onClick Biometrics in touch

UK citizens have help getting their life back.

If your identity resides in the UK, they've laid out the red carpet of helping hands. This site is here to help you with the before, after, and how-to of identity theft.
Gov.uk launches anti-fraud website.

Miracle, magic, or just good technology.

Myth 6: The silver bullet

So often biometrics are touted as the silver bullet that will rid the world of evil. Again this is to over-estimate and misunderstand the abilities of biometric technology.

For instance, contrary to common belief, biometric systems are not able to confirm with any level of certainty the true identity of a person. Rather, they are able to confirm whether this is the same person that initially enrolled into the system.

The person’s true identity is irrelevant to the biometric system. Confirming a person’s true identity is far more a question of checking the validity of an individual’s official identification documents, such as birth certificates or driving licences.

Biometric technologies are also unable to perform miracles. If a government doesn’t have a quality photograph of a known terrorist suspect, then the chances of stopping that person at a checkpoint using facial recognition are slim.

All that said, biometrics can play a valuable assisting role in the fight against organised crime and terrorism, but it must be part of a holistic approach, which uses many different strands of information.

Religion vs. biometrics

I don't think we've covered the religious debates enough here, and apparently it is big enough of a worry to have a presentation about it.

Biometrics are being construed by a select few as being the "mark of the beast". Having to overcome a stigma of this nature requires deep understanding of the bible, and an ability to factually deconstruct the reasons they see biometrics as so. Bill Rogers is going to attempt to do this at the end of the month.

Here's the press release giving all the specifics:
Biometrics and the mark of the beast.

The never-ending controversies

So I know their point is a little different, but did they just NOT read the last post?:
Imis will call for the government to introduce tough penalties for anyone who changes or forges information used to establish identity, even when no apparent fraud has been committed.

Anyways, this is about the gripes one group has about government identification procedures.
"What the government needs to do is have proper validation for issuing passports. The government needs to validate its own ID checks."
Why can't we just do both? Seems fair.

Biometric ID cards do little to cut fraud, warns Imis

We might need a bigger prison for this...

President Bush passed the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act this morning. A little bit of relief should come over you - this is finally one matter that's heading in the right direction.

This new law establishes in the federal criminal court the offense of aggravated identity theft. And someone convicted of that crime can expect to go to jail for stealing a person's good name. These punishments will come on top of any punishment for crimes that proceed from identity theft. For example, when someone is convicted of mail fraud in a case involving stolen personal information, judges will now impose two sentences, one for mail fraud, and one for aggravated identity theft. Those convicted of aggravated identity theft must serve an additional mandatory two-year prison term. Someone convicted of aggravated identity theft, such as using a false passport in connection with a terrorism case, would receive an additional prison sentence of five years. In addition, judges will not be allowed to let those convicted of aggravated identity theft serve their sentence on probation.

And if you are employed at a business that keeps customer information, and you abuse it, that's jail time for you too.

1 Point for the President.

Would you like to turn yourself in? Circle YES or NO.

Myth 5: You'll get arrested

Number five on the list relates to the belief that fingerprint information captured by a commercial fingerprint system could somehow be used in a criminal investigation. This myth stems from a misunderstanding of how a biometric system typically works in a commercial environment.

Almost none of the available commercial fingerprint-based systems store the entire image of a fingerprint. Rather they extract information from that fingerprint to create a mathematical representation or template. This template, which is often encrypted, is designed so that it cannot be reverse engineered to reconstruct the original fingerprint image, so is useless information to the police, or indeed a hacker.

The feeding of identical template data to a fingerprint system’s matching engine by a hacker will normally fail, as this is almost a sure indication that the data has been stolen and that a replay attack is underway.

In a non-commercial biometric system, such as the recently announced US-VISIT system, which is being installed to monitor the comings and goings of foreign nationals in the USA, the situation is different, with full fingerprint and facial images being acquired and stored. This information can and has led to the arrest of more than 500 people since January 2004.

A Facelift.

Here's some blatant advertising for our corporate division. We just relaunched the website and now we want to show it off. So without further ado -
onClick Corporation

I kid. I kid.

Myth 4: Children and Asian women go undetected

Fingerprint technology also gives us number four on the list of myths. This relates to the inability of the technology to enrol or verify the identity of children, or women of Asian descent. This myth is relatively new, because until a few years ago it was a reasonable criticism of the technology, given the challenge of acquiring small fingers with “faint” fingerprints.
However, recent advances in imaging have led to far greater resolutions being achieved by fingerprint sensors, so boosting a biometric system’s ability to extract the pertinent information required to create a biometric template of that person.
Children, in particular, seem to hold no fear of the technology, believing it to be “cool”. It may be surprising to learn that at least 1,300 primary schools in the UK are using fingerprint technology to replace old-fashioned password-based systems in their libraries. The interesting spin off benefit here is that so many children want to use the technology that the number of books taken out increases dramatically.

Australia facing some choices, mate.

Australia makes its case.
One of the countries that are jumping head first into developing proper biometric technologies, they are finding difficulties that other countries have yet to even address. However the biggest difficulty is that of understanding the importance of the technology, yet accepting the hurdles that need to be jumped in the process.
Doubts linger on biometrics.

So THAT'S where my finger went.

Myth 3: Stolen body parts trick the system

This is also a classic, and has been seized upon by many a Hollywood director, who are not known for letting the true facts cloud a good storyline. With most biometric devices there is an element of 'liveness' detection, which can measure many variables, from a finger pulse to a pupil response. This would normally be enough to prevent the system from working once the body part had been removed. However, other factors quickly come into play. For example, an extracted (or enucleated) eyeball quickly begins to decompose, with the cornea clouding over and obscuring the iris. A severed finger also dies rapidly – typically becoming useless after around 10 minutes.

And let me just also say, that with particular sensors, this is never an issue. The sensors that come equipped in our VIA products detect whether the sample is living skin cells. It doesn't take an image of the first layer, but rather determines points off of the print's underlying living layers.