CBP sees bigger play for Iris ID at the border

In the 1997 sci-fi horror film Cube, about six people trapped in a giant mechanical cube, one character asks of the titular shape, “why put people in it?” The response from another, who unknowingly helped to build it, applies to technological adoption in general: “Because it’s here.”

If a technology is available to use, people will find ways to use it to their advantage, particularly in formal structures of power. Between that and the volume of irregular migrants at the southern border, it should come as no surprise that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has found its way to expanding the use of iris recognition. That could be good news for the agency’s long-time iris biometrics provider, Iris ID.

A report in FedScoop calls CBP’s adoption of iris biometrics “a notable move given the somewhat limited use of the technology compared with more widespread applications like fingerprint and facial recognition.”

Yet it follows by noting how the U.S. Border Patrol has “significantly ramped up use of iris scanning over the past decade.” Iris biometrics are in use at forty checkpoints across four regional sectors. The percent of CBP’s apprehensions that involved an iris scan currently stands at around 70 percent.

Now, through an upcoming software update and other measures, it wants to get that to 100.

Matthew Lightner of the U.S. Border Patrol highlighted the importance of iris biometrics to the safety of Border Patrol officers, and its reliability advantages for border ID checks, during a panel discussion at Identity Week in September.

Grown slowly from humble algorithmic beginnings

As biometric identifiers, irises are more stable throughout a person’s life than fingerprints or faces. FedScoop quotes the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Patrick Grother, who says “face recognition is built on learning from massive amounts of data. Iris recognition, originally, wasn’t done that way.”

Rather, the original algorithm was created by the late Cambridge Professor John Daugman.

“The original research looked at images of the iris and wrote down a set of algorithms – as a set of procedures in mathematics – that would promise good recognition. That turned out to be true and an industry was built upon that.”

NIST is growing the size of its iris database for IREX X 1:N evaluations and planning to launch a new IREX XI to evaluate 1:1 comparisons, which will provide a lower barrier to entry for academics looking to study challenges like noise or low-resolution images.

It is also working on a metric to evaluate the speed and accuracy of iris algorithms together.

Iris ID eyes expansion

Specific iris technology is proprietary to vendors. CBP uses tech from Iris ID – per its website, “the world’s most deployed iris recognition platform.” CBP has used it for about ten years, and it has won its advocates elsewhere; Iris ID counts the FBI, India’s UIDAI, Pakistan’s NADRA and Clear among its clients.

Iris ID’s technology uses a frame grabber to capture still frames from the video file, which an algorithm analyzes for patterns visible between the pupil and the white of the eye, and converts them into a 512-byte digital template. Voila: a value corresponding to an individual, which can be replicated with further submissions of video (in other words, scans).

The company has noted that its technology is gaining traction among U.S. law enforcement bodies, and delivering up to 99 percent accuracy on even across large databases. It is even used in Canadian airports.

Because close-up images of irises are not found all over the internet, there is an argument that it poses fewer privacy risks than facial recognition.

Iris biometrics safer for privacy – until they aren’t

But, as tends to happen in the cycle of technological innovation, some can already see how mass adoption might end up sending iris recognition off the rails, privacy-wise. FedScoop quotes Jake Wiener, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who says “what we don’t want to happen with iris is what happened with Social Security numbers. It got used for everything. Now everyone’s Social Security number is purchasable on the dark web. I think iris is the last biometrics that has not been broken in that way.”

Yet, that is.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  border security  |  CBP  |  iris biometrics  |  Iris ID  |  iris recognition  |  U.S. Government