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.

This is customs, another layer in the security web. It doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worthwhile. Presumably people getting on the plane have been through the physical security checks.

It would be great if we could do the entry processing before they got on the plane, but that's not within our control since they're still on foreign soil at that point.

Every problem looks easy to someone that doesn't understand the constraints on the solution.

Make that 'in US custody on foreign soil', surely?
It happens in Canada and the Republic of Ireland on US-bound planes. Extending this to other airports would bring benefits to millions - and ensure that Cat Stevens gets to where he's going - so why not extend this now?

That physical security is meaningless, as the crew and the passengers themeselves don't believe it protects them. If they believed that the security had done their job right, we would not have cases where people are kicked off a plane after having gone through the security, and we would not have ha crew asking for F-14 escorts.

Technically when you pass through DHS in Canada at an airport, you have entered US Soil. If you want to go back outside the secure area, you have to pass through Canada Customs/Immigration as you "have been out of the country"

I don't believe this is correct. In the event of a cancelled flight or other reason to not take your flight, you are free to leave back through the US Immigration hall and go back into the terminal. I have done it many times.

Employees who work in the terminal pass back and forth without being inspected by either US or Canadian officials.

Also, the sterile area after pre-clearence is still considered Canadian soil - the US government has no authority there...actually, they don't even have authority in the Immigration or Customs area - if Immigration wants to bar you, or Customs finds something illegal in your luggage, they have to summon the Canadian police to intervene.

Are you kidding? Are you suggesting that everyone be fingerprinted as a prerequisite for boarding an airplane?

:td: :td: :td:

ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!!!

I might make an exception for those Americans (politicians and camp followers) who seem to believe believe such moves have a serious impact on 'security' (just to reassure them :p).

So, how much will it cost to US to retrofit every international airport in the world where a flight from the US lands to have a completely seperate departure area only used for US-bound flights, and then how much will all of the expat work agreements with US government employees and contractors cost?

This is kind of like after 9/11 when Ma and Pa Kettle kept bleating about how there should be armed guards on all US flights. Most people grossly underestimate the number of airports and flights there are per day. I've asked many people this and most guess that there are "several thousand flights a day" with round numbers of less than 10,000. When I tell them it's closer to 30,000 just in the US (counting all of the puddle jumper flights) their eyes light up. You would need a workforce close to the size of the US Marine Corps to provide a couple of armed guards for every flight, and to put US customs at every foreign airport that has/might have a US-bound flight would be a truly enourmous undertaking.

It's done in Canada because, one, Canada is close and two, you don't have to spend a ton on BICE employees/contractors to live there. Also, a large portion of Canadian air traffic is US bound, so the economies of scale are there.

Just think about how much it would cost to build out and man a location that maybe has one US departure per day. Not just the pay of the BICE employees, but housing, car, medical, foreign taxes, per diem and/or monthly living allowances. Ex-pat agreements are expensive, even for the government. Just transporting household goods to and from a foreign posting can cost $10-15k easily.

Biometrics are not foolproof. There is ample evidence to show that it doesn't take much to defeat these systems. Can it help? Possibly, but it isn't the silver bullet that most people make it out to be.

You're referring to unattended biometrics such as keyless entry, where the user can play games with spoofing the system. A fingerprint scanner with a customs officer looking at you is almost impossible to beat.

My 5 year old son believes in Santa Claus, but that don't make him so.

My mother-in-law believes in government controlled medicine, but that don't mean it'll work.

Really? Someone should tell AMRIS since SABRE is fully biometrically protected in it's bunker in OK.

Also, AT&T (or whomever they are these days) should know since that's what they use too.

Terrorists have been known to use hotels and get on flights. What are we going to do? Blacklist every person who has ever been in that particular room or on a particular plane?

These measures deter basically diddly-squat, enrich the consultants and contractors, and create bigger haystacks in which to lose needles while losing even more hearts and minds of visitors (and even fellow US persons) who find themselves at the mercy of a confused, expensive system comprised of foolish persons, suspect data and even worse. Accenture and Booz Allen's "security" practice areas' employees will be cashing bigger checks and we'll be no safer than we were 5 years ago.

"Almost impossible" wrt fingerprint scanners? Not true. Even "attended biometrics" checking has been circumvented before. And the fingerprint-process that DHS is in love with has already failed once to prevent a person from entering the US who was supposed to be denied entry and caught by such things as the current incarnation of DHS fingerprinting.

The point of Yaatri's comment was that BICE/CBP checks of this sort do little to nothing for aviation security. Fingerprint data use as a law enforcement and intelligence tool? More utility for those purposes than for aviation security. Then again, this is just another attempt at casting a wide net and will be little more than a fishing expedition. And I have no blind faith that non-terrorist Americans will always be exempted from these procedures to control the movements of persons.

I guess by treating all visitors to the US as criminals, we'll deter as many people as possible from coming here, and thus there will be fewer people to search for.

I don't see why we don't just ban foreign visitors entirely. Who needs them?

Well first, everyone knew those guys had been caught for quite some time. Second, the only reason they were held in the secret CIA prisons in the first place was that they were caught abroad. There's no way that the government could get away with those kinds of secret arrests and deportations on US soil. (At least not yet.)

So, in the UK where they photograph your coming in (mug shot) and keep you on CCTV as much as possible (if only East Germany could have implemented that!) I guess they'd be much worse off than we poor serfs under the thumb of Comrade Chertoff?

I have to give my thumbprint at several client sites to get in the building, and at least two clients have run a criminal background check on me before giving me a temporary badge. But it doesn't make me feel like a criminal - perhaps I am insufficiently hysterical.

So you say. What are your credentials? I know a LOT about profiling, data, and computer systems and I know I could build a system that could flag a suspect fingerprint in a few seconds. Mastercard built a system that could process several hundred million transactions per minute in under three seconds without even getting up a sweat.

Not saying the Gov't will pull it off (see also IRS system updates), just that it's not such a big deal.

Again, an opinion masquerading as a statement of fact, unless you're a bona fide security wonk.

Ah, well, healthy paranoia bout the government keeping things like, say, background checks for gun purchasers past the 48 hour timeline is pretty healthy. Its just that since Hoover they haven't done much of a good job with it (see also Nixon and Clinton) so it's not high up on my list.

Have fun.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

Private companies and government agencies are different things, for a start.

Most of the time people are only fingerprinted when they're suspected of committing a crime. Thus the connection between being fingerprinted isn't quote as "hysterical" as you may think. Plenty of ordinary people don't like being fingerprinted to come to the US and have cut back or entirely stopped coming. Making the process even more intrusive and cumbersome will only further decrease the number of visitors. I hardly think that damaging our own economy (which is a stated goal of Al Qaeda), for the illusion of security is worthwhile.

You are right that East Germany probably would have loved the technology we could have. Amazing that with extensive files on a huge percentage of their population and all of their draconian tactics they couldn't even predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, or keep residents of East Berlin locked in.

This sounds absolutely hysterical to me! The Government would never do anything wrong. Never has one, never will one. Thinking otherwise is hysterical paranoia.

Really? I just gave several examples. And if you don't have a very big balance at your bank, they'll take your fingerprint on the back of your paycheck.

And yet Disney has an all time high number of visitors from Europe due to the ForEx situation. Care to cite something besides a broad generalization.

Actually, I was talking about the CCTV network in Britan, which I hope we will never have. And it would not have helped them stave off their eventual doom - communism/socialism just don't work compared to capitalism.

These are all examples of getting one fingerprint taken. Getting them all is different. Furthermore, the percentage of people getting fingerprinted (for office access or standard banking) is pretty low. Many people already complain about this kind of thing and avoid doing business with companies that operate in this manner. Dollar or one of the other car rental agencies started taking fingerprints as a condition of rental, but, IIRC, canceled the program after receiving complaints.

I would agree that for a big discount people would be willing to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do. I don't have anything other than anecdotal evidence that travel is being negatively impacted by the "US Visit" program, but then, I haven't seen any hard evidence to the contrary.

Intuitively one wouldn't expect the program to have a positive effect (certainly nobody decides to travel to the US for the purpose of being photographed and fingerprinted), so the (intuitive) best case would be a zero effect.

Why not?

And capitalism doesn't work very well when governments discourage free trade by continuously thinking up new ways to discourage trade and travel.

That depends on the bank. I'm not wealthy by any sense of the word (comfortable maybe, but definitely not wealthy), but I've deposited serveral checks at my credit union bigger than my directly deposited salary and I have NEVER been asked for a finger print. And these were with personal checks and corporate checks written for several thousand dollars.

The only bank I've ever seen take fingerprints was Wells Fargo, and that was only for people who didn't have an account there. I don't know if they still do that or not.

I'm not the topic. ;)

I get my news from more sources than just the news when it comes to these matters. ;) But what does it matter, for I'm NOT the topic. ;)

It's not healthy paranoia; it's a realization that there's such a thing as the slippery slope ... especially given public-private party discussions on this particular subject matter. ;)