WILLIAM O BEEMAN, Providence, Rhode Island | Thursday
NEW forms of electronic surveillance, often derided by privacy activists, are being re-evaluated as a means to improve security in the wake of Tuesday’s unprecedented terrorism attacks.
Proponents of a new branch of technology known as biometrics — including face-scanning technology, iris recognition and hand geometry — say these systems may help identify criminals and terrorists and foil such attacks.
The use of cameras linked to face-recognition systems at the Super Bowl earlier this year prompted an avalanche of protests, but backers of the system say the deadly attacks demonstrate the need for such technology.
“This could have had a profound difference. It’s clear that some of these (terrorist) suspects were in the FBI database,” said Tom Colatosti, president of Massachusetts-based Visage Technology, which supplied face-scanning systems for the Super Bowl.
“What has us frustrated is that we allowed ourselves to be intimidated by some of this privacy silliness. I carry guilt for not being able to make that point better.”
By scanning faces in a crowd and matching the images to those in a database of known criminals and terrorists, face-recognition technology can be used in airports and other public places to quickly alert law enforcement about suspicious activity.
Colatosti says the system of his company has proven accurate 99,78% of the time.
Joseph Atick, chief executive of New Jersey-based biometrics firm Visionics, said face-scanning technology has been effectively used at Reykjavik airport in Iceland and has dramatically cut crime in the London district of Newham, where some 300 cameras are in use.
While face-scanning is a “passive” system that can be easily used in crowds, other biometric systems can be used for verification of employees who have access to sensitive areas.
Atick said that in addition to face-scanning, airports should use biometric systems such as hand geometry, live fingerprint scans and iris recognition to ensure that unauthorised people do not gain access to airplanes. This would eliminate the problem of lost or stolen badges or access keys.
“Your face is your badge” with a face-scanning system, Atick said.
He said that “within half an hour” of the news of the terrorist attacks, “we received a significant number of calls from organisations tasked with security as well as decision-making bodies” interested in biometric systems.
Richard Norton, executive director or the International Biometric Industry Association, said it would be “irresponsible to speculate on what could or could not have been done,” to prevent the attacks.
But he said biometrics technologies “have been tested in a number of environments and certainly could be a piece of the equation for diminishing the threat.”
He said about 50 US firms are involved in biometrics and have developed systems that “are robust, and proven to work” and can be designed to avoid invading people’s privacy.
Still, civil libertarians warn against a rush to any solution that erodes freedoms before all the facts are known.
David Sobel, a lawyer for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said it is “premature to reach conclusions on these issues.
We really don’t know what fully happened on Tuesday and it’s dangerous to start prescribing solutions before we understand what the failures were.”
Sobel said that there is “a tendency in these situations to propose quick solutions that are not always well considered. There are a lot of analogies to Pearl Harbor, and with 60 years of retrospect we can see that the treatment of Japanese Americans was rash and unjust and now widely regretted.”
House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt said Americans “need to find a new balance between freedom and security, and that’s going to be hard to do.”
“In dealing with this, we will not give up our freedom,” Gephardt said.
“We’re going to have to change the balance between freedom and security, but we will not give up our freedom, we will not be defeated as to the basic values and ideas that underlie this country.” – Sapa-AFP
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