•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, March 27, 2008

For sale, biometric ID system, one owner, hardly used

| Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |

| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A biometric passenger verification system has been put on ice, just one day before it is due to go into service at London Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. For non-UK readers, a brief history;
Terminal 5, for all that it was, for a time, Europe’s largest construction site, is actually quite constrained for floor space. To optimise the use of lounge space and to maximise traffic through its shops and restaurants, it was designed with a single departure lounge for both domestic and international passengers. Therefore some means of distinguishing domestic passengers, who would not typically travel with passports, from international passengers, was required. This already happens at some UK airports, where photographs are taken at check-in and departing passengers are checked against them. For Terminal 5, operator British Airports Authority, BAA (actually owned by the Spanish company Ferrovial) decided it needed more; every passenger would have fingerprints taken at check-in and these would be used to permit boarding to the correct flight. The technology has been installed by German company Dermalog. This has caused considerable controversy on a number of levels.
Now, with one day to go before the terminal opens to the public, the UK official “watchdog” on information security has pronounced that the system may actually be illegal, and initial operations (at least) will be conducted without the fingerprinting system. Maybe someone should have thought of asking the data watchdog first? You might have thought so.
It may well be that Heathrow will be better off without the systems as it ramps-up the new building – there’s a lot of technology in Terminal 5 and the likelihood that it will crash-and-burn in the first few days of handling real passengers is very high. For one thing the building has an extremely complex baggage handling systems with automatic routing, storing and transfer features. What’s the number one cause of trouble in new airport buildings – anywhere? That’s right, baggage handling teething troubles.
But back to the fingerprints; you may well be asking (if you don’t live in the UK), what is the problem? To understand it, you have to factor in the British public’s deep distrust of its own government and civil service when it comes to data and data security. Arrogant in demanding more and more data, and obsessive in collating it, the real weakness of those bodies has been that they have repeatedly shown contempt for any need for security of the data once they have it, and a fair degree of incompetence in actually looking after it. Add to that a complete failure to “sell” biometrics to the UK general public – who associate fingerprinting with being “treated like a criminal” – and you have all the ingredients of a truly joyous foul-up.
So, when BAA says, “The data is encrypted, not accessible to any other body and is destroyed once the flight has departed” – no-one believes it. When the UK government says, “We don’t have access to this data: it is not being streamed direct to our databases,” the working assumption here is that they are lying.
Airline BA – which is the sole user of the new Terminal – is reportedly Not Pleased. Its call centres are understood to have taken large numbers of calls from customers saying, “I’ll never fly with you again while this is in place.”
Personally, I am registered on a UK government system (called IRIS) that re-admits me to the UK on the basis of (oddly enough) an iris scan. The official literature for that scheme says that it’s an isolated database not shared with any other government records. I don’t believe a word of that, either, but I’m prepared to put up with it the risk to my data (reconstructing an iris to impersonate me would be pretty tricky) for the convenience it offers. Likewise, other biometrics techniques have a lot to offer, but their progress is going to be painful if they are introduced in this clumsy way. PR disaster, anyone? We can only watch and marvel. And, perhaps, giggle a bit.

Post a comment

* Display Name
* Comments
* Anti Spam security code	To pervent spamming, please enter the anti-spam code as shown above to proceed with the submission