Please give thumb impression and check in
Jon Boyle
THE
executive skips past the snaking airport check-in queue, waves a
credit-card size pass at a monitor, puts a finger into a hi-tech
reader and proceeds to the boarding zone thinking: "Some day,
we’ll all fly like this."
Science fiction? Not
at all. Biometrics, the technology that uses fingerprints, the
voice, face or eyes to identify an individual, is set to
revolutionise the way we travel and live.
French firm Sagem,
Aeroports de Paris, Air France and the police are already discussing
ways to enable frequent flyers to breeze through check-in procedures
with a biometric smart card.
"They are more
likely to agree to give their fingerprints" in order to benefit
from fast-track embarking, Sagem’s Jean-Charles Pignot told
Reuters at an annual security exhibition outside Paris.
A pilot project at
Paris’ main Charles de Gaulle airport seeks to ensure the person
who checks in is the same one who actually boards the plane, placing
a passenger’s fingerprints on the magnetic strip in the boarding
pass.
The system is being
installed in some US airports, where security procedures are being
overhauled after Islamic militants rammed hijacked airliners into
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two years ago, killing
almost 3,000 persons.
Pignot said Sagem
technology is already in use at the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation. The New York police and the US Department of Homeland
Security installed it after 9/11.
The company this month
won a deal it touts as the biggest airport biometrics security
contract in Europe, providing passes to 90,000 employees working at
Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports. The mooted frequent flyer
scheme could be the next phase in a generalised embrace of the
technology.
Hi-tech passports
Biometrics look set to
take off in the next few years as Europe and the USA introduce a new
generation of smart visas and passports in an effort to stamp out
forgeries that allow criminals and terrorists to cover their tracks.
At least one EU state
is including encoded fingerprint data on visas issued in China and
Ghana, a method that could allow developing countries to boost
security relatively cheaply.
Western states favour
documents with embedded chips containing fingerprints, the bearer’s
photograph, iris or other data. That could add one to `80 10 to the
cost of passports, depending on the system adopted and economies of
scale, industry experts say.
Airline authorities
want an international technological standard for biometrics,
something that is nearly in place for fingerprints. But agreement
over the newer facial and iris recognition technologies will take
longer.
Nevertheless, with
security the travel industry’s watchword like never before,
biometrics has a bright future. The United States alone records 500
million cross-border journeys a year.
Biometrics also has
wider applications, such as for driver’s licences and distributing
social security and pension payments in a fraud-free way, say the
technology’s champions.
With
biometrics, they say, your fingertips could be transformed into a
loss-proof car key, your voice
could unlock the door to your home, and your eyes could gain access
to sensitive data.
"I think in the
next two to three years we will see a very sharp increase in the use
of biometric systems in general," said Bernard Chekroun, CEO of
French biometric firm ISTEC.
He predicts
exponential growth for a market is currently worth around $1 billion
a year.
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