iD CARDS NO MORE

Since the use of ID cards and fingerprints have long been considered as means to serve and protect one’s population, the last few years have been particularly interesting in regards to the development of iris scanning technology. Back in 2003, it was put to use for the first time in British school canteens, and for International Customs in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Three years later, Iris identification technology is still considered a hot topic amongst many members of the general population, and in scientific circles. The latest issue is that of children’s security. The Freehold Borough School District in New Jersey went through two months of testing before, finally making the technology fully operational within its complex. Parents will now have to go through the eye scanner in order to confirm their identities, before being permitted on school ground to pick up their children. Iris scanning is beginning to replace the now obsolete swipe-card system in the hopes of providing better and stricter measures for identifying authorized individuals. This project is actually made possible through funding by the U.S Department of Justice.

Retinal eye scanning technology works by taking a digital photograph of the iris, the colored portion of the eye, each time a parent, teacher, and school employee gains access to the school. “The algorithm can map out up to 242 unique points in the iris… A good fingerprint patch is anywhere from seven to 22 points” says Raymond Bolling, co-founder of Eyemetric Identity Systems, a by-product of New Jersey Business Systems Inc., which specializes in, biometrics identification. Biometric technology seems safe and intriguing on paper, but some reports in the UK and the US are expressing serious qualms in regards to its practical use. Markus Kuhn, a lecturer in computer security at the University of Cambridge computer lab, claims that biometrics, even though relatively reliable to some degree, is flawed ; “With huge databases of biometric records it was likely that many people would be misidentified as being wanted or missed altogether.”

Others fear that the system will be mainly focused on the profit margins of companies involved in the program, such as Hewlett- Packard, Eyemetric Identity Systems and LG Electronics USA.

One other major setback to such an endeavor seems to be the potential infringement of personal freedom. Even though parents have the choice to sign up or not for now, children and other administrative personnel simply don’t. This could mean that in the future everybody will be scanned and classified in a system that is, as of yet, incapable of dealing with the mass number of individuals in its database.

Furthermore, there are no international standards as to what constitutes a valid identity check by retinal eye scanning, so it is pretty much left to private companies and government subsidies to create their own standards.