US-VISIT round-upDHS announces US-VIST ten-print capture wish list
Although four companies have come close to meeting DHS needs, agency is open to competition in its efforts to shore up the US-VISIT program; speed and accuracy are a must, as is a small footprint; software improvements needed on the back end
It does not cause the same excitement as Valentine’s Day or even Secretary’s Day, but DHS’s 10-Print Capture Industry Day, held earlier this week in Washington, D.C., had industry officials on the edge of their seats. With DHS planning to modify the software and hardware behind the US-VISIT program to acommodate 10-fingerprint scanning by 2008, vendors were eager for tips on how best they might grab a slice of the pie. “The two-print system has already yielded significant results,” DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said. “But to stop the unknown threat, [the ten-print system] will allow us to scan prints against those gathered at terrorist training camps, from battlefields [or other areas where terrorists have been known to leave prints],” he said.
Ten-print scanning is quickly becoming the government standard. In 2005, a joint federal government user group challenged industry “…to provide 10 print capture devices and software meeting the processing time and size requirements and meeting FBI and industry format and quality requirements within the next 12 months.” Palm Beach Gardens, Florida-based Cross Match was the first to succeed with their L SCAN Guardian, but there were many competitors.“The primary issue is quality [of the fingerprint image captured],” said Robert Mocny, US-VISIT’s acting program manager. Although only 2 percent of the population has fingers that cannot be scanned by current technology (usually due to harsh physical labor, not an attempt to evade security), officials hope more sensitive machines can overcome this strategic hole, perhaps by changes in the cameras or the lighting systems. “We had three or four systems that were pretty close [to the US-VISIT program’s needs],” Mocny said.
DHS had few criticisms of the two-print machines currently in use, other than to make the inevitable call for smaller, faster, and more user-friendly machines. The only specific critique came from technical specialists who “called for improvements in the software links between the reader units themselves and the back-end databases against which the fingerprints are compared,” Washington Technology reported.
The State Department plans to deploy fingerprint-scanning units to about 300 locations worldwide by the end of fiscal 2007. DHS, however, will issue a request for proposals early next year, followed by testing next summer, and a procurement decision early in fiscal 2008. DHS plans to field about 3,000 10-fingerprint reader units in 2008.
-read more in Wilson Dizard’s Washington Technology report
