Revolutionary Worker #1131, December 16, 2001, posted at http://rwor.org
Last winter there was outrage when it was discovered that police in Tampa, Florida had used biometric technology at the Super Bowl. Biometrics is the computer technology that matches the physical characteristics of a person against information held on file in a computer database. The effect in Tampa was to establish something like a computerized line-up, and many people saw this as an unacceptable invasion of privacy that could lead to all kinds of cases of mistaken identity and repression. Now, less than a year later, talk among politicians and in the media makes it seem like the use of biometrics is a foregone conclusion--or as USA Today reported, "federal officials have told biometrics firms to 'get cracking.' And airports are now becoming a testing and proving ground for such big brother measures the government hopes to get people to accept and get used to more broadly.
One of the biometric technologies being fine-tuned now is iris scanning. Currently being tested in Amsterdam and London, the magazine Computing explained, "Iris scans cause no discomfort and are not thought to carry any health risks. Passengers simply put their faces in front of a camera, which then analyses either eye. Passengers do not even need to take off their glasses. Once the iris is scanned and approved, the passenger is allowed through. Iris recognition is seen as having the highest accuracy of all biometric technologies. The eye is less likely to be damaged, while a cut on a finger, for example, hampers fingerprint recognition."
The trade journal Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that in Amsterdam, "Travelers volunteered iris data to be stored in a chip-equipped identity card, enabling the system to compare a passenger's iris with stored information." The article then noted that "This testing is not being limited to Europe, The San Francisco Chronicle reported at the end of October, 'The Transportation Department also is considering a plan to allow passengers who volunteer for background checks and are issued special "smart cards" with their fingerprints, irises or other biometric identification to bypass long security lines.' "
Connecting Databases
Accompanying the technology to positively "ID" people are measures to single people out for more attention by using profiling. While it has been well publicized that there is a "terrorist watch list" matched against passenger lists to flag certain people, there is another profiling mechanism operating outside of most people's awareness and understanding.
This mechanism is something called the "Computer Assisted Passenger Screening system" (CAPS). CAPS was quietly introduced by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1997 (after being recommended by a commission headed by then Vice President Al Gore). This is a secret system hooked into an airline's reservation system that selects people for more intrusive searches and screening. The exact criteria for how people get flagged is not publicly known, but the Boston Globe reported between 3 to 8 percent of airline passengers are "selected" based on profiling by CAPS.
Since September 11, there is a push to expand the use of CAPS. The Department of Transportation wants to link it to databases from the INS and other sources. Widening this net further, the head of the INS, James Ziglar, told Congress in early October that his agency is moving to link its computers with those of the FBI's central database.
Eye in the Sky
Another element being explored goes beyond the airport. The trade journal RCR Wireless News reported in its November 5 issue on a live in flight video surveillance technology developed by the company Qualcomm: "Using an antenna no bigger than a suitcase, Qualcomm said the system can broadcast live cockpit conversations, flight information and location and even streaming video of passengers inside the cabin. This allows airline controllers on the ground to track the plane and monitor the events inside the aircraft. 'What is being proposed here is to tie into the systems providing that data, bring that data down in real time from all the commercial aircraft that are over, say, North America,' said Qualcomm Chairman Irwin Jacobs." Such technology could be used in all kinds of public places.
Wider Net
And there is more being explored. One Business Week article excitedly discussed the prospects of tying many different surveillance elements together: "A national ID card, for example, could be used to launch a new unified database that would track everybody's daily activities. Information culled from Carnivore [used to spy on the Internet] could be stored in the same place. This super database, in turn, could be linked to facial-recognition cameras so that an all-points bulletin could go out for a potential terrorist the second the data-mining program detected a suspicious pattern of conduct."
Many things like this were already being developed and well on their way to being implemented before September 11. Now, all kinds of big-brother measures are being put in place and approved as part of the "war on terrorism" and will be available to use broadly in society--to spy on, track down and persecute all kinds of people, from immigrants suspected of being "illegal" to critics of the government and political activists.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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