From: Gina Miller (nanogirl@halcyon.com)
Date: Fri May 28 1999 - 01:31:54 MDT
New devices can identify just about any part of you
By MARY DEIBEL
(May 28, 1999 12:16 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Principal Patricia
Wagner of Lavaland Elementery School in Albuquerque has been a big believer
in biometrics since a machine that can "read" the shape of a hand stopped a
father who had lost a custody fight from spiriting his child away.
Not only do hand-readers help insure student safety, Wagner says, but the
machines are easy to use.
Hand-readers like the ones the Albuquerque schools use are made by
Recognition Systems of Campbell, Calif., and are being used for everything
from controlling entry to a Los Angeles sperm bank to clocking lawyer's
hours in Manhattan.
The machines are part of a new generation of devices that identify people by
face, fingers, eyes and voice as well as hands and then use biometric
techniques to take the computerized measure of a man or woman according to
individual characteristics of various body parts.
Once the stuff of science fiction and spy thrillers, biometrics are moving
into the mainstream, with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service
the most prolific user, according to Jeffrey Dunn, head of the government's
Biometrics Consortium.
Due to a 1996 change in U.S. law in which Congress ordered the INS to use
biometric technologies to identify aliens, INS programs now:
--Use voice verification systems at remote Canadian border crossings so
agents up to 45 miles away can conduct inspections and ask questions before
opening the gates.
--Test face and speaker recognition systems on a dedicated car lane at the
main border crossing with Mexico near San Diego. The project has cut
frequent commuters' time in line to a one-minute delay at a time when
peak-hour crossing can take up to two hours.
--Let 85,000 frequent fliers abroad bypass long lines at busy airports by
using an automated hand reader in airport kiosks.
The latest figures show the government is the biggest user of biometrics to
date, spending $140 million on body-reading equipment last year compared to
$33 million for private industry.
Besides the INS and defense and intelligence agencies commonly thought to
employ this sort of James Bond gadgetry, states including Arizona,
California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and
Texas use fingerprinting and other biometric techniques to detect and deter
welfare fraud.
But in a high-tech world in which keys can be lost, PIN numbers forgotten,
and mother's maiden names purloined by determined identity thieves, analysts
predict private industry will quickly turn body-parts-as-passwords into a
$1-billion-a-year business.
High-tech trend-watchers at the Gartner Group of Stamford, Conn., expect
biometrics to be one of the technologies "that will change everything from
the way we run our business to the way we conduct our personal lives" in the
21st century.
The key at the moment is getting businesses to integrate biometrics into
their products, says Gartner Group's Jackie Fenn, who expects business to
pick up by the end of the year, when Compaq and other computer-makers start
bundling fingerprint identifiers and other biometric devices into their
overall PC package.
Biometric techniques debuting in May alone at the CardTech/SecuriTech
convention in Chicago and elsewhere include Bank United of Texas' trial run
for cameras capable of reading the irises of the eyes of ATM users at three
branches in Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth.
To show the machines are fast, friendly and foolproof, the bank had
identical twins Michael and Richard Swartz try each other's ATM cards, only
to be turned down. "We can confuse tellers, but we can't confuse the
machine," Michael Swartz told reporters.
The camera reads 266 reference points on an iris - the colored part of the
eye surrounding the pupil - and then digitizes the photograph and sends the
image to a computer for verification of the eyeball's owner in seconds.
The system is made by Sensar Inc., a private, for-profit spin-off of the
Sarnoff labs in Princeton, N.J., where high-definition and color TV were
born.
Britain's largest thrift, Nationwide Building Society, has used the Sensar
system for two years and a recent survey of its customers found that 91
percent approve. Trials also are under way in Japan, Norway and Turkey.
But analysts say the iris verification system is costly, adding as much as
$5,000 to the $35,000 price tag for a single ATM machine. Banks may consider
it worth the money for certain ATMs, but for other businesses and other
applications, less costly alternatives are likely to prove more popular even
if they assure a slightly lower level of accuracy, security and
accountability.
Competing technologies include:
--A new, computerized fingerprint technology that gets high marks based on
plates of fingertip whorls embedded on super-hard silicon chips full of
sensors that use multi-point digitized match-ups.
One system developed by Verdicom of Santa Clara, Calif., a joint effort by
Lucent Technologies and its venture capital partners, can disable a laptop
computer unless the computer keyboard recognizes the user's fingerprints.
A second system by Identix of Sunnyvale, Calif., adapts to a range of
products from mobile phones to credit cards and is considered so promising
that Motorola has just teamed up with Identix to bring the technology to
market.
A third system by American Biometric, a Canadian firm, is called BioMouse
Plus and uses fingerprint scanners to trap unwary users of corporate
computer networks.
--Digital signatures that let users record a cyber-signature for
autographing digital documents or signing themselves onto a secure Internet
site.
The system developed by Cyber-Sign of Newport Beach, Calif., works by having
a user sign an input tablet three times so that future computerized
signatures can be verified against the shape and speed of the pen strokes,
pen pressure and number of times the pen leaves a writing surface.
--Face recognition systems such as the new version of TrueFace by Miros
Corp. of Wellesley, Mass. TrueFace recognizes an individual according to the
unique brow-to-nose tip triangle and already is used by Mr. Payroll
automatic paycheck-cashing machines in hundreds of service stations and
grocery stores in 20 states.
The latest version - TrueFaceNT - allows for standalone verification that
the user logging onto a laptop or personal computer loaded with Microsoft's
Windows NT software is authorized to use the computer or access the data it
contains.
Visionics of Jersey City, N.J., a Miros rival, used the Chicago show to
unveil its third-generation FaceIt system, which can scan one face against
12 million others per minute and is being incorporated into home-security
systems for sale in the United States.
Visionics' face-mapping system was speeded up in the wake of its "Mandrake"
experiment in London, in which the city put 144 face-scanning cameras in a
high-crime area in hopes of lessening neighborhood violence.
That experiment has raised privacy concerns, because laws in the United
Kingdom and Europe generally prohibit people who collect personal
information for one purpose from selling or using it for another reason.
U.S. law, however, holds that people's faces, voices or images of body parts
aren't private if they're collected publicly or voluntarily provided to a
bank, school or other user.
"When you give your biometric identifier to a private institution, what's
going to happen to it?" John Woodward, a lawyer, former CIA operations
officer and biometrics expert, recently asked Congress, stressing that it's
up to Congress to change privacy law.
But Congress has yet to protect the privacy of computerized medical,
financial and personnel files. Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of the Privacy
Journal, predicts that "it's going to be awhile" before Congress copes with
the privacy questions posed by biometrics and decides if data about your
face, hands and eyeballs can be bought, shared or sold.
Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Nanotechnology Industries
Web:
http://www.nanoindustries.com
E-mail:
nanogirl@halcyon.com
Alternate E-mail
echoz@hotmail.com
"Nanotechnology: solutions for the future."
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