The woman who controls access to Baghdad's Green Zone is one of the most powerful Americans in Iraq (Slate.com)
BAGHDAD, Iraq—Army Lt. Col. Kimberly Johanek is one of the most powerful Americans left here. Not even the U.S. ambassador or the four-star commander in charge of U.S. forces has the authority to do what she does.
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Johanek is trying to encourage the Iraqis to use biometrics, which match fingerprints or iris scans against a database. It is a highly reliable but expensive identifier that embeds a chip in a badge that can be matched against information stored in a database. The U.S. military uses such biometrics on its badges. But the Iraqis only have five biometric-badge readers, and neither government is willing to turn over their databases to read each other's badges.
This lengthy but informative article underscores one of our common themes: ID management is about people.
