Biometrics – a passport to security?

By David Cronin

Date: 23/06/05

EU citizens who do not need a visa to travel to the US will only be eligible for the visa-waiver programme from 26 October if they have passports containing digital photographs or at least a machine-readable passport. This is the result of a series of concessions from the US Department of Homeland Security, which initially requested that all those travelling to the US should have biometric indicators in their passports.

The feverish political environment after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks saw the US demanding hi-tech passports from its visitors.

The rationale behind the move is that because fingerprints are unique to an individual, their inclusion in passports would prevent terrorists and other criminals from going to the US with forged travel documents.

Biometric methods are already used in the US for security reasons like ensuring that only authorised persons have access to computer networks.

They are designed to allow the automated recognition of an individual based on behavioural or physiological traits. As well as fingerprinting, they include face and eye (especially iris) scanning and capturing voice patterns.

While the US had told EU countries that their citizens must have biometric indicators in their passports by 26 October this year, it agreed last week to extend the deadline for another year. Just six of the 25 EU member states were thought to be ready to issue such passports this year: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg and Sweden.

The Americans postponed the deadline after pleas from the travel industry, worried about a slump in the number of Europeans crossing the Atlantic.

Yet the US is sticking to its demand that by 26 October this year all of the 27 countries on its visa-waiver programme must be issuing passports with a digital photograph of the traveller's face. All of the EU's 15 old member states, bar Greece, are part of the programme. Of these, only France and Italy do not yet have digital photographs. The laminated photographs they have instead are considered easier to tamper with.

Yet the Department of Homeland Security has said that existing passports from the visa-waiver nations will still be accepted without digital photographs, provided they are machine-readable.

Some biometric specialists feel that George W. Bush's administration has been wrong to tie biometrics so closely with its war on terror.

"The people who were the pilots on 9/11 all had legal passports," notes Max Snijder from the Biometric Expertise Group in the Netherlands. "They never would have found them with this system."

Studies undertaken for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre have concluded that principles of privacy and data protection have been "discarded" during the debate on biometrics.

Franco Frattini, the commissioner for justice, freedom and security, recently told European Voice that he was "open to possible solutions" to ensure that such principles were upheld. "But regarding the inclusion of biometrics in travel documents, I think we cannot have doubts, because otherwise we risk undermining the credibility of the European strategy on security," he added.

Another Commission source said biometrics could be useful in ensuring a more accurate identification. Studies have shown, the source added, that people of white European origin could struggle to tell people of Asian origin apart when faced with conventional photographs. Biometric indicators should help to reduce such confusion, the source said.

Not everyone is convinced that the benefits of biometrics outweigh the risks. Last month two Stanford University scientists cast doubt on the fingerprint-matching methods used under America's Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (VISIT) programme.

They estimated that 5% of the general public and 10% of suspects on a US 'watch-list' have poor quality fingerprints either because of genetic factors or because of the effect that manual labour has had on their hands.

Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor, has warned that another risk concerns that of 'identity theft', reflecting concerns by civil libertarians that the incorrect use of biometrics could lead to people being wrongly convicted of crimes. "The storage of fingerprints and photographs in a database linked with a stolen ID could lead to major and permanent problems for the real owner of this identity," he said.

The United States Government has agreed that citizens of the European Union who do not need a visa to travel to the US will be eligible for the visa-waiver programme from 26 October 2005 if their passports contain a digital photograph, or a machine-readable passport.