Six months ago, a Madison, Wis.-firm’s hot new product was a thumbprint-ID security device to prevent strangers from stealing personal information stored on hand-held computers.
Today, the firm’s phones are ringing with double the normal number of calls from businesses inquiring about using Biocentric Solutions Inc.’s fingerprint identification technology to guard not against theft, but as a first line of defense against terrorists.
The horrific attacks Sept. 11 were a defining moment for a nation that increasingly will turn for protection to high-tech devices that verify the identify of people entering buildings and logging onto networks or scan crowds for suspected criminals.
At center stage in this arena are about 150 makers of software and gear that captures and converts unique physical characteristics into data and, in some cases, transmits the data instantly to government agencies.
Experts say the spirited public debate about privacy, weighted now with new-found national security concerns, will shift from whether such technologies should be deployed more widely to which is most effective and least intrusive.
Bottom line: There will be many more scanners, cameras and smart card readers on computers, at check-in gates, guard posts and doors .
“The events will change our thinking for a long time to come, certainly for the rest of our lifetimes,” said Texas-based security consultant Bill Rathburn, a former Los Angeles deputy chief of police who was security director for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. “They will change security as broadly in our society as the 1972 Munich incident changed security for the Olympics.”
The heightened security also will mean millions of dollars in new investment for biometrics pioneers such as voice-recognition firm Veritel Corp. in Chicago, face-scanning firm Visionics Corp. and iris-recognition firm Iridian Technologies, both based in New Jersey.
“There will be a paradigm shift in the way security is done,” said Visionics CEO Joseph Atick, who was summoned to Washington, D.C., last week by Federal Aviation Administration and other officials to answer questions about mass-deployment of biometric systems.
Biometric technologies have been in use in high-security environments for decades. In recent years, as the technology has improved and costs have dropped dramatically, systems have been installed from Las Vegas casinos to airports and city street corners.
Pilots identified by their eyes
At London’s Heathrow Airport, a pilot program by airlines and immigration officials is scheduled to begin in October to help frequent fliers pass more quickly through customs, according to Iridian CEO Bill Voltmer.
At Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, a pilot program launched in May using Iridian’s software grants access to 3,500 pilots, flight attendants and others to secured areas.
A passenger or employee is required to glance at a camera that takes a digital snapshot of the iris–the colored ring surrounding a pupil and a feature more distinctive than fingerprints, according to biometric experts. They say that eyes offer more accurate biometric measures than faces, voices, hands or fingerprints.
In London near the Millennium Dome, 300 cameras scan faces for matches with digital files of faces of known criminals. Thirty-six such cameras are being used by law enforcement officials to check crowds in Tampa’s downtown entertainment district, Ybor City.
Public outcry has been loudest over technology that randomly scans crowds, which poses different issues than technology that requires active consent, as when people are asked to present their faces or hands before entering a secured area.
Nonetheless, if investor sentiment is any indication, face scanning is likely to become much more common. Visionics, which sells the software used in the systems deployed in London and Tampa, saw its stock shares nearly double on Sept. 17, the day the stock market reopened after the attacks.
Consultant Rathburn said face-recognition technology has not progressed far enough in terms of speed and reliability to screen masses of people for admittance to large public events. “But that day will come,” he said.
Meanwhile, Visionics’ Atik foresees the mass installation in airports of face scanners–networked computers that convert streaming video images to 84-byte digital face prints and transmit the face prints in real time to law enforcement agencies’ databases.
Only part of the answer
“You’ll have thousands of these boxes in the ceilings mounted above cameras,” he said. “It’s just one additional layer that somebody has to penetrate. We’re half the solution. Intelligence gathering is the other half.”
Atik, whose firm’s Jersey City offices overlook New York Harbor directly across from the site of the World Trade Center, was in Orlando on Sept. 11, for an annual meeting of the Biometric Consortium, where he was scheduled to speak. The convention was canceled. The industry and government-sponsored group was formed in late 1995 to promote standards.
Biometrics was growing even when other high-tech sectors were depressed, but the Sept. 11 events were a watershed.
“One of our challenges is to enhance security in a significant and quantifiable fashion,” said Biocentric Solutions CEO Martin Janiak. “Wherever possible in this process, we need to innovate to minimize the loss of freedom and convenience so the public will embrace these changes” in order to ensure their success.
Calls have increased steadily since Sept. 11 at Biocentric, which sells fingerprint-ID products and software to secure facilities and networks.
At Chicago’s Veritel, an 8-year-old private company that makes voice-identification systems that work over standard telephone lines, Chairman Christopher Tomes has been getting calls not only from prospective customers, but from people and private equity firms wanting to invest.
In recent months, Veritel had been struggling to hold down costs, reducing its Chicago staff by about six people to 20 because of the slowing economy. Investment capital was tight.
“We had decided to wait out the [economic] storm until the biometric market took off or until we started to land major customers,” he said.
The attacks shifted Veritel into higher gear.
“This has pushed us ahead about a year,” he said. “Unquestionably, we’ll push much more rapidly now on a global basis.”
Iridian’s Voltmer said security has shot to the top of the list of corporate priorities.
“Everybody already knew physical-access security was important,” he said, “but it was not a top-level decision until now.”
To meet anticipated demand, he said, “we will ensure that the next versions of our technologies happen at a faster rate. You go down that path anyway, but we’ll concentrate harder on speed-to-market and making sure we have features and functions that users demand.”
Biometrics is certain to play a larger role in security, but Voltmer warned there is no simple answer to preventing attacks.
“What everybody is recognizing is there are technologies that can be used,” he said, “but they’re also recognizing that technology by itself is not the solution.”
