DHS announces plan to scan all ten fingers of foreign vistors to U.S.

Published 12 September 2006

System to be operational by 2008; current two-finger system inadequate due to poor capturing technology and vulnerability to spoofing; vistor fingerprints will be compared to massive database that includes those picked up in al Qaeda training camps

When U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan, destroying al Qaeda and the Taliban was their first objective. Second, perhaps, was helping to ease in a democratic government. Not far from their mind, however, was law enforcement — not in Afghanistan but in the United States. Soldiers scoured former al Qaeda bases for fingerprints in the hope that once the United States implemented a full-scale immigration finger-biometric system, the data could be used to identify terrorists trying to enter the United States. There were successes at first, but they were limited because of the poor quality of many of the prints and the fact that immigration authorities took only two index finger impressions.

This week DHS secretary Michael Chertoff announced a major change to the program. By the end of 2008 the United States will begin taking a full set of ten fingerprints from foreign nationals arriving in the country. The hope, Chertoff said, was a “magnificent deterrent effect” because “every single terrorist who has ever been in a safe house or a training camp or built a bomb is going to have to ask himself or herself…’Have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere in the world that’s been captured?’” The program was originally announced last July without any firm implementation date.

DHS’s goal is to implement scanners that can take ten finger impressions in less than fifteen seconds. The system should also deal well with partial prints, a major problem faced earlier by two finger scanners. “About ten percent of the people on the federal watch list have the poorest quality fingerprint images,” said Stanford University professor Larry Wein. “And for those people, if they came in and gave their true fingerprints, the chances we would catch them are only about 53 percent, so barely more than a coin flip.” Other finger-biometric challenges include developing effective counter-spoofing methods. While the risk of someone chopping off another’s finger (or hands, as the case may be with the new program) is slight, some systems can be tricked by blowing on the reader, thereby causing the previous user’s prints to reappear.

-read more in Jason Ryan’s ABC News report