By Calvin Biesecker
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are hopeful that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will make a decision in the first week of January on whether to move ahead with plans to introduce a biometric exit component to the US-VISIT program, a DHS official said this week.
If Napolitano gives the green light for a biometric exit solution soon, DHS will have to work quickly with the Office of Management and Budget to include funding for the effort in the Obama administration’s FY ’11 budget request that will go to Congress early in February 2010.
Depending on the particular exit solution that is selected for airports and seaports, the initial start-up costs range between $153 million and $515 million, according to the proposed rule. But over a 10-year period the costs run into the billions of dollars, the official said.
There are political and cost considerations that have to go into the decision, as well as the efficacy and viability of the various exit options, the official told Defense Daily.
The US-VISIT program has conducted several pilot programs of exit solutions ever since Customs and Border Protection in January 2004 began nationwide collection of fingerprints of foreign nationals entering the United States. The first set of pilots, conducted between 2004 and 2006, involved either using kiosks or handheld fingerprint capture devices at 12 airports and seaports.
This past spring and summer, CBP officers at one airport departure gate and Transportation Security Administration officers at the checkpoint of another airport collected fingerprints for departing foreign nationals.
All these different pilot projects have demonstrated that “you can capture fingerprints from individuals leaving the country [at airports and seaports] and not cause a disruption to the airport environment,” the official said.
Moreover, the pilots conducted between 2004 and 2006 showed that there is time for law enforcement to respond and take action if a fingerprint check determines the need to do so, the official said. During that series of tests, there were seven or eight arrests made because of the fingerprint checks done on exiting foreign travelers, the official said. The latest series of pilots did not include a law enforcement response component, the official noted.
All of the exit options, including having the airlines be responsible for collecting the fingerprints of departing foreign nationals, are on the table, the official said.
The purpose of a biometric exit system is to give DHS better confidence that a person has, or has not left the country. The department currently has a system to identify overstays called the Arrival Departure Information System (ADIS) that is managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ADIS currently matches exits to entry about 92 percent of the time, which means there are about four million people unaccounted for, the official said. Some of them may have left, but “we don’t know,” the official said. Doing biometric exit will raise that metric to about 99 percent, the official added.
The decision on a biometric exit solution excludes land ports of entry because of how the infrastructure is built at these portals and because the technology doesn’t exist to be able to do this comprehensively and rapidly in that environment.
If DHS moves ahead with a biometric exit solution at airports and seaports, US-VISIT will use four-print slap devices for the biometric capture technology, the official said. The handheld devices work fine but the capture is faster with the four-print slap device versus a two-finger handheld unit, the official said.
When US-VISIT was initially implemented two fingerprints were captured from arriving foreigners and compared against the DHS IDENT database, which now contains 108 million individual records. That biometric capture is meant to ensure that the person arriving is the same person who applied for a visa to enter the U.S. Now when foreign nationals apply for visas to come here 10 fingerprints are collected overseas and put into IDENT.
The process of matching against potentially all 10 fingerprints is still being tested and is slated to be fully implemented in the summer of 2010, the official said. At entry, multiple prints will be collected for matching, although rarely all 10.
Accenture [ACN] is the prime contractor for US-VISIT and Cogent Systems [COGT] provides the fingerprint matching capability for IDENT. Cogent has also been modifying the IDENT database from two fingerprint records to 10.
Late this past summer, Accenture selected France’s Sagem Morpho to test their capabilities to provide a 10-print matching capability. Cogent’s ability to do 10-print matching will also be tested, the official said. Both companies have already proven they can do the 10-print matching in controlled environment but the question is can it be done in a real world environment at the speed and accuracy CBP requires, the official said.
Accuracy, speed and cost will be key criteria for the 10-print matching, the official said. It will take six months to a year of data collection to determine which contractor to go with or if both should be part of the 10-print matching program, the official said.