Military & Aerospace Electronics

U.S. airports and is collaborating with airlines to integrate facial recognition technology into passenger gates at three others. The agency notes there are several laws directing DHS to record the arrival and departure of non-U.S. citizens.

“You never know what new and cool technology is starting to emerge and the potential for that technology to be integrated into the immigration process,” says Paul Hunter, chief of biometrics strategy at DHS U.S.

Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). Hunter made his comments in an interview with IDGA prior to the July 2017 Biometrics for Government & Law Enforcement International conference.

“Voice holds a lot of promise in
the digital age,” Hunter says. “Facial
recognition holds huge potential to
improve and eliminate face-to-face
interaction with the government.

Person-centric processing versus
form-based is the next leap in
transformation.”
IDENT, developed in the 1990s,
will be replaced by a new system,
Homeland Advanced Recognition
Technology (HART), to handle the
growth of stored biometric identities,
says Shonnie Lyon, acting director of
the DHS Office of Biometric Identity
Management. The number of bio-
metric identities has risen from hun-
dreds of thousands initially to more
than 200 million.

“HART will deliver more robust
performance, greater capacity and
functionality, and multi-modal
matching, storing, and sharing
capabilities,” Lyon said in an accom-
panying interview. “Another chal-
lenge is the pace of change in the
biometrics and identity space.
Technological advances and cus-
tomer demands are moving so
quickly that, in many cases, an
overall policy framework has not
yet been developed.”

Safeguarding privacy

An additional challenge relates to balancing privacy and mission needs, Lyon explains. “Privacy protection is of utmost importance. Balancing the natural tension between a commitment to privacy protection and the need to exchange biometric data means we need to be especially vigilant in what data is shared and with whom.”