U.S. military expands, deepens use of biometrics

Biometrics technology is having more of an impact in society and the marketplace, and it is having more of an impact on the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). In evidence: Cheryl Gerber writes in Military Information Technology that the year-old Biometrics Task Force(BTF) has outgrown its mission and organizational home. As a result, officials have decided to create an ongoing entity, known as the Biometrics Defense Agency (BDA), with expanded responsibilities covering use of the technology in all aspects of military operations. “The task force was set up to get a capability quickly. We’ve achieved our goal. Now we’re taking it a step further to institutionalize it across the DoD without losing momentum,” said Dr. Myra Gray, director of BTF. “Although it is not yet finalized, we have determined that we will be called the Biometrics Defense Agency.”

Two actions earlier this year heralded the establishment of BTF as a program of record and an institution tasked with developing biometrics more broadly for identity management. In April, the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) Defense Science Boarddelivered a final report concluding that the use of biometrics is “vitally important to the success of many missions within the DoD.” The Task Force on the Defense Biometrics Program outlined forty-six recommendations in its report and urged the OSD to develop planning for the use of biometrics in the broader scope of identity management at the earliest opportunity. By June, the war supplemental bill had provided $320 million to integrate existing, disparate biometrics tools and databases and to expand the integrated capability across DoD.

“We are multi-modal, meaning we don’t rely on one thing. Any biometric can be spoofed, but the use of multiple biometrics significantly decreases spoofing,” said Gray. “When we have to look at whether the biometric is a living finger or eyeball or a dead one, we have the technology today to prove whether it’s dead or alive.” The BTF will standardize and integrate biometrics into an existing infrastructure connected to the Global Information Grid using standard data formats and upgrading to relational databases. This will improve upon the current ad hoc, disparate systems stored in spreadsheets. “One of our missions is to provide the standards by which the biometrics community operates. We will develop policy to help guide the biometrics community and determine an acceptable timeframe for turning around an answer,” said Gray. “We want to strike a balance without degrading quality, using biometrics as an identifier but not as an inhibiter. In the process of information sharing, we have to be sensitive to privacy laws, cultural and security issues,” she stressed.

Gerber writes that DoD has been using biometrics tools to control access to installations in Southwest Asia for several years, expanding the technology usage into law enforcement and forensics in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, in theater, biometrics collection can be used for population management to establish a census of regular citizens, or for identification on service members needing medical care, as well as to confirm or deny the identity of suspected terrorists.