COLUMN ONE : The Power, Peril at Our Fingertips : New fingerprint technology is giving crime fighters a boost. One day, it may produce keyless cars and replace credit cards. Some fear it also could bring a Big Brother-type national ID system.

When global crises strike, U.S. military leaders plot strategy inside a top-secret operations center that is secured by a door lock unlike anything else at the Pentagon.

No ordinary key will open the thick steel door. Rather, a laser scanner reads the index fingerprints of those who seek to enter and verifies their identities more surely than any identification card.

The computerized scanner, which works something like ones at the supermarket checkout counter, was pioneered for law enforcement. And now, inevitably, commercial enterprises are adapting the technology to mass markets.

In Houston, one of the nation’s biggest law firms uses an automated fingerprint system to control access to its offices. Los Angeles County uses one to make sure that no one files for welfare benefits under different names.

This is nothing next to what the future might hold. Motorists someday may not need a key to start their cars, just a finger on a dashboard scanner. Plastic credit cards may give way to fingerprint systems that could eradicate fraud.

The glitzy technology also has a dark side: the potential to give government a Big Brother capability to keep an eye on individual citizens.

“We are looking at very serious proposals for creating a national identification system, and an automated fingerprint system is a big part of it,” said Janlori Goldman, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, a civil liberties advocacy group. “The ability of the government to push a button and keep track of people will be astonishing.”

But such concerns are not stopping companies from building up the new industry, particularly in its applications to law enforcement, which still represents its largest and most important use.

Defense contractors, starving for business, are pushing fingerprint systems for law enforcement agencies everywhere.

And the FBI is laying down the biggest bet of all. It is preparing to invest $520 million in a computerized system that will hold prints on 32 million criminals and suspects, allowing local police to check a suspect’s fingerprints in two hours, instead of up to three weeks now.

Businesses that market fingerprint identification systems are seeing visions of dollar signs. “The worldwide potential is in the tens of billions of dollars,” said Gary Mann, vice president of information systems at Lockheed Martin Corp. “We believe the company that gets the FBI program will be the predominant force in the world market.”

Lockheed Martin, TRW Inc. and Unisys Corp. are competing for the FBI contract, which is believed to be the largest order for a high-technology law enforcement system in history. The FBI plans to make its selection in November.

The system will have unprecedented technical capability, including software that can rapidly and accurately search the entire national database of fingerprint sets. Scheduled to begin operation in 1998, the system will handle 50,000 requests for verification every day and help police nab some of the 393,000 fugitives on America’s streets.

“It is a giant leap forward,” said FBI Assistant Director Steven L. Pomerantz.

Thanks in large part to the FBI program, U.S. firms are poised for a rebound after losing their lead to foreign suppliers in the late 1980s. American firms pioneered much of the early technology, but then cut back their investments in research and development.

NEC, the huge Japanese electronics manufacturer, came to dominate the world fingerprint market. The Los Angeles Police and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s departments, as well as the California Department of Justice, use NEC systems.

Now domestic firms are fighting back. In the past year, TRW has won big contracts to build law enforcement systems for the British Home Office and the state of Ohio, for example.

Much of the new technology plays to the strength of California firms. Fingerprint systems represent a convergence of the best American technology, combining missile tracking software from defense contractors, large-scale computer systems from the commercial electronics industry and the renowned fingerprint expertise of the FBI.

Cogent Systems, located on a grimy industrial strip in Alhambra without even a sign on the door, has emerged as a world leader in fingerprint software. Started by two graduates of USC, the firm is part of the TRW and Hewlett-Packard team shooting for the FBI contract. But it also is involved in projects around the world, including building a system for Thailand.

Identix, a Sunnyvale firm that makes laser scanners for reading fingerprints, built the system for the Pentagon’s secret conference room. The firm is working with European and Japanese auto makers on a system that would operate automobile door locks and engines, said Mike McGarr, vice president for sales. This year, sales will be more than double 1994’s $5.7 million, he said.

Printrak, a Costa Mesa firm, is ranked as second largest in the industry, behind NEC, and its sales are growing at 38% annually. The company lost out on the FBI system but has won several key state awards as well as national systems for Hungary, Greece and the Czech Republic.

Experts foresee many exotic uses for fingerprint technology. Newly democratic countries believe they may be able to eliminate voter fraud with a fingerprint-based registration and ballot-casting system--a product that U.S. companies are beginning to develop. Jamaica is considering such a system.

Closer to home, some workers who punch time clocks are prone to cheat, a big problem for U.S. industry. Vance Bjorn, a partner in Fitcorp, a new firm in Redondo Beach specializing in fingerprint technology, says scanners could stop this kind of fraud.

The federal government could use fingerprint systems to track and deliver such benefits as Aid to Families With Dependent Children and food stamps, which are subject to high fraud rates.

After Los Angeles County introduced a fingerprint system to prevent welfare applicants from filing under multiple names, the AFDC caseload there dropped by 8,070. Taxpayers are saving an estimated $116 million over a 30-month period, said Lisa Nunez, chief of computer services for the Department of Public Social Services.

“In coming years, any government benefit is going to be tightly accounted for and controlled,” said Dan Driscoll, director for marketing at Printrak. “The political nature of that is very hot.”

Experts expect every anti-fraud application of automated fingerprint technology to spawn efforts to fool it. Criminals will try to break into automated teller machines, they predict, by fashioning latex fingers with account holders’ fingerprints--or even by cutting off the account holders’ real fingers. Bjorn believes that scanner manufacturers can strike back, perhaps by equipping scanners to detect fake or dead fingers by reading blood-sugar levels.

The advances come while the American public seems increasingly inclined to support a U.S. identity card, a proof of citizenship or a registration for health care benefits, all of which are seen as tools to stanch illegal immigration, stop welfare fraud and stiffen law enforcement.

National identity cards would be worthless unless they were tamper-proof, and fingerprinting systems represent the only existing technology that is both tamper-proof and easily automated on a nationwide basis.

A number of nations, including Thailand and South Korea, already require their citizens to be fingerprinted and are actively developing automated identification systems.

And even in the United States, fingerprinting is becoming more accepted every year. California, among other states, takes a thumbprint of everyone who applies for a driver’s license and is free to use it for any law enforcement purpose.

Child-care workers in many states are fingerprinted, as are members of the armed forces and employees of various federal agencies. The FBI has the fingerprints of about 80 million non-criminal Americans.

Partly as a result of the growth of non-criminal fingerprinting, the FBI estimates that it will be processing fingerprint cards of 50,000 Americans a day by 1998, up from 20,000, according to Pomerantz.

But he recoils at the suggestion that U.S. citizens should be subject to mandatory federal fingerprinting. Pomerantz said the FBI’s new, automated system “is not giving us any capabilities that have any civil liberties implications. All we want is the ability to do what we have been doing.”

Danny W. Greathouse, chief of the FBI’s latent fingerprint section, said he could not foresee mandatory fingerprinting in the United States. “There will always be a Big Brother concern,” he said.

Other U.S. agencies, however, have shown little hesitation to use fingerprinting in cases where non-citizens are involved.

When roughly 30,000 Cuban and Haitian refugees flooded into the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay last year, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service kept track of people with an automated fingerprint system with a thought-provoking name: the Deployable Mass Population Identification and Tracking System.

Even though governmental collections of fingerprints are tightly controlled, critics worry that they threaten privacy. And they worry that minorities will be more subject to fingerprint checks, just as they are more often the target of law enforcement actions. Ronald Plesser, chairman of the individual rights section of the American Bar Assn., says the public has already lost some of its privacy to large, computerized databases used for such purposes as credit ratings.

“In order to get the benefits, we have made some trade-offs, and privacy has been stretched,” Plesser said. “There is more information in the hands of more people about other people. No question about it.”

Whether any damage has occurred is unclear, Plesser said. Industry experts say the public will eventually accept wholesale fingerprinting.

“What’s the difference between taking a picture of your face versus taking a picture of your fingerprint?” said Archie Rivera, director of identification technologies at Unisys, one of the companies competing for the FBI contract.

So far, one big difference is that computers can easily search through huge files of fingerprints. They cannot now readily match facial pictures, although that too is changing and may one day pose a new set of civil liberties concerns.

Cogent Systems, the Alhambra firm, recently demonstrated for a reporter a prototype system that matched a photograph of an individual against a digitized database of photos. Asked how such a system could be used, Cogent Chairman Archie Yew suggested that police might set up cameras in airports, using automated photo recognition systems that would search a database of wanted felons.

Could such a system pass muster with the U.S. Constitution? “We are just trying to develop the technology,” Yew said. “It is up to the customer to decide how to use the technology.”

Ultimately, widespread public acceptance will depend on changing the image that fingerprinting is something that happens to felons when they are booked at a police station.

“It is an emotional issue,” said Jaan A. Loger, director of automated identification systems at TRW. “It is going to be awhile before fingerprints are an accepted thing by customers.”

But holding up his finger, Loger added: “This will be me: my check, my credit card.”

Next: The FBI’s super-fingerprint system.