as typical German in the US either hilariously quaint and completely out of sync with modern Germany or simply embarrassing. That is also why young Turkish people that my parents met in the southern Turkish city of Antalia told them that it is Germany were you can find the worst backwards Turkish people who cling to completely outdated ideas of what is supposed to be Turkish.
I am 100% with you that the citizenship laws in Germany are completely bogus. They are one of the main reasons why I voted for the Green party in the last election because they sincerely want to let go of these stupid ethnic focused definitions of what is considered German. Being fluent in German and sharing the values of modern-day multi-ethnic Germany is what should count and nothing else.
I am very much in favor of Turkey joining the EU. Once this happens this issue will be moot anyway (EU citizens are free to live and vote on the town council level anywhere in the union).
The main difference between Germany and the US is that there are hardly any neighborhoods in Germany that I don't feel save to walk in at night.
Inner city segregation is much worse in the US. And the school diversity is back to the level before the busing started in the 70s.
I don't think the US is in any position to point fingers at Germany for not learning of its mistakes.
The lesson that we drew from history is that democracy has to be defended at all cost. I don't mind that an administration that I trust knows who I am and where I am knowing that this information will not be abused. I have this level of comfort and faith in the German as well as EU institutions and the contemporary German governments (may they be social-democrats or conservatives). But I don't blame any American for not having the same level of comfort with American institutions because I certainly don't have either.