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Where does the finger point?
NEWS
Where does the finger point? Biometrics 2007 preview: the technology has come a long way since 1997, with governments overtaking banking as the biggest customers – but they may find it strips them of some power SA Mathieson Jim Wayman, director of the biometrics test centre at San Jose State University in California, says biometrics has changed in numerous ways over the past decade. In 1997, the technology was seen as having huge potential in retail banking, there was concern over a lack of standards and experts were expressing concern about the lack of a scientific approach to testing biometrics. “All that has changed,” says Wayman, who will review the last decade in his opening keynote address to the tenth anniversary Biometrics 2007 conference and exhibition (www.biometrics.elsevier. com), held in London on 17 to 19 October. The event is organised by Infosecurity’s publisher, Elsevier. Wayman says that biometrics has developed from having just a few US standards to 16 fully international standards, including three for testing. “We didn’t have a fundamental agreement on what is an error, and now we do,” he says, covering the most basic measurement of a biometric technique’s quality. One drawback of the standards explosion is that there are four interoperability standards on fingerprinting – maybe this is too many, Wayman says. In 2007, banking has largely disregarded biometrics, following experiments earlier this decade. This included the UK’s Nationwide Building Society, which tested an ATM cash machine which used irisscanning. “Everyone liked it, but Nationwide didn’t find a way to make money off it. There hasn’t been a big push,” says Wayman. “What has happened, which we didn’t expect then, are the national identity systems, the border crossing systems,” he says, with the UK doing both. “We did have a US system we were talking about, using hand geometry – that system has gone.” Wayman says this shows the major shift towards use of fingerprint recognition technology over the last decade. Yet he says this kind of biometric has been struggling to reach its potential for far longer: automated fingerprint recognition systems first appeared in the 1960s, along with hand-writing recognition. “It was seen as the best biometric, if people could get past the stigma,” from its association with policing. Even now, its growth is linked closely to security. The battle between different biometric techniques continues. The conference will include discussion of the success – or failure – of fingerprint technology in excluding banned individuals from football grounds, as well as the contentious politics of the UK identity scheme, which is set to rely on fingerprinting.
Ethical questions Emilio Mordini, director of the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship in Rome, will chair a conference debate on the ethics of biometrics. He says this will cover issues of privacy, including “the interface between surveillance and identification, with the risk that
Hands-on approach: Jim Wayman says standards have proliferated in the last decade
for security’s sake we are less free somehow, and in any case more traced”. Speakers will include Phil Booth, of the No2ID anti-identity card campaign group. But Mordini believes that mobile telephones post a significantly greater risk to individuals’ privacy than biometrics. “People are not afraid of their mobile phones, they are afraid of biometrics. It’s irrational – biometrics can be used in a democratic way, in a democratic state, respecting privacy.” In fact, he believes that biometrics may end governments’ control over their citizens’ identities. “For the first time in the modern era, we don’t need governments and nation states to guarantee identities,” says Mordini. “For the last four centuries, identities were certified and guaranteed by nations – one of the main tasks of the nation state was to certify people’s identities. Now, with biometrics, this is changing,” he adds, despite governments’ current level of custom. “A private company, like Microsoft or Google, can do the job better, at a global level without the nation state. This is a future scenario, but from the pure technical point of view, it is feasible.” Mordini points out that government identity systems were built upon the registration of births, but that many states are now failing in this task. Research by the UN children’s fund Unicef suggests that some 50 million births each year go unregistered, including 24m in south Asia, representing 64% of babies born in the region. This can deprive children of healthcare and schooling, and heightens the risk of child marriage, trafficking and underage military conscription (see www.unicef.org/protection/index_birthregistration.html). Mordini says that even some eastern European Union nations fail to register significant proportions of their births: “In this context, you can’t rely on nation states for issuing identity documents.”
SEPTEMBER 2007
11
Where does the finger point? Biometrics 2007 preview: the technology has come a long way since 1997, with governments overtaking banking as the biggest customers – but they may find it strips them of some power SA Mathieson Jim Wayman, director of the biometrics test centre at San Jose State University in California, says biometrics has changed in numerous ways over the past decade. In 1997, the technology was seen as having huge potential in retail banking, there was concern over a lack of standards and experts were expressing concern about the lack of a scientific approach to testing biometrics. “All that has changed,” says Wayman, who will review the last decade in his opening keynote address to the tenth anniversary Biometrics 2007 conference and exhibition (www.biometrics.elsevier. com), held in London on 17 to 19 October. The event is organised by Infosecurity’s publisher, Elsevier. Wayman says that biometrics has developed from having just a few US standards to 16 fully international standards, including three for testing. “We didn’t have a fundamental agreement on what is an error, and now we do,” he says, covering the most basic measurement of a biometric technique’s quality. One drawback of the standards explosion is that there are four interoperability standards on fingerprinting – maybe this is too many, Wayman says. In 2007, banking has largely disregarded biometrics, following experiments earlier this decade. This included the UK’s Nationwide Building Society, which tested an ATM cash machine which used irisscanning. “Everyone liked it, but Nationwide didn’t find a way to make money off it. There hasn’t been a big push,” says Wayman. “What has happened, which we didn’t expect then, are the national identity systems, the border crossing systems,” he says, with the UK doing both. “We did have a US system we were talking about, using hand geometry – that system has gone.” Wayman says this shows the major shift towards use of fingerprint recognition technology over the last decade. Yet he says this kind of biometric has been struggling to reach its potential for far longer: automated fingerprint recognition systems first appeared in the 1960s, along with hand-writing recognition. “It was seen as the best biometric, if people could get past the stigma,” from its association with policing. Even now, its growth is linked closely to security. The battle between different biometric techniques continues. The conference will include discussion of the success – or failure – of fingerprint technology in excluding banned individuals from football grounds, as well as the contentious politics of the UK identity scheme, which is set to rely on fingerprinting.
Ethical questions Emilio Mordini, director of the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship in Rome, will chair a conference debate on the ethics of biometrics. He says this will cover issues of privacy, including “the interface between surveillance and identification, with the risk that
Hands-on approach: Jim Wayman says standards have proliferated in the last decade
for security’s sake we are less free somehow, and in any case more traced”. Speakers will include Phil Booth, of the No2ID anti-identity card campaign group. But Mordini believes that mobile telephones post a significantly greater risk to individuals’ privacy than biometrics. “People are not afraid of their mobile phones, they are afraid of biometrics. It’s irrational – biometrics can be used in a democratic way, in a democratic state, respecting privacy.” In fact, he believes that biometrics may end governments’ control over their citizens’ identities. “For the first time in the modern era, we don’t need governments and nation states to guarantee identities,” says Mordini. “For the last four centuries, identities were certified and guaranteed by nations – one of the main tasks of the nation state was to certify people’s identities. Now, with biometrics, this is changing,” he adds, despite governments’ current level of custom. “A private company, like Microsoft or Google, can do the job better, at a global level without the nation state. This is a future scenario, but from the pure technical point of view, it is feasible.” Mordini points out that government identity systems were built upon the registration of births, but that many states are now failing in this task. Research by the UN children’s fund Unicef suggests that some 50 million births each year go unregistered, including 24m in south Asia, representing 64% of babies born in the region. This can deprive children of healthcare and schooling, and heightens the risk of child marriage, trafficking and underage military conscription (see www.unicef.org/protection/index_birthregistration.html). Mordini says that even some eastern European Union nations fail to register significant proportions of their births: “In this context, you can’t rely on nation states for issuing identity documents.”
SEPTEMBER 2007
11