Birth of the biometric age

What was science fiction five years ago is now science fact

DON BUTLER
CanWest News Service

The 2002 film Minority Report depicts a society that keeps tabs on its citizens by scanning their irises when they exit subway cars or enter buildings. The same technology verifies the identity of those authorized to enter restricted areas.

At the time the Steven Spielberg film was released, the biometric world it depicted seemed far off. But systems that rely on biometric samples of fingerprints or iris and facial scans to establish identity have become so ubiquitous some suggest we’re witnessing the birth of the biometric state.

Around the world, biometric identifiers are used at airports and border crossings in machine-readable documents such as passports and driver’s licences. Police and security services rely on digitized databanks of fingerprints in watch lists and companies access them for background checks on prospective employees.

Increasingly, people are required to present a biometric to enter buildings, access a laptop or database, check out a library book or claim a meal.

Whether all this is good or bad is the subject of intense debate.

Those most fearful of biometric technologies warn they are accelerating the trend toward a surveillance society that gained momentum after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Advocates respond that biometrics will enhance security, help governments deliver improved services more efficiently and make it easier for citizens to navigate the online world of e-commerce and e-government.

Some, such as Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, argue emerging biometric encryption technology offers the best of both worlds.

“There are very reasonable ways to protect privacy and security at the same time,” she says.

What’s clear is the biometric genie is fully out of the bottle. Decisions being taken now by governments in Canada and around the world will determine whether biometrics usher in the Big Brother societies that civil libertarians fear or broker a new age of enhanced security and privacy.

The United States, spurred on by the 9/11 attacks, is a leading user of biometric systems. The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), an automated 10-fingerprint matching system that became operational in 1999, is the world’s largest biometric database, with more than 47-million subjects on file.

Finger scans

Last August, the U.S. began issuing passports containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips encoded with biometric and biographical information. As well the US-VISIT program, launched in 2004, uses digital finger scans and photographs to screen selected foreign nationals against watch lists.

While Canada remains one of the few industrialized nations not actively considering a national ID card, governments here have not hesitated to incorporate biometrics in a range of uses. To underline their growing centrality to government, a 70-member “biometrics working group” drawn from 22 federal departments and agencies has met regularly since May of 2006 to assess and co-ordinate initiatives.

The biometric initiative with the greatest potential impact on Canadians involves passports. It’s being driven by the U.S. Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and shaped by passport standards developed by the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization. Under the new American policy, Canadians will soon need passports or other secure travel documents to enter the United States.

For its part, the organization has selected facial features as the primary and universal form of biometric identification in RFID-equipped passports, meaning e-passports containing biometrics will almost certainly become the only acceptable document for international travel.

More recently, governments have shifted to other rationales for biometrics, including international obligations, more efficient access to government services, controlling voter fraud, better immigration and border control, and even enhanced citizen control and autonomy.

Civil libertarians, privacy advocates and other critics remain unconvinced its putative benefits outweigh its costs.

Their greatest fear is biometrics could be used to undermine or even obliterate privacy.

Without adequate safeguards, Cavoukian says, biometric systems “would enable data linkage in multiple separate databases that all contain the same key, which would be the biometric. You would be able to engage in endless secondary uses of the information.”

This would allow governments or corporations to develop extensive profiles of every citizen in the databases.

“That’s the fundamental fear from a privacy perspective,” says Cavoukian, “the possibility of rampant tracking of one’s activities. Ultimately, it will leave no door unopened.”

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