biometrics – Page 3

USA, EU and UK all investing in advanced biometrics

News from various sources has revealed that the United State, the European Union and the United Kingdom are all preparing to invest further large sums in advanced biometrics and surveillance research.

According to an anonymous message to Slashdot, in the USA, Department of Justice requisitions for the coming year show “$233.9 million in funding for an ‘Advanced Electronic Surveillance’ project, and $97.6 million to establish the ‘Biometric Technology Center.'” The former is largely to deal with the problems of intercepting Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications – like Skype. The latter is what Slashdot calls a “vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification” for the FBI. In other words, the architecture of the proposed ‘Server in the Sky’ system, which The Guardian revealed last year – for some notes on this and other systems under development, see here.

Meanwhile Owen Bowcott in The Guardian today has a story which puts together various bits and pieces from the EU’s FP7 Security theme research budget and UK security investment. In the UK, there is to be £15 million spent on updating UK biometric security for embassies, and more interestingly other unspecified ‘surveillance’ purposes, and in addition, rolling out of facial recognition systems to more UK airports. As we know, the controlled environments of airports where people are required to look at cameras, are one of the few place where this technology works properly.

This provides a rather tenuous link to the headline of the Guardian story which is an EU-funded study into brain-scanning (yet again) called Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis). There are lots of these about, and one of them may work sooner or later, but it is worth pointing out that people have been putting out ‘we will soon have brain scanning’ stories since the 1980s and like, nuclear fusion, it always seems to be 5 or 10 years in the future. Brain-scanning seems to be the technology of the future… always has been, always will be?

High Court rules innocent man’s DNA must be removed from database

As if the govenrment wasn’t in enough of a bind over the police National DNA databases, in a landmark ruling yesterday, the High Court of England and Wales has decided that the DNA of the innocent should not be on the database in the current legal circumstances. The man from County Durham was maliciously accused of assaulting a pupil at the school at which he was a teacher, and despite volunteering for questioning was arrested, fingerprinted and swabbed. These records were of course kept despite his innocence.

This story reminds us that being on the NDNAD is not an isolated thing, but part of a complex network of records that do imply suspicion (like it or not) – even Sir Alec Jeffreys, who pioneered DNA fingerprinting, thinks so… in the case of this teacher, he would have been wrongly suspected every time he applied for jobs working with children.

This is another indication that the government’s policy on the DNA database and police tactics to populate it, have been not just morally questionable but illegal, and confirms that the response issued this week was inadequate and devious. It will be interesting to see how they might now immediately have to modify their plans to conform to this new ruling (which, being a British court, they can hardly blame on ‘un-British’ European law)…

Global CCTV datamining project revealed

As a result of an annual report on datamining sent to the US Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a research project, Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE), has been revealed. The program is aiming to produce an computer system that will be able to search and analyse video images, especially “surveillance-camera data from countries other than the United States” to identify “well-established patterns of clearly suspicious behavior.”

Conducted by the Office of Incisive Analysis, part of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the program has apparently been running since 2001,and is merely one of several post-9/11 research projects aiming to create advanced dataveillance systems to analyse data from global sources. How the USA would obtain the information is not specified…

One could spend a long time listing all the DARPA and IARPA projects that are running, many of which are speculative and come to nothing. The report also mentions the curious Project Reynard that I have mentioned before, which aims to analyse the behaviours of avatars in online gaming environments with the aim of detecting ‘suspicious behaviours’. Reynard is apparently achieving some successful results, but we have no real idea at what stage VACE is, and the report only states that some elements are being tested with real world data. This implies that there is nowhere near a complete system. Nevertheless the mentality behind these projects is worrying. It is hardly the first time that the USA has tried to create what Paul Edwards called a ‘closed world’ and these utopian projects which effectively try to know the whole world in some way (like ECHELON, or the FBI’s proposed Server in the Sky) are an ongoing US state obsession.

It is the particular idea that ‘suspicious patterns of behaviour’ can be identified through constant surveillance and automated analysis, that our behaviour and indeed thoughts are no longer our own business. Because it is thoughts and anticipating action that is the ultimate goal. One can see this, at a finer grain, of programs like Project Hostile Intent, a Department of Homeland Security initiative to analyse ‘microexpressions’, supposedly preconscious facial movements. The EU is not immune from such incredibly intrusive proposals: so-called ‘spy in the cabin’ cameras and microphones in the back of every seat have been proposed by the EU-funded SAFEE project, which is supported by a large consortium of security corporations. The European Commission has already hinted that it might try to ‘require’ airlines to use the system when developed.

No doubt too, because of the close (and largely secret and unaccountable) co-operation of the EU and USA on security issues, all the images and recordings would find their way into these proposes databases and their inhuman agents would check them over to make sure we are all passive, good humans with correct behaviours, expressions and thoughts, whether we are in the real or the virtual world…

Come to Britain and we will fingerprint your kids…

Last week I mentioned the approval of the biometric passports scheme by the European Parliament, and that there were several countries that planned to fingerprint children under the age of 12 despite the legal, ethical and technical problems with this.

However, what I didn´t mention is that – surprise, surprise – Britain is one of the countries that does fingerprint kids, and indeed it has already been fingerprinting foreign children resident in Britain as young as 6. As Privacy International´s Gus Hossein argues on The Guardian´s Comment is Free website, the UK government claims that this is only bcause the EU has forced this upon them when in fact it was the UK government that forced the EU into adopting that position in the first place!

Now, as I mentioned, the European Parliament has pushed the age limit upwards, but will this make any difference to the UK Home Office? Given that the Home Office is still ´carefully considering´ its responce to the kicking it received from the European Court of Human Rights over the taking and retention of the DNA of 857,000 children, I wouldn´t bank on it.

The new Brazilian ID system

There are more details of the new Brazilian ID card and system on Renato Siqueira’s Conversa Digital blog, including some informative images and photos. It seems that far from eliminating the various different numbers currently used, this new system will merely create a kind of overlay. And, not only that, but the CPF, RG and electoral number will be printed on the back. Unless every single transaction will actually require the taking of fingerprints or the verification of photos, this card will be even more of a convenient source of personal information to thieves and fraudsters than ever before. Plus the chip technology is the same standard format that has proved to easy to clone and access illicitly elsewhere…

European Parliament Agrees to Biometric Passports

The European Union’s plan to introduce biometric passports (with fingerprint images) will go ahead from the end of June after the European Parliament finally agreed to the proposal. This means that all states of the EU will now have to construct new databases of fingerprints for the entire population (including the UK and Ireland who, although outside the Schengen agreement on internal borders, voluntarily follow the same passport standards).

The Parliament did manage to introduce one major ammendment which rejected the European Commission’s plan to have children under 12 years-old fingerprinted as well – although some countries already do this. However, this vote was a rubber-stamping exercise by a ineffectual body.

The unreliability of fingerprint identification, which is mentioned in this report by PC Worldremains a major issue. Having talked to European Commission people at many different events, my general opinion of them is that, whilst well-meaning, they are seriously lacking technological expertise and knowledge of the research in the area, and generally fail to listen to those who know except where they will confirm their existing opinions. Like most governments.