Digital Images Will Verify Identity of Visitors to U.S.

In a high-tech strategy against terrorists, the government will soon begin comparing foreign travelers with digitized photographs and will consider plans to encode their travel documents with personal data that can be read electronically.

Starting this month, the State Department will relay digital images of foreign travelers to U.S. ports of entry. For the first time, immigration officials will be assured that they are comparing the travelers who stand before them to authentic pictures taken when they applied to visit the United States.

In addition, Congress may approve legislation to mandate unique, personal identifiers--such as digitized fingerprints--on visas that the State Department grants to foreign nationals who wish to travel in this country, as well as on the passports of 29 nations. The bill passed the House on Dec. 19 and enjoys broad support in the Senate.

While such efforts were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the push to employ more sophisticated means of identifying travelers was spurred further by initial confusion over the identity of Richard C. Reid, the Briton accused of smuggling a shoe bomb aboard a Miami-bound jetliner.

“I think it’s critical. It’s coming,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). “It’s going to happen.”

The emerging strategy is twofold: Travelers will be identified with greater certainty than in the past, and U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, will be required to provide more lookout information about terrorists to inspectors at U.S. entry points. Advocates maintain that more efficient use of data is needed to thwart terrorist attempts--and could possibly have stopped some in the past.

“Maybe the computer screen would have said that according to French officials, [Reid] is actually a Sri Lankan,” said Kyl, alluding to confusion over the man’s identity. At least, Kyl added, “you might have found out more than officials at the airport found out.”

Technology to Compare Features

Biometric technologies can match the identity of an individual applying for a visa or appearing at a port of entry by comparing a unique physical feature--such as the traveler’s fingerprints, image of the retina or iris, hand geometry or even facial shape--against details stored in a database.

The legislation would require biometric identifiers on visas that American consulates grant to foreign travelers and for the passports issued by the 29 nations for which this country has waived most visa requirements. These nations, including Japan and most of Western Europe, would have to develop the new passports in keeping with international biometric standards. Any countries that chose to ignore the rule would be removed from the visa waiver program.

While the idea of the United States attempting to dictate passport security standards to other countries is unusual, it is based on recent episodes of passport forgery by terrorists.

In one major case, Islamic extremists from Tunisia used stolen Belgian passports in their plot to assassinate Ahmed Shah Masoud, the Northern Alliance guerrilla leader, on Sept. 9. Critics of the U.S. visa waiver program have long worried that overseas theft of passports is one of the weaknesses in the system.

“Such efforts will have a real impact in fighting terrorism and preventing exploitation of our immigration laws in the future,” said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The push is part of a broader effort to harness the potential of modern technology to secure vulnerable U.S. entry points, where inspectors face pressure to process travelers swiftly, often with scant information on their backgrounds. Even before Sept. 11, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service had begun to implement such technology for a frequent border-crossing card used by Mexicans and the green card issued to permanent U.S. residents.

For all the enthusiasm, however, some experts caution that biometric technologies are not a panacea.

If, for example, a traveler first manages to establish a false identity and then obtains a passport and other documents, the biometric system might not flag the individual as an impostor. The technology would establish only that the traveler is the same person who applied for the passport.

“It isn’t a magic bullet. It isn’t the 100% solution,” said Michael Thieme, a senior consultant for International Biometric Group, a New York-based consulting firm.

Even the time-tested comparison of fingerprints can yield inadequate results, Thieme said, depending on the particular electronic system that is used to store the prints digitally and even the condition of a person’s fingertips.

For state-of-the-art identification technologies, such as facial recognition, in which travelers’ facial measurements might be compared with information on terrorists’ faces in a database, the hurdles are greater.

Vendors of facial recognition equipment conjure up dazzling images of technology that can spot terrorists in a stream of travelers at airport checkpoints. But some experts warn that such technology has fallen short of its promise in real-world tests.

“It doesn’t take plastic surgery for the system to go down” and yield an inaccurate result, Thieme said. “It just takes rudimentary changes--from smiling to frowning. A different [camera] angle. . . . People will be flagged as terrorists who are not. I’d be stunned if that’s not the case. There are a lot of things that have to be thought through. It’s more complicated than anybody has an idea of.”

Inspectors Depend on Tip-Offs

Whatever the technology for identifying people, inspectors at U.S. ports of entry will remain dependent on cooperation from intelligence and law enforcement agencies for tip-offs on whom to watch out for. The Sept. 11 hijackers, for example, entered the United States with valid travel documents, and U.S. consular officials later complained that they had received virtually no warning from intelligence agencies, which they rely on for guidance on suspected criminals.

“We have to get better information from law enforcement and the intelligence agencies if we are going to do the job that we have of being the outer ring of border security,” Mary A. Ryan, the State Department assistant secretary for consular affairs, testified in late October.

At the same time, she described the plans to share the photographs of visa applicants with INS inspectors as “really a tremendous advance” against people who steal passports and establish fake identities.

Under the plan, INS computers at the nation’s ports of entry are being given the ability to link up with the State Department’s consular database--which contains images of travelers and their visa applications--so border inspectors will be able to review such details while they look people over. Officials at the INS and the State Department have said the broader capabilities, initially tested in Newark, N.J., should be in place by the middle of this month.

Efforts to use technology as a weapon against terrorists are spreading beyond the United States.

Germany is considering whether to encode passports with details of a traveler’s unique hand geometry or fingerprints, said officials who do not see problems in a U.S. mandate for biometric passports.

“Germany is moving in the same direction as the United States is planning to do,” said Hinrich Thoelken, a spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington.

An official with the European Commission office in Washington said European nations would need more information about any biometric requirements that Congress has in mind but added: “The [European Union] and the United States have a lot of contact on these issues. . . . We’re making improvements all the time.”

Closer to home, the move toward more tamper-proof documents for foreign travelers hits on a different set of nerves, including issues of privacy and whether the new rules are paving the way for more intrusive means of identification that ultimately will be applied to U.S. citizens.

“If we’re using a thumbprint in order to determine that I’m the same person as the person in my passport, in general we think of that as a perfectly reasonable security mechanism,” said Cecilia Munoz, vice president for policy for the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group. “But if we’re using a biometric identifier to connect to databases, particularly INS databases that are particularly flawed, that is a concern.”