Federal money for identity programs boost biometrics market

for enforcing federal immigration laws, Dezenski said. Cross Match’s lobbying activity soared last year to $860,000, up from $260,000 in 2006, the center reported. The company spent $150,000 in the first quarter of this year. The Monument Policy Group is a top lobbying firm for Cross Match and Digimarc. The shop was founded by Stewart Verdery, who was DHS’s first assistant secretary for policy, and recently brought in a new partner, Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, who served as Democratic staff director and general counsel for the House Homeland Security Committee. Victor Cerda, formerly chief of staff and counsel for ICE, was a contract lobbyist for Cross Match in 2006 and 2007 but is not lobbying for the company now.

Companies which specialize in biometrics are also using trade and lobbying associations to try to keep federal procurement dollars flowing. “The industry is pulling itself together to be involved in the policy process more than it ever has in the past,” says Tovah LaDier, managing director of the International Biometric Industry Association (IBIA). LaDier says that the association most recently lobbied Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in favor of a bill which would require TSA to form a working group with private companies to evaluate existing and proposed industry biometric programs that could be used in airports. The House passed the bill in mid-June. LaDier works as a lobbyist for the IBIA and for the clients of the Williams Mullen Strategies law firm in Washington, D.C.. One of her biggest clients, according to federal lobbying records, is Cogent Systems, which is a subcontractor for the government’s US VISIT foreigner-tracking program. According to Grant of the Stanford Group, Cogent could be the prime beneficiary as the government expands the US VISIT program from collecting two fingerprints per person to collecting all ten. The most closely watched event in biometrics this year, Grant says, will occur when Lockheed Martin selects subcontractors for the Justice Department’s next-generation identification system (see HS Daily Wire of 17 June 2008). Cogent is in the running to support the fingerprint and palm portion of the program, according to Grant. The company spent $120,000 on lobbying in 2007, and about $30,000 in the first quarter of this year.

Industry officials are divided, however, over how much the identity-solutions market will grow in the next several years. Grant predicts that the market will stay flat, especially as