The Times: Tech column - Biometrics/body economics
By David Rowan
IT IS NOT just David Blunkett who is getting excited about biometric identification. From next year it looks as though we shall have to start to share our bodies' most intimate secrets if we want to travel abroad. The European Union is pushing through plans to ensure that EU passports will carry DNA, iris scans or fingerprints by October 26, 2004, apparently to meet a deadline set by the United States after September 11.
This comes after US demands that any travellers who do not have biometric data embedded in their travel documents will need an entry visa after that date - and Europe is keen to make member states upgrade their passports.
There has been little public discussion of this, and even less consultation. But increasingly, governments are turning to biometric identification as the high tech means of monitoring people's movements using personally distinguishing data. Even as the Home Secretary has been looking for a way to persuade us to pay £39 for the privilege of carrying an ID card, his department's immigration officials have been celebrating the results of a six-month trial of iris-scanners at Heathrow. By next summer they want regular travellers to blink into scanners at airports throughout Britain.
These techniques can certainly boost security, and frequent travellers may like a faster check-in. But don't be surprised if your eye pattern or DNA sequence finds its way on to databases all over the world. The US can already access details of all flights originating in Europe, and can store for at least seven years details such as whether you booked a halal meal, your earlier travel history, and any "general remarks" made by the airline about you. Combine this with face-recognition scans now being taken in airports, and powerful check-in X ray machines that show what you look like under your clothes, and soon any number of databases will know vast amounts about you. That data will not always be used for the purposes originally intended.
As for Mr Blunkett's plans, all a technology column can do is to point out that "smartcards" have historically proved less smart than the criminals who have managed to beat them. There may be little statistical likelihood that someone shares your iris pattern, but it is a certainty that as soon as such cards are introduced, organised gangs will clone or otherwise fake them. The French discovered this almost a decade ago, when faking the high-tech new national ID card became a highly profitable business.
As Peter Dorrington, head of fraud at SAS, a software firm, put it recently: "If there is a big enough prize, then organised crime will find a way. If you have one of these, and know that banks and governments are going to take them as a trusted form of identification, then the potential to commit fraud is massive."
Don't say you weren't warned.
++++
YOU'RE LOOKING like a million dollars today. Actually, more like $45 million (£28 million), according to a Wired magazine survey of what your body's various components would fetch on the open market. It's not your vital organs that make your fortune, apparently - at about £60,000, a kidney will barely pay the school fees, and hearts have fallen for knock-down bids of £36,000. No, the real money's in your bone marrow, according to private hospitals and insurance companies, which value it at about £14,000 a gram, of which you might be able to offload 1,000g. Add your DNA, a full set of antibodies and any available eggs, and suddenly you've attained a Rich List lifestyle. Albeit a very dead one.
(The Times, July 8 2003)
IT IS NOT just David Blunkett who is getting excited about biometric identification. From next year it looks as though we shall have to start to share our bodies' most intimate secrets if we want to travel abroad. The European Union is pushing through plans to ensure that EU passports will carry DNA, iris scans or fingerprints by October 26, 2004, apparently to meet a deadline set by the United States after September 11.
This comes after US demands that any travellers who do not have biometric data embedded in their travel documents will need an entry visa after that date - and Europe is keen to make member states upgrade their passports.
There has been little public discussion of this, and even less consultation. But increasingly, governments are turning to biometric identification as the high tech means of monitoring people's movements using personally distinguishing data. Even as the Home Secretary has been looking for a way to persuade us to pay £39 for the privilege of carrying an ID card, his department's immigration officials have been celebrating the results of a six-month trial of iris-scanners at Heathrow. By next summer they want regular travellers to blink into scanners at airports throughout Britain.
These techniques can certainly boost security, and frequent travellers may like a faster check-in. But don't be surprised if your eye pattern or DNA sequence finds its way on to databases all over the world. The US can already access details of all flights originating in Europe, and can store for at least seven years details such as whether you booked a halal meal, your earlier travel history, and any "general remarks" made by the airline about you. Combine this with face-recognition scans now being taken in airports, and powerful check-in X ray machines that show what you look like under your clothes, and soon any number of databases will know vast amounts about you. That data will not always be used for the purposes originally intended.
As for Mr Blunkett's plans, all a technology column can do is to point out that "smartcards" have historically proved less smart than the criminals who have managed to beat them. There may be little statistical likelihood that someone shares your iris pattern, but it is a certainty that as soon as such cards are introduced, organised gangs will clone or otherwise fake them. The French discovered this almost a decade ago, when faking the high-tech new national ID card became a highly profitable business.
As Peter Dorrington, head of fraud at SAS, a software firm, put it recently: "If there is a big enough prize, then organised crime will find a way. If you have one of these, and know that banks and governments are going to take them as a trusted form of identification, then the potential to commit fraud is massive."
Don't say you weren't warned.
++++
YOU'RE LOOKING like a million dollars today. Actually, more like $45 million (£28 million), according to a Wired magazine survey of what your body's various components would fetch on the open market. It's not your vital organs that make your fortune, apparently - at about £60,000, a kidney will barely pay the school fees, and hearts have fallen for knock-down bids of £36,000. No, the real money's in your bone marrow, according to private hospitals and insurance companies, which value it at about £14,000 a gram, of which you might be able to offload 1,000g. Add your DNA, a full set of antibodies and any available eggs, and suddenly you've attained a Rich List lifestyle. Albeit a very dead one.
(The Times, July 8 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, July 08, 2003
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