Since the war on terrorism began, the
United States government has really clamped down on foreigners entering and leaving the country. Part of its plan for enhanced security is to use new technologies at its borders.
The USA Patriot Act and Border Security Act direct that the Attorney General and the Secretary of State jointly, through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, “develop and certify a technology standard, including appropriate biometric identifier standards, that can be used to verify the identity of persons applying for a
United States visa”.
A biometric is a physical characteristic that is unique to an individual. The standards would be used in all documents issued to foreigners by the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, including student visas, green cards and border-crossing cards.Foreigners from about 180 countries require an immigrant or non-immigrant visa to enter the
United States. For more than a century, the entry-exit policies and processes were largely intended to deter illegal entry and citizenship claims, regulate legal migration to meet labour-market needs and administer benefit programmes.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the
US is facing the challenge of having to identify, out of the millions of foreign nationals who come to the country each year, those who might be a threat to national security.At the moment, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) has the authority to perform an inspection of each person who arrives at the
US border and to grant or deny admission.Usually an INS inspector manually examines the person’s travel documents, which can often be falsified through photograph substitution. The biometric identifiers used today range from a photograph for most
US government-issued travel documents to a photograph and two fingerprints for Mexican border-crossing cards.In addition, the INS issues an INSPASS card that allows low-risk travellers to use an automated kiosk and is based on hand geometry. The FBI has more than 45 million sets of 10 rolled fingerprints, the majority of which belong to US citizens. Over the past year, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology looked at what is involved in issuing aliens with machine-readable, tamper-resistant visas and other travel documents with biometric security.Its Information Technology Laboratory measured fingerprint recognition ance on an INS database of 1.2 million prints of 620,000 individuals.The Face Recognition Vendor Tests 2002 measured the face recognition performance of 10 vendors on a Department of State database of 121,000 images of 37,000 individuals.Based on the evaluations, the institute recommends that a dual biometric system including two fingerprint images combined with facial scanning be used for verification. The biometrics would assist identity enrolment, background checks and identity verification. Each government agency would choose its own vendors.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Fingerprint, Biometric & Security.
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Since the war on terrorism began, the