Tuesday, July 19, 2011
(planetbiometrics)
Pinellas County School District in Florida is serving up vein recognition on its lunch menu. The technology will be used to identify students and thereby reduce waste and the threat of impersonation.
The core technology is being supplied by Fujitsu Frontech North America, while MCS Software is supplying the software for the school food service environment.
The Fujitsu PalmSecure palm vein authentication solution has been integrated into the existing MCS Software’s Point-of-Sale system to provide a more reliable, hygienic, accurate, and secure authentication solution that is also easier to use and maintain, the company's said in a release...
(more)
Get em while they're young... that way, they will have no problem getting fingerprinted by their employer later in life.
(TheHindu)
The Aadhaar project, just as its failed counterpart in the U.K., stands on a platform of myths. India needs a mass campaign to expose these myths.
Two countries. Two pet projects of the respective Prime Ministers. Unmistakable parallels in the discourse. “The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty, but about the modern world,” wrote Tony Blair in November 2006, as he was mobilising support for his Identity Cards Bill, 2004. “Aadhaar…is symbolic of the new and modern India,” said Manmohan Singh in September 2010, as he distributed the first Aadhaar number in Nandurbar. “What we are trying to do with identity cards is make use of the modern technology,” said Mr. Blair. “Aadhaar project would use today's latest and modern technology,” said Dr. Singh. The similarities are endless...
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Thursday, July 14, 2011
(sjbj)
A device that attaches to Apple's iPhone and can be used by law enforcement agencies for quick, portable IDs of suspects is raising civil liberty and privacy questions.
The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities in Massachusetts, Arizona and elsewhere are planning to roll out the devices made by BI2 Technologies Inc. of Plymouth, Mass. They can reportedly be used to photograph a person's face, irises and fingerprints for images that can then be used to identify them.
The Journal said that some are questioning whether use of the device in some ways would legally be considered a search that would require a court order...
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Coming to a cop near you! Just don't make eye contact with them!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
(commondreams)
Last week, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and several other organizations released documents from a FOIA lawsuit that expose the concerted efforts of the FBI and DHS to build a massive database of personal and biometric information. This database, called “Next Generation Identification” (NGI), has been in the works for several years now. However, the documents CCR posted show for the first time how FBI has taken advantage of the DHS Secure Communities program and both DHS and the State Department’s civil biometric data collection programs to build out this $1 billion database.
Unlike some government initiatives, NGI has not been a secret program. The FBI brags about it on its website (describing NGI as “bigger, faster, and better”), and both DHS and FBI have, over the past 10+ years, slowly and carefully laid the groundwork for extensive data sharing and database interoperability through publicly-available privacy impact assessments and other records. However, the fact that NGI is not secret does not make it OK. Currently, the FBI and DHS have separate databases (called IAFIS and IDENT, respectively) that each have the capacity to store an extensive amount of information—including names, addresses, social security numbers, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, fingerprints, booking photos, unique identifying numbers, gender, race, and date of birth. Within the last few years, DHS and FBI have made their data easily searchable between the agencies. However, both databases remained independent, and were only “unimodal,” meaning they only had one biometric means of identifying someone—usually a fingerprint.
In contrast, as CCR’s FOIA documents reveal, FBI’s NGI database will be populated with data from both FBI and DHS records. Further, NGI will be “multimodal.” This means NGI is designed to allow the collection and storage of the now-standard 10-print fingerprint scan in addition to iris scans, palm prints, and voice data. It is also designed to expand to include other biometric identifiers in the future. NGI will also allow much greater storage of photos, including crime scene security camera photos, and, with its facial recognition and sophisticated search capabilities, it will have the “increased ability to locate potentially related photos (and other records associated with the photos) that might not otherwise be discovered as quickly or efficiently, or might never be discovered at all...”
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Saturday, July 09, 2011
Humans on Earth,
We are all at a crossroads. Do we want to go further and further into the IDENTITY WEB, the biometric saddle, the slave-making security grid? Or do we want to value our autonomy, our sense of freedom, our very identity? When we give them our fingerprint, our iris scan, our hair follicle, a swab from our cheek - - in effect we are saying, "I am an animal, and you are my boss. I am too dumb to refuse your twisted demands. I applaud you in the name of Science!"
I scream as you frame me with false evidence u made up in some lab somewhere. Your falsified DNA samples put me in the chair.
And as the cold electric juice takes my body, will I whimper and say, "thank u sir, may I have another?"
Or will I avoid their unjust punishment entirely, simply living out the words of my wise forefather, He Who Cannot Be Named:
“From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, listening to others, considering well what they say, pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.”
(dailymail)
It's a standard scenario across the world - the computer crashes and we scream exactly what we think at the flickering screen.
But we may soon have to learn to bite our tongue - or risk the wrath of being shouted at by the machine we've just cursed.
This is because scientists are building a voice-activated device that can interact with people in a 'natural and intelligent way'.
Artificial intelligence will help it become familiar with a user's voice, with the ultimate goal that it can understand, speak and behave like a human...
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