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Jewish World Review June 24, 2005 / 17 Sivan, 5765 The power of the fingerprint By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The U.S. has seen the future of border security, and it is the
fingerprint. The swirly pattern on a fingertip is what is called in
the security business a "biometric identifier." It is a feature
unique to every person, and therefore key to establishing someone's
identity.
Privacy advocates on the left and the right get suspicious at
the mere mention of the word "biometrics," and people have a natural
resistance to being fingerprinted because of its association with
the criminal-justice system. Get over it. There will be no border
security or fraud-proof identity documents — both of which are
crucial when we are attempting to stop a catastrophic terror attack
— without utilizing the amazing power of a fingerprint.
The Department of Homeland Security has now instituted the
biometric-based US-VISIT program to begin tracking entries and
exits. Someone traveling here on a visa has his fingerprints taken
when his visa is granted overseas, and his prints are checked
against a database to see if he has a terrorist or criminal
background. When the visa-holder arrives at a U.S. airport, his
fingerprints are checked to ensure that he is who he says he is, and
again against a terrorist/criminal watch list. The watch-list check
takes all of about six seconds.
DHS has enrolled more than 28 million people in the system,
according to former DHS official Stewart Verdery. He recounts the
case of a convicted rapist who was identified at Newark
International Airport. He had been deported from the U.S.
previously, but had traveled to the U.S. using nine aliases and four
different dates of birth. The program has denied entry to 600 people
who have shown up here but have no business being in the United
States, and has led to the denial of additional thousands of visa
applications overseas. There has been a decline in the number of
faked visas.
The problem with US-VISIT, which is still in its initial stages,
is that it applies only to about 15 percent of visitors. The great
bulk of visitors come by land from Canada and especially Mexico. In
2002, Mexicans accounted for 104 million out of roughly 200 million
visits. To get into the U.S., Mexicans are issued border crossing
cards that have fingerprints, but they are never checked. Fraud
abounds. People rent the cards in Mexico and use them to enter the
U.S. illegally.
Our border with Mexico should truly enter the era of biometrics.
It is a massive task, but the technology is there. Border crossing
cards can be made so they can be read and checked against a watch
list wirelessly the way an E-ZPass works at a highway tollgate. The
New Jersey E-ZPass system processes more than 400 million
transactions a year.
The kind of guest-worker program being debated in Congress now
should be a non-starter without a biometric identity card. As
Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies argues, the
only way to "bring people out of the shadows," in the catchphrase of
guest-worker supporters, is to know who they are — which is
impossible without a biometric card. It should serve both as an
entry and an employer-verification document for a guestworker.
Meanwhile, we should be making existing documents more secure.
U.S. passports should include fingerprints. That they don't is
testament to the power of the privacy lobby. But if you have to
present a passport to travel anyway, it doesn't violate your privacy
to make it fraud-proof. And a fingerprint will alleviate the most
intrusive aspect of the current system, which is the false positives
that subject innocent people to intrusive searches because their
names seem to match ones on the watch list.
Don't fear the fingerprint. It is the future.
CORRECTION: I misidentified Sen. Jeff Bingaman as a Republican
in my last column.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
