Effectiveness of $10 Billion Biometric ID System in Doubt (moved from ATSNN), page 1

According to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Homeland Securities Biometric System which uses fingerprints to check the identity of foreign visitors is seriously flawed. The system has a 50/50 success rate, even if the prints are on file which leaves a large vulnerability for terrorist to exploit.

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The Department of Homeland Security's $10 billion system for using fingerprints to check the identity of foreign visitors has only about a 50-50 chance of catching suspected terrorists, even if their prints are on file, according to a mathematical analysis in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences carried the analysis, which used statistical modeling to predict how often the inkless finger scans collected from visitors to the United States can be successfully matched with the type of poor-quality images that are typically the only records of the fingerprints of terrorist suspects.

"The strong dependence of biometric identification performance on image quality level leaves the ... program vulnerable to exploitation by terrorists," said the journal.

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The journal states that this is a serious vulnerability in one of the last lines of terrorist defense but can be fixed.

Meanwhile Homeland Security defends the Biometric Systems technology stating that their assumptions in the flaw of the system are purely theoretical and only examines the system under the worst possible scenario.