Federal money for identity programs boost biometrics market

lobbying profile but has heavy hitters on its board, including former CIA director George Tenet and retired Coast Guard Adm. James Loy, who was DHS’s first deputy secretary. Digimarc won contracts from Washington state and Vermont to produce new driver’s licenses with radio frequency identification chips, and is poised for more work under the Real ID law. Bruce Davis, Digimarc’s chief executive officer and board chairman, said that the vision behind the sale is to provide the government with both a systems integrator and expertise in identity documents. “I think we’re in the merging market phase of global identity management,” he says. “As the industry continues to mature, I believe that the kind of consolidation that we are doing with L-1 is essential to meeting customer needs.” Strohm writes that ast year, Digimarc’s lobbying activity spiked to $1 million, up from $350,000 in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company spent $180,000 on lobbying for the first quarter of 2008.

Defense behemoth Lockheed Martin solidified its foothold in the identity-solutions market in February by winning the contract for the Justice Department’s billion-dollar next-generation identification system. The program is intended to transform the department’s fingerprint-based system for identifying criminals and suspected terrorists into a multimodal biometrics system that includes facial scans, iris imaging, and palm prints. Lockheed Martin is also DHS’s prime contractor for issuing new biometric identification cards to seaport workers. Strohm writes that the corporation spent $4 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year, putting it on pace to exceed the $10.6 million it spent in 2007, according to the center.

Multimodal biometrics is viewed as a growth field for government programs, says Elaine Dezenski, who most recently was a senior vice president for Cross Match Technologies, which specializes in biometrics applications. On 5 June, President George Bush issued a directive requiring administration officials to come up with policy and legal recommendations for increasing the collection and sharing of biometrics for identifying not just known or suspected terrorists but also other “categories of individuals.” Dezenski joined Cross Match after serving as acting assistant secretary for policy at DHS. The company’s president, James Ziglar, is a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The company is positioned to provide mobile biometrics systems, particularly to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for airport security and to the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)