StarPhoenix
Posted [1] : 2007-06-16

OTTAWA -- The 2002 film Minority Report depicts a society that keeps tabs on its citizens by swiftly scanning their irises when they exit subway cars or enter buildings.

The same technology verifies the identity of those authorized to enter restricted areas.

At the time the Stephen Spielberg film was released, the biometric world it depicted still seemed far off. But in the five years since, systems that rely on biometric samples of fingerprints or iris and facial scans to establish identity have become so ubiquitous some suggest we're witnessing the birth of the biometric state.

Around the world, biometric identifiers are used at airports and border crossings in machine-readable documents such as passports and driver's licences. Police and security services rely on digitized databanks of fingerprints in watch lists and companies access them for background checks on prospective employees.

Increasingly, people are required to present a biometric to enter buildings, access a laptop or database, check out a library book or claim a meal.

Whether all this is good or bad is the subject of intense debate.

Those most fearful of biometric technologies warn they are accelerating the trend toward a surveillance society that gained momentum after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Advocates respond biometrics will enhance security, help governments deliver improved services more efficiently and make it easier for citizens to navigate the online world of e-commerce and e-government.

And some, such as Ann Cavoukian, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner, argue emerging biometric encryption technology offers the best of both worlds. "There are very reasonable ways to protect privacy and security at the same time," she says.

What's clear is the biometric genie is fully out of the bottle. Decisions being taken now by governments in Canada and around the world will determine whether biometrics usher in the Big Brother societies that civil libertarians fear or broker a new age of enhanced security and privacy.

The United States, spurred on by the 9/11 attacks, is a leading user of biometric systems. The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), an automated 10-fingerprint matching system that became operational in 1999, is the world's largest biometric database, with more than 47 million subjects on file.

Last August, the U.S. began issuing passports containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips encoded with biometric and biographical information. As well the US-VISIT program, launched in 2004, uses digital finger scans and photographs to screen selected foreign nationals against watch lists.

While Canada remains one of the few industrialized nations not actively considering a national ID card, governments here have not hesitated to incorporate biometrics in a range of uses. To underline their growing centrality to government, a 70-member "biometrics working group" drawn from 22 federal departments and agencies has met regularly since May of 2006 to assess and co-ordinate initiatives.

In a presentation in Quebec City in April, Dean Barry, a Department of Public Safety manager who heads the working group, outlined some of Ottawa's current and potential uses of biometrics.

They include the Restricted Area Identification Card used by airport employees to access secure areas; the Canadian Border Service Agency's Canpass and Nexus programs for trusted travellers; the RCMP's Real Time Identification project, which will supply a new automated fingerprint identification system; and field trials of fingerprint and facial recognition technologies by Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

The field trials "will help determine how biometrics could be used to identify people entering Canada and to reduce the potential for identity fraud," the department said last year.

The biometric initiative with the greatest potential impact on Canadians involves passports. It's being driven by the U.S. Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and shaped by passport standards developed by the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Under the new American policy, Canadians will soon need passports or other secure travel documents to enter the United States.

For its part, ICAO has selected facial features as the primary and universal form of biometric identification in RFID-equipped passports, meaning e-passports containing biometrics will almost certainly become the only acceptable document for international travel.

According to spokesperson Fabien Lengelle, Passport Canada is working on two biometric initiatives.

One is a facial recognition system that would verify the identity of passport applicants and check them against photo databases maintained by police or security services.

In addition, the government has asked Passport Canada to develop an e-passport pilot project. Passport Canada is busily working on one and Lengelle says the agency should have something to announce in coming months.

"It's too early to say what a Canadian e-passport would look like," he says.

But the document will comply with ICAO standards, he says, meaning facial recognition is the likeliest biometric.

Despite their futuristic aura, biometric systems have been around for years. But interest in biometric systems mushroomed after the 9/11 attacks as governments sought to protect their citizens against terrorist attack.

That biometrics can protect us from terrorists is largely an illusion, says Cavoukian.

"We simply lack the predictive ability to find out who these individuals are," she says.

Despite that, governments everywhere quickly embraced biometrics because they were an easy sell to fearful populations.

Ironically, relying on biometric ID cards to secure identity "is simply to make suspects of us all," argues Benjamin Muller, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University. "Even the trusted traveller is arguably trusted only because his/her personal history and contemporary movements across the virtual borders of the Biometric State are tracked and recorded," he observes in a paper presented earlier this month at a workshop on ID cards at Queen's University.

More recently, governments have shifted to other rationales for biometrics, including international obligations, more efficient access to government services, controlling voter fraud, better immigration and border control, and even enhanced citizen control and autonomy.

Not everyone, however, is a convert to the new world of biometrics.

Civil libertarians, privacy advocates and other critics remain unconvinced its putative benefits outweigh its costs.

Their greatest fear is biometrics could be used to undermine or even obliterate privacy.

Without adequate safeguards, Cavoukian says, biometric systems "would enable data linkage in multiple separate databases that all contain the same key, which would be the biometric. You would be able to engage in endless secondary uses of the information."

This would allow governments or corporations to develop extensive profiles of every citizen in the databases.

"That's the fundamental fear from a privacy perspective," says Cavoukian, "the possibility of rampant tracking of one's activities. Ultimately, it will leave no door unopened."