Biometrics proves 1 percent of applicants to enter U.S. are unsuitable

of interest in our Department of Homeland Security and the FBI biometrics systems and also frequently in our Department of Defense biometric systems. There does seem to be a tremendous amount of international interest in what the major United States Identification Systems are doing, the challenges that we’re encountering, and how we’re dealing with it. Perhaps that’s tunnel vision on my part, but it’s my impression at least that the world still does look to us for innovation and leadership in this area. Interestingly, in some of the commercial systems that we’re buying, they are not made in the U.S. so in terms of the technical capabilities that may not be the case (that they look to the United States) in the future, but in terms of building them into major systems and reliably operating them we still appear to have a great deal of credibility.

Archer: Lastly, can you tell us about what’s being explored in terms of next gen biometrics and ID management, domestically and internationally, what are you seeing?

Loudermilk: There’s a tremendous amount of both academic research and industrial research that’s going on in well-understood as well as developing new modalities. A lot of people have expressed interest in electrophysiology. Our sense is that the applications for that at least in the near term are pretty limited. A lot of interest in iris at a distance and iris in facial recognition on the move. If you read the vendor literature, you’d have the impression that facial recognition is already a well developed highly accurate biometric modality and for access control with relatively small populations that’s true, but as you start looking at it for criminal justice applications that’s not true today, but perhaps at sometime in the future it will be true.

Today it’s useful for lead generation in investigative environments. So there’s research going on to further advance facial recognition, to deal with issues of pose, expression, and illumination. Something I’ve been very interested in over the past few years that over the next 3-5 years is going to become an operational reality in law enforcement, sooner in military and homeland security operations, is the use of point of encounter rapid analysis of DNA. Unfortunately, if you watch the crime shows on television you come away with the impression that DNA results come back during the commercial break, but the reality is that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the laboratory setting, the absolute best you can do is 8-10 hours, and conventionally if you’re at the laboratory and you’re next in the queue you’re probably looking at 2-3 days, not a response in the commercial break. With the rapid DNA equipment we’ll be able to take a swab from an individual, put it in the machine, press a button, and roughly in an hour have a profile that can be searched against databases. This is not going to be a complete genome, it won’t have medical information or personally revealing information, but it will have the information that we use in law enforcement to differentiate people.

You probably know that the core locations on the genome that we look at, we only look at thirteen locations. We’re looking at a very small amount of information out of the three billion base pairs that the genome has we have just a tiny amount of information, but it is enough to reliably identify people for law enforcement purposes. It’s certainly not enough for medical purposes. So I think that’s a big opportunity. We’re hopeful that over, probably not the next five years, it’s probably a longer period of time, but we’re going to have much more effectiveness with voice biometrics as an investigative tool. In fact, we’re underway right now with the National Bureau of Standards and various partners to develop specifications as to how you would transfer that information and a host of other things. There are improvements being made for things that have been around 20-30 years, hand geometry is not widely used, but it’s used some places and there are improvements being made. There are improvements being made in almost every area.

James Loudermilk will lead an FBI Panel Discussion at IDGA’s Biometrics & Identity Management Summit, which will be held 20-22 August at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City , Arlington, Virginia. For more information, download the summit’t brochure:

James Loudermilk is the Senior Level Technologist in the FBI Science and Technology Branch; Chris Archer, the online content editor at IDGA (the Institute for Defense & Government Advancement)