[Infowarrior] - Face scans for air passengers to begin in UK this summer

[Richard Forno]

Face scans for air passengers to begin in UK this summer

Officials say automatic screening more accurate than checks by humans

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/25/theairlineindustry.transport

This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday April 25 2008 on p1 of the
Top stories section. It was last updated at 01:00 on April 25 2008.

A face recognition system

A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips
on passports. Photograph: Image Source/Getty

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology
rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security
and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

>From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers'
faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their
biometric passports.

Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than
humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot
project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by
an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly
let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to
generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected
because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

They may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be
authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks.

Ministers are eager to set up trials in time for the summer holiday rush,
but have yet to decide how many airports will take part. If successful, the
technology will be extended to all UK airports.

The automated clearance gates introduce the new technology to the UK mass
market for the first time and may transform the public's experience of
airports.

Existing biometric, fast-track travel schemes - iris and miSense - operate
at several UK airports, but are aimed at business travellers who enroll in
advance.

The rejection rate in trials of iris recognition, by means of the unique
images of each traveller's eye, is 3% to 5%, although some were passengers
who were not enrolled but jumped into the queue.

The trials emerged at a conference in London this week of the international
biometrics industry, top civil servants in border control, and police
technology experts. Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development
for the UK Border Agency, told one session: "We think a machine can do a
better job [than manned passport inspections]. What will the public reaction
be? Will they use it? We need to test and see how people react and how they
deal with rejection. We hope to get the trial up and running by the summer.

Some conference participants feared passengers would only be fast-tracked to
the next bottleneck in overcrowded airports. Automated gates are intended to
help the government's progress to establishing a comprehensive advance
passenger information (API) security system that will eventually enable
flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a
security watch list.

Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign said: "Someone is extremely optimistic. The
technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial
recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a
40% success rate in a real time situation. I am flabbergasted they consider
doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for
passengers."

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay
between technology and society, said: "It's a laughable technology. US
police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was
throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn't even recognise
gender. It's not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but
that it won't match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a
computer can't."

Project Semaphore, the first stage in the government's e-borders programme,
monitors 30m passenger movements a year through the UK. By December 2009,
API will track 60% of all passengers and crew movements. The Home Office aim
is that by December 2010 the system will be monitoring 95%. Total coverage
is not expected to be achieved until 2014 after similar checks have been
introduced for travel on "small yachts and private flights".

So far around 8m to 10m UK biometric passports, containing a computer chip
holding the carrier's facial details, have been issued since they were
introduced in 2006. The last non-biometric passports will cease to be valid
after 2016.

Home Office minister Liam Byrne said: "Britain's border security is now
among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we
don't want long waits. So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new
automatic gates for British and European Economic Area [EEA] citizens. We
will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports [and
airports]."

The EEA includes all EU states as well as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland.