US expands visitor fingerprinting to deter attacks
 

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The U.S. government will take prints of all 10 fingers of foreigners entering the United States and compare them with those found at sites with ties to terrorists, the country's security chief said on Friday.

"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 ... 'Have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere in the world that's been captured?"'

Give me a break, Darth Chertoff. The only result of this will be more visitors asking themselves if visiting the USA is worth it any more and taking their tourist dollars to friendlier places like Canada and Mexico.

As for you, Reuters...I have a 1 finger salute for your quasi-journalism and unverifiable claim that this action will "deter attacks" as you put it. Just more sensationalism and misinformation to add to the stew, eh?

This is great news! DHS has been practically overwhelmed by all the terrorists it is capturing by collecting the two fingerprints it does from foreigners who land on US soil. Just imagine how many terrorists will now be caught with all ten fingerprints being collected!

Once DNA analysis is undertaken by DHS (mid 2007), we will truly be safe.

I can imagine all the terrorists will start building their bombs and touching things in their safe houses and training camps with their toes only.

Better yet, someone should send them copies of Chertoff's fingerprints so they can make fingercaps that lay his prints on all of their dirty deeds.

Then, when US Visit is expanded to everyone (as is being planned) and Chertoff re-enters the country from abroad, he can be apprehended officially as the threat to our nation that he is.

I'm just dumbfounded at how they expect this to work? They're going to fingerprint people AFTER they've had the chance to do their dirty work on the flight?

In my mind, this gives them extra incentive to get the job done while the plane is in the air.

Great job DHS. Keep up the good work. :rolleyes:

Can someone explain to me why this won't work? It seems pretty straightforward: Intelligence agencies pick up fingerprints of bad guys from captured safe houses and training camps, fingerprints are put in the database, bad guy tries to enter the US and gets caught. The only way to avoid it to come in some other way.

No ad hominems please. Calling Chertoff an idiot isn't an argument. Just looking for a logical explanation of the position.

I guess the terrorist tourist dollar is really important to our economy.

Now, if only we could fingerprint the illegal aliens coming across the border in Mexico. But didn't all of the 9/11 terrorists arrive by plane?

Here's another question, how long is the search going to take to match the fingerprints? Anything longer than close to instantaneous would be murder on the immigration lines.

Excellent for DHS! :D Keep'em coming more news for ten fingerprint.

Presumed terrorists will start using gloves when handling things. Then one day the DHS/TSA will decide to do DNA tests on everyone entering the country. So then the terrorists will start using clean rooms to build bombs and stuff.

Eventually, some bright mind will figure out that identification doesn't mean better security because most terrorists will keep a low profile prior to the act making it near impossible to identify them on an inbound plane flight, ship, or car trip. The DHS response to that will be to close the border.

Only Hollywood and politicians believe that terrorists carry a terrorist identification card which is used whenever they buy something or check into a hotel or airplane flight.

How long is it going to take for a match, how accurate will it be, and how much will the storage of such prints cost?

I am pretty sure that this is going to do wonders for US tourism.

Mr Smith plus three kids come to the US for two weeks a Disney, and the WHOLE FAMILY gets fingerprinted!

But they haven't been doing that for the last five years. Presumably we've already built up a good database of fingerprints we've found that we think are terrorists, but there's no way to match them to anyone in time.

If terrorists have to start operating in clean rooms and wearing gloves all the time then we've seriously impaired their infrastructure. Only in the movies is it possible to not leave fingerprints when you're living in an house for a few days.

This will force them not to use the ones that have been to training camps. The low profile ones are the amateurs they talk into wearing a bomb vest or think they can mix up TATP in a lav. They're much more likely to get tripped up in other layers of security. They'll appear nervous, they'll buy one-way tickets, they'll pay cash, etc. We should be much more concerned about the ones who have been through Spetsnaz style training. Muhhammad Atta's replacement wouldn't be able to get through on a fake passport under this system.

Sounds like a good reason to run their fingerprints.

It doesn't matter if we actually have their prints in the database. They don't know if we do or not, so we've just immensely complicated their planning.

Every layer of security added, even if by itself it's not sufficient, adds complications to the bad guys trying to pull something off. Add enough partial screens are pretty soon you've put the odds of success down so low that they don't even try.

The typical FlyerTalk security "expert" looks at any security measure and says "here's a way that can be defeated and it's inconvenient to me so it's stupid." Which is beside the point. Perhaps it can be defeated, but it's just added another layer of complication to the bad guy's plan. Perhaps they could find people whose prints aren't on file to come in and lead the operation. But the odds of success just went way down -- you've done the equivalent of making them use a brand new 2nd Lt. to lead the group instead of a Colonel. The opportunties for the other layers of security to be successful just went up considerably.

It's true that we have to be right 100% of the time and the bad guys only have to be right once in order to pull off a successful attack. But that one attack has to be right 100% of the time against each individual activity we're undertaking to thwart it. Each of our layers doesn't have to be 100%, it just has to add to their complication.

Actually, they already get fingerprinted at Disney. It's part of their ticket fraud prevention.

When I arrive in the UK I'm photographed and under constant CCTV surveliance. This hasn't seemed to hurt the number of people travelling there, because the customs area at LHR always has a huge line.

Glad you've figured out how bad the news is, Al-Reuters especially.

Makes you wonder why everyone condemns Chertoff based on their reporting. <crickets>

And I can understand why you're so skeptical about the effectiveness of fingerprints for, you know, catching criminals. <sound of an owl>

Finally, I can really see that people will go to MEXICO instead of the United States when they want to see the Statue of Liberty, Disney, or Hollywood.

Having worked in the public safety industry from the technical side I have some expertise here. But since you don't know me, do your own research.

How long for a match? Almost instantaneous, especially when you're matching against a small database. Disney probably has more visitors in a year than we probably have terrorist fingerprints on file, so expect that sort of response time. In other words, it doesn't slow down the lines at Disney so it shouldn't here. This technology has been working just fine since back in the mid-1990s.

The time constraint will be the amount of time it takes people to place their fingers in the sensor. But you can do that while the customs people are asking questions. That's actually a way to improve the questioning -- tasking someone makes it harder to keep their story straight. That's one of the reasons the customs people love to come out and ask you questions while you're waiting for your baggage.

Think of all the companies that are using biometric sensing for security applications. Lee Majors even did an IBM commercial with a six million dollar man reference. This technology is now old stuff.

How accurate? It's very good. About 99.9% when you're using 10 fingers. There will be false positives and false negatives. False positives means more questioning, false negatives means a bad guy gets through, and it's about evenly distributed between them. But I can't think of any other layer in our security that has a 99.9% accuracy rate.

How much will it cost? Disk space is amazingly cheap these days, and they're not storing an image, they're storing the geometric representation of the image so it doesn't take much space. Storage is not a detectable cost in this plan.

Actually, none of us has any idea how many terrorists they have or have not caught in the program. I suspect that when they get a bad guy he is just taken quietly into another room to hear the bad news. We found out on Friday that the US had several high ranking Al Qaeda people in foreign custody that would be transferred to Gitmo -- providing that somehow we've managed to catch terrorists without alerting the media.

And you've exposed how little you know about this technology. The reason for taking 10 fingerprints is to increase the accuracy and speed of the scan. They're driving down the number of false positives.