Thursday, August 18, 2005
Babies Caught Up in 'No-Fly' Confusion
"Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the U.S. because their names are the same as or similar to those of possible terrorists on the government's 'no-fly list.'

It sounds like a joke, but it's not funny to parents who miss flights while scrambling to have babies' passports and other documents faxed.

Ingrid Sanden's 1-year-old daughter was stopped in Phoenix before boarding a flight home to Washington at Thanksgiving.

'I completely understand the war on terrorism, and I completely understand people wanting to be safe when they fly,' Sanden said. 'But focusing the target a little bit is probably a better use of resources.'"

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Biometric Flaws Mar Start of British ID Card Plan
'Telecoms systems are judged on an availability of 99.999 per cent, but even that level of accuracy of biometrics, across the whole population, would mean 6,000 people in the country being mistaken, and no biometric technology is anywhere close to that reliable yet,' Fisher told Computing.
'Unless there is a strategy to overcome that lack of accuracy, the system will be flawed as soon as it starts,' he added.

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Border Crossing Checking Efforts Stalled
"Under the program, the government has created repositories of digitally recorded biometric data -- including fingerprints and facial characteristics -- that can be used to identify more than 45 million foreigners, the report said. It also has data on some 70 million Americans to search for domestic terrorists."
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IBM Works Toward Replacable Biometrics
"Biometric systems have one particularly critical vulnerability: how do you replace your finger if a hacker figures out how to duplicate it? An IBM research team working on that problem says it's recently cracked a major problem in the area of 'cancelable biometrics.'

'Biometrics is more private to you than a number that somebody assigned to you. I cannot cancel my face,' said IBM researcher Nalini Ratha, a scientist with the Exploratory Computer Vision Group at IBM's Watson Research Center. 'If it is compromised, it is compromised forever.'"

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1 Comments:
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