FBI face rec leads to fugitive pedophile

FBI using facial recognition despite privacy concerns (Valley News - Fargo, ND)

For 19 years, Lynn Cozart eluded authorities after being convicted of sexually assaulting his three children.

He failed to show up for his sentencing hearing and seemed to drop off the map. So in a desperate bid to track down the Pennsylvania native, an FBI agent submitted Cozart's mug shot to the agency's newly created Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which among other things uses facial recognition software to identify suspects.

The story continues at the link. With input from privacy advocates and law enforcement officials.

Asia-Pacific region lagging in counter-terror biometrics

Interpol pushes for more use of biometrics to ID terrorists (Computerworld)

Interpol is calling for Asia Pacific authorities to make better usage of biometrics to identify members of terrorist groups such as ISIS.
...
“Europe provides 26 more times fingerprint data than the APAC region and 623 times more DNA data. Yet, we know the [APAC] region has the technology and does make use of it at national levels.”

The Europe-Asia comparison is even more dramatic considering the size of their respective populations.

Voice biometrics and "the right to remain silent"

Passcode vs. Touch ID: A Legal Analysis (9TO5MAC)

With the suspect in handcuffs, the agent swipes the student’s finger across the phone to access his call history and messages. Once the FBI swipes the suspect’s finger and bypasses the biometric security, the phone asks for the student’s passcode. The FBI agent asks for his password but the student refuses to speak. How can the FBI agent access the phone? Whereas a fictional Federal Agent like Jack Bauer would simply pull out his gun, jam it in the suspect’s mouth and scream, “WHERE IS THE BOMB?”, in our example, the FBI agent would hit the proverbial brick wall.

This is where a gray area might still exist for hardware protected with voice biometrics.

I'm no criminal or constitutional lawyer, but it seems plausible that while a criminal suspect can be legally compelled to give over their fingerprint, the "right to remain silent" remains.

Commonwealth v. Baust probably isn't the last word on all biometric modalities that could prove useful in criminal investigations.

Biometrics against criminal aliases

Suspect in deputy deaths arrested in Utah in 2003 (Boston Herald)

Police in West Valley City, Utah, said they took a fingerprint from a man using the name Marcelo Marquez during a misdemeanor hit-and-run arrest in 2003. Court records show that he pleaded guilty, received a year of probation and was fined about $500.

However, Utah authorities never connected him to his real name or his previous criminal record.

In Utah, fingerprint data is entered into a biometric database for all people booked into jail. But for those who are cited and released, police take a print from a single finger that's kept in state criminal records.

Unless there's a request from an investigator, the print is not run against the biometric database to determine whether the person has a prior record outside Utah or is using an alias, said Alice Moffat, director of the Bureau of Criminal Identification.

Biometrics are a great way to root out criminal aliases, but only if procedures are in place to run the biometric search.

Why facial recognition tech failed in the Boston bombing manhunt (Ars Technica) — This is a very good article that follows some of the contours of our Putting the mosaic together in Boston. I might have written the headline of the Ars Technica piece as "Why facial recognition tech was ill-suited to the Boston bombing manhunt," though.

Law enforcement interoperability, though little discussed, is a big deal

Tyneside jewellery heist could lead to DNA sharing (Chronicle Live)

A jewellery heist on Tyneside has sparked a review of DNA sharing across Europe that could force police to hand over criminal records to foreign counterparts.

Specialists in Newcastle will spearhead a £1.2m effort to design a database that profiles crimes committed across the continent as part of a controversial EU information sharing treaty.

It comes just 12 months after a convicted murderer and his armed gang from Eastern Europe were convicted of carrying out an armed raid at a Newcastle jewellers.

Led by convicted murderer Marek Viidemann, the ring was linked to at least 150 armed robberies across the UK and Europe before being eventually jailed for a total of more than 30 years.

First, DNA is likely to be a small part of whatever system improvements emerge.  It's expensive and slow compared to just about any other biometric modality or combination of modalities such as finger, face and iris.

From a management standpoint it seems that if you want to have a free flow of people, you need to have a free flow of law enforcement information. This is easier said than done. It's often a challenge even when dealing with adjacent counties in the same state in the US much less, as in the European context, two different countries.

The term for this system compatibility and ability to effectively cooperate among departments is interoperability. It is a managerial and technical challenge that is rarely dealt with in popular depictions of how law enforcement works but, especially as the complexity of the law enforcement challenge increases, it is of critical importance.

Often, there are good systems in place for passing information "up the chain of command," i.e. from street cop all the way up to a state or national information repository, but the information doesn't always flow as freely back down again in the other direction. For various reasons, the formal links between street-level law enforcement officers in neighboring jurisdictions run up through a centralized authority and then back down again, though there are often informal links that bypass the up-and-back-down information flow model. The implications for efficient multi-jurisdictional law enforcement are clear.

Some of these issues came up a couple of years ago in a post. Usefulness of Biometrics in Law Enforcement: Who is the Customer? The analysis there can be extended from biometrics to all sorts of law enforcement IT systems and it has a great deal of bearing on issues like the ones raised by the Newcastle jewelry heist by international criminals.

Many police professionals put a lot more into databases of all types than they ever get out of them. Through biometric technologies and other integration services, SecurLinx works hard to balance that out a bit for our law enforcement customers.

Facial recognition and criminal investigations

Updated & Bumped...
Facial recognition and identifying suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing (Biometric Update)

Since the bombing, authorities have appealed to anyone who was at the event to turn over any video or photo evidence, in hopes that they may hold crucial details in identifying a suspect. Though nothing can be confirmed, particularly in the midst of an investigation, it is likely facial recognition will be used to identify suspects from these photos and videos. So far, the FBI has received more than 2,000 tips.

Auhor Adam Vrankulj strikes the right tone in his article about how facial recognition is going to be applied to investigation of the recent terrible events in Boston. Read the whole thing.

Paul Scheupp, CEO of face recognition technology developer Animetrics weighs in on Fox's "On the Record," last night.

UPDATE:
Facial recognition technology could prove key in Boston Marathon bombing manhunt - video embed unavailable.

UPDATE II:
The Boston Marathon bomber: Caught on film? (BBC)
More personal videos are being shot now than ever before, and such footage could help identify the Boston marathon bomber. But how is that footage processed - and could civilians really solve the crime?

Real fake ID's

Facial recognition system leads to thousands of fraud arrests

After kicking off facial recognition technology, the Department of Motor Vehicle says the state was arresting people by the thousands for possible identity fraud. They were even a bit surprised at the number of people trying to cheat the system.

"We've arrested 2,500. We've taken 5,000 to administrative hearings," said Owen McShane from the DMV.

Read the whole thing for an education about how lax issuance of legitimate ID documents enables crime.

See also similar items from Washington and Texas.

Pakistan may require a fingerprint check to purchase a cell phone

Pakistan is considering requiring a fingerprint check as part of the process of purchasing a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card as a way of more definitively tying mobile phones to their purchasers.

Nigeria implemented a similar system beginning in 2010.

There are several reasons that countries would want to do this, most related to making it easier (or even possible) to investigate crime. Mobile phones are critically important tools in such criminal enterprises as ransoming kidnapping victims and organized robbery. Terrorists depend upon mobile phones both for communication and to detonate explosive devices.

Tele-operators briefed on biometric system (The Nation)

“NADRA being the sole custodian of biometrics of over 96 percent total population of the country, has offered the biometric solution in the wake of Interior Ministry’s grave security concerns over the use of cellular devices in terrorist plots,” the spokesperson said. It should be noted that on December 1, 2012, the Prime Minister, after taking notice of insecure sales mechanism for issuance of SIMs, directed all telecom companies to employ biometric verification for SIMs issuance within two months’ time.

Biometrics "Fix" Identity

Even if there is fraud in the identification process, biometrics can be used to fix a single identity upon an individual.

An article in today's Canberra Times about people smuggling brings home the point.

Despite some unauthorised arrivals' lack of documents, biometric capability is critical. In a few cases, unauthorised boat arrivals will be identified from international databases, particularly through fingerprints. Even if people cannot be identified, the collection of biometric data on arrival provides a basis for anchoring the identity of an unauthorised arrival, so that the Australian community can be confident it is dealing with one person and that further identity-shifting is difficult. It also leaves open the possibility of identification in the future. [Emphasis mine]

One classic use of identity fraud among professional criminals is the use of multiple ID's so as to keep a clean identity and a dirty identity. If possible, all the documents involved are "real" in that even the ID card related to the fabricated identity is issued by the legitimate authority.

When the the professional criminal with his family in the car is pulled over for running a stop sign in his neighborhood by a police man who goes to the same church, he presents his "real" ID. When he's picked up in the course of his job, say 1,500 miles away, with a trunk full of weapons and narcotics, he gives the police the ID containing bogus information.

The arresting officers call the ID authority who created the false ID card. Sure enough, he's in the database. No criminal record. Light sentence for a first offence and he can still go back to his life, get another ID, and go back to work, too.

The same pattern works well with fraud.

Pretty simple, right?

Well, yes — until biometrics.

Once ID issuing authorities institute biometric checks before issuing new ID documents, even a person who lies on their original ID application is stuck with only the one ID.* Further attempts to obtain additional ID's can be detected and investigated. Later claims of a false identity (or lost ID) can be unraveled.

This is something that might have given pause to the person who supplied Mr. Coriander with fingerprints. If he thought the only time those fingerprints could be used for a UID number, he might not have found the joke as funny.

*This applies to discrete ID management system. If ID databases aren't linked, it may be possible to maintain different identities in different databases.

UID to Link With Criminal Records System

Home Ministry plans to link its crime records with UIDAI (Economic Times)

The Union home ministry plans to link its crime records with the Aadhar unique identity project, signaling a reversal in its hostile stance towards the Nandan Nilekani-led Unique Identity Authority of India.

The home ministry's 2,000-crore Crime and Criminal Tracking System project, which aims to create a central database of all crime records in the country, will have a provision for linking up with UID or Aadhar numbers, an official associated with managing the project said.

"The big plan is to link crime records with UID," the official told ET. "This will make the database easier to handle and more accurate."

UID has an incredible potential to help bridge Indian bureaucratic silos.

New Statistical Model Assigns Probability to Fingerprint Evidence

Statistical model removes barriers to using fingerprint evidence in court (Homeland Security NewsWire)

Potentially important fingerprint evidence is currently not being considered in legal proceedings owing to shortcomings in the way it is reported, according to a report published Wednesday in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. Researchers involved in the study have devised a statistical model to enable the weight of fingerprint evidence to be quantified, paving the way for its full inclusion in the criminal identification process.

A Wiley release reports that fingerprints have been used for over a century as a way of identifying criminals. Fingerprint evidence, however, is not currently permitted to be reported in court unless examiners claim absolute certainty that a mark has been left by a particular suspect. This courtroom certainty is based purely on categorical personal opinion, formed through years of training and experience, but not on logic or scientific data. Less-than-certain fingerprint evidence is not reported at all, irrespective of the potential weight and relevance of this evidence in a case.

It may come as a surprise that fingerprint evidence in court cases depends upon expert witness testimony. It is only admitted if an expert claims absolute certainty of a match.

The shortcomings (error rates) of the current system are well described by Cognitive Consultants International (CCI) in their study of actual professional examiners [pdf]. Since the evidence is collected from the chaotic environment of a crime scene and frequently consists of partial fingerprints, a heavy burden falls upon professional examiners and the methods used by examiners open the door to errors related to the way humans process information. The team found statistically significant unevenness among examiners and even within the same examiner.

Abstract:

Deciding whether two fingerprint marks originate from the same source requires examination and comparison of their features. Many cognitive factors play a major role in such information processing. In this paper we examined the consistency (both between- and within-experts) in the analysis of latent marks, and whether the presence of a ‘target’ comparison print affects this analysis. Our findings showed that the context of a comparison print affected analysis of the latent mark, possibly influencing allocation of attention, visual search, and threshold for determining a ‘signal’. We also found that even without the context of the comparison print there was still a lack of consistency in analysing latent marks. Not only was this reflected by inconsistency between different experts, but the same experts at different times were inconsistent with their own analysis. However, the characterization of these inconsistencies depends on the standard and definition of what constitutes inconsistent. Furthermore, these effects were not uniform; the lack of consistency varied across fingerprints and experts. We propose solutions to mediate variability in the analysis of friction ridge skin.

Cognitive Solutions has quantified the error rates of the current system and have made proposals to reduce those error rates. They propose a reassessment of how examiners are recruited and trained; And since different types of latent print lead to different error rates, they recommend further research into the categorization of latent fingerprints.

Alternatively, in Fingerprints at the crime-scene: Statistically certain, or probable? [pdf], Cedric Neumann and Julian Champkin propose a statistical error-checking method applied to the minutiae used by examiners in order to generate a probability score for the match, arguing that "DNA experts are required to give probabilities for their evidence of matching; fingerprint expert are forbidden to. This bizarre situation ought to be ended, in the interests of justice as well as of common sense." This is how they do it:

Figure 2, slightly edited, from Significance. Fingerprints at the Crime Scene.

Historically, in most countries, 12 minutiae that matched each other in type, orientation and position have generally been considered sufficient to identify the source of the mark. Until 2001 the UK required 16 correspondences to establish proof of identity. Both these numbers arose through experience rather than statistical analysis.

The reasoning that currently leads experts from minutiae to identification is essentially a psychological one that cannot be rationalized and rendered explicit. The method that my colleagues and I have presented also relies on those minutiae; but numbers are derived from them.

On any given finger impression, the most prominent minutiae – say six – can be selected and joined up, in a clockwise direction (see Figure 2). They will form a pattern – essentially a six-sided polygon around a centre. (The centre can be defined as the arithmetic mean of the Cartesian co-ordinates of our six points.) A polygon is a much simpler pattern than the whirling lines of a full print or mark. It is also much easier to analyse numerically. The basis of the method is to describe that polygon with a set of variables.

h/t @MDKConsulting

Biometrics Assist US Border Patrol Apprehension of Convicted Kidnapper

Previously removed from the U.S. in May and June, 2011 (Deming Headlight)

Using the Integrated Automated Identification System (IAFIS), and other databases, a female subject from the group was identified as Blanca Yesenia Garcia-Recinos, a 24-year-old Guatemalan national.

The subject's biometric information revealed prior arrests which led to felony convictions, including kidnapping, burglary and aggravated assault in 2009.

Garcia-Recinos was previously removed from the U.S. in May and June, 2011.

Agents use Biometrics to halt sex offender entry into U.S.

Las Cruces Sun-News

The subject is identified as Luis Rene Lemus, 45, a Cuban national.

Lemus' biographical and biometric information were entered into the Integrated Automated Identification System. The system positively identified Lemus. The system also revealed Lemus' prior convictions for sex offense against a child-fondling conduct on a 16-year-old child, cruelty to a child, child abuse resulting in no great bodily harm and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

United States: ID Technology & the Bill of Rights

The Fifth Amendment in the Digital Age (ZDNet - Identity Matters Blog)

Basically, if the password is a physical thing she has, than the Fifth Amendment does not protect it. But if the password is deemed to be something the defendant knows, it is protected.
...
To illustrate the principle, the Supreme Court has previously explained that a witness might be “forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents,” but not “compelled to reveal the combination to a wall safe.”

As the post points out, biometric technologies complicate this further.

The Fifth Amendment guaranty that "No person shall... be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself," applies (outside the military) to those who have already been indicted by a grand jury, are standing trial, and are being asked to assist in their prosecution. The example above doesn't seem to prevent the police from hiring a locksmith to open the wall safe; it merely prevents the police from compelling the accused to help them.

The Fourth Amendment is much more relevant to privacy in the ordinary sense.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees that:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

"Warrantless mobile device searches" (Google search) are a much hotter digital age privacy issue.

The Bertillon System: An Early ID Management System

In a post the other day, I made a brief mention of the Bertillion system, also known as anthropometry, Bertillonage and the Bertillon system. "Bertillon system" seems to be the most common usage. Developed for use in criminal identification, the Bertillon System was an extremely important early attempt at using objective, measurable details of the human body for use in establishing an individual identity with a high degree of certainty.

Before 1882 establishing an individual's unique identity usually involved the testimony of trusted individuals. In a criminal trial, witnesses to a crime would swear that they did or didn't see the suspect commit a crime. Establishing a criminal history might rely upon a police officer under oath to establish the suspect's criminal record* [1].

With the invention of anthropometry, a system of body measurements of adult individuals for personal identification, Alphonse Bertillon, then working with the police in Paris, changed all that.

Divided into three integrated parts, Bertillon's anthropometrical system consisted of:

♦ Bodily measurements conducted with the utmost precision and under carefully prescribed conditions of a series of the most characteristic dimensions of bony parts of the human anatomy;

♦ The morphological description of the appearance and shape of the body and its measured parts as they related to movements "and even the most characteristic mental and moral qualities"; and

♦ A description of peculiar marks observed on the "surface of the body, resulting from disease, accident, deformity or artificial disfigurement, such as moles, warts, scars, tattooings, etc."[2]

Bertillon's system, which made the jump across the Atlantic in 1887, was greatly enhanced by advances in photography.

Here's a great example of a Bertillon record from Jersey City, New Jersey 1898 [3]

For a much larger view, Click here.

The Bertillon system was eventually abandoned world-wide because it failed to provide reliable and unique measurements, was too cumbersome to administer in a uniform manner and (unlike fingerprints) it didn't rely on a single measurement of any part of the body for identifying a specific individual.[2]

* Definitively establishing a criminal history that would merit harsher punishment than that meted out to first time offenders might (in certain times and places) also rely upon the highly effective, though irreversible, methods of dismemberment (cutting off the hands of thieves, etc.), branding, scarring and tattooing [1].

UPDATE: 
An observation: the measurements on the left half of the front of the record (the Bertillon measurements) appear to be in centimeters (metric system) while the height and weight on the right side are in standard units.

UPDATE II:
Something of a continuation of this post: The Death of the Bertillon system and the History of Fingerprints

Sources:
[1] Origins of the New York State Bureau of Identification by Michael Harling
[2] Alphonse Bertillon and Ear Prints by forensic-evidence.com
[3] Jersey City Police Department Bureau of Criminal Identification (B.C.I.), New Jersey, USA

See Also:
Alphonse Bertillon - Wikipedia.com

India: Criminal Tracking Network Ready by 2012

Goal: Interconnect all police stations in India (Times of India)

"With the CCTNS in place, all information will be available online. Information regarding fingerprints, unidentified bodies, missing persons, stolen vehicles, stolen arms, etc, will be just a click away. At present, if we need information about a suspect, we send intimations to our counterparts in other states. This is a time-consuming process," said Dhiware.

He said that the data was being fed into the computers at the stations where the system was being installed. "Police personnel are also being trained in handling the software."

Other CID officials said the CCTNS would create a national databank of crime and criminals and their biometric profiles. This database will have details of the criminal justice system including courts, jails, immigration, passport authorities, forensic labs, transport department, mobile companies, central agencies etc, in a phased manner.

India: How Much Fraud is Acceptable in NPR, UID

Home Minister expresses concern on UIDAI data collection process (Deccan Herald)

It's hard to read the above linked article as other than a continuation of the rivalry between the National Population Register (NPR) being assembled by Home Minister Chidambaram and the Unique ID (UID) Project being conducted by UIDAI and its chairman, Nandan Nilekani. The two organizations have overlapping mandates and heat generated between the two has been vented through the press before.

But a very interesting question is concealed within Home Minister Chidambaram's statements.

Home Minister Chidambaram says:

"The data collected by multiple registrars of the UIDAI does not meet the degree of assurance required under the NPR from the point of view of internal security," he said.

The Home Minister said the UIDAI process of enrolment is based on production of documents and, in the absence of documents, through an introducer based mechanism. It was due to the fact that document based systems are not feasible in rural areas especially among the poor, illiterate, landless and women.

"If the UIDAI process is to be introduced in NPR, it would lead to large scale exclusions. The possibility of inclusion of non-usual residents in the local register and the creation of false identity profiles is also real. This would defeat the purpose of creation of NPR. There are also a number of legal, technical and practical issues that makes it difficult to accept data collected by other registrars," he said in the letter.

So, how do you go from a situation where you have a billion people and no rigorous ID management to a system where everyone has a permanent, singular, legally-enforceable, government-backed identity?

Answering two other questions will help answer the first.
How much time and money can be spent?
What error rate (level of deception) is tolerable?

India has (hundreds of?) millions of people without ID resulting in a social welfare system that is rife with corruption and an entire underclass that lacks access to the tools that allow for social mobility and the enjoyment of basic rights. Some of the individuals lacking ID don't even know all the information that will be asked of them in obtaining an ID document.

What is your date of birth?

Where were you born?

What is your father's name?

I don't know.

When this is the real root of the problem (and Chidambaram acknowledges this with his mention of the poor, illiterate, landless and women) how much worry about the "inclusion of non-usual residents in the local register and the creation of false identity profiles" is appropriate?

Bringing full citizenship rights to poor, illiterate landless Indians brings with it a near-certainty that full citizenship rights will be conferred upon some number of poor, illiterate, landless non-Indians living in India. Is it worth it?

Creating an identity profile for people who lack the details required to create a rigorously complete identity profile means that the system will be open to some measure of deception. If a person has no ID and must be trusted to provide information to obtain an ID, they can either err or lie in the information they provide. How much error/deception is acceptable?

Even with unlimited resources and unlimited time, something both NPR and UID lack, imperfection is guaranteed.

The saving grace is that through database de-duplication, everyone only gets one ID. What was fluid solidifies.

So, yes, some sort of illegal resident amnesty and opportunity for "individual self-reinvention" is going to happen as a result of either the NPR or UID. This must be balanced against the known ills associated with the lack of a functional ID management infrastructure.

The existence of NPR and UID means that these questions have already been answered. Lots of money is available. Reasonable efforts to prevent wholesale fraud will be undertaken. Some abuse will happen, but it's worth it to both bring huge numbers of poor people into the system and to make a sharp break with a past where poor ID management made it too easy to operate invisibly for any purpose whatsoever.

There may be a real difference between the auditing processes used by NPR and UID. NPR's may be more rigorous and, in the view of Mr. Chidambaram, superior. Fortunately, the truth will come out. The expenditures of both efforts will be known. The number of credentials issued by each will be known. And at some point, it will be possible to compare the two systems to each other both in terms of their efficacy and their cost.

Australia: Deal with US on DNA a "perfect match"

Another day, another bi-lateral biometric security agreement.
Australia and the United States have committed to a crime-fighting union (Adelaide Now)

Both countries yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding to share resources, including DNA profiles on suspects.

The arrangement will also allow crime fighting agencies to cross-check biometric data such as fingerprints, unlocking information on suspects in both countries.

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor and US Ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich yesterday committed to the arrangement, which will involve information sharing between agencies in both countries.

Additional reporting:
Australia, US sign new deal on DNA checks (AAP)

Australia and the United States can now swap DNA and fingerprint data more easily in the fight against terrorism and transnational crime.

Prototype "Rapid" DNA

Could bolster forensic investigations (Computerworld)

All that's needed is to insert the type of swab now widely used to collect DNA often from inside a cheek into the DNA-analysis kit and within 90 minutes, out pops the answer to what an individual's DNA is (not a full genetic analysis but what suffices for identification and perhaps confirming family relationships such as parent-child or sister-brother).

The goal is to get RapidHIT, a portable box-like device with integrated bio-science reagents, chipset, software and applications down to an hour. Jovanovich said there's been field testing with the Palm Bay, Fla., police department. Even the Department of Defense has taken the RapidHIT device to test it with Army volunteers in a Norfolk field exercise in May, he added, noting that one Army officer brought a swab from his son to see what the DNA-linked paternity outcome to him would be (he wasn't disappointed).

If it's all that's available, and often it is, DNA analysis is an extremely valuable tool. Occasionally, time is of the essence and DNA is the only option. The full article describes the efforts of several organizations to return DNA results more quickly.


And then, there's this:

One pent-up need for a rapid DNA analysis kit is coming for the Department of Homeland Security's citizenship and emigration services, according to Christopher Miles, biometrics program manager at DHS.
...
The uncomfortable realization that the government might be wasting a huge amount of time reading fraudulent documents and listening to lies was a lesson learned a few years ago in trying to help refugees in Kenya that wanted to emigrate to the U.S. In that instance, the U.S. government took about 500 DNA samples, did a lab analysis to verify family relationships, and found out 80% were fraudulent, Miles said.

Biometric modalities are interesting. Different ones are good for different things. No other modality can determine biological family relationships which, in certain circumstances, are very important.

It's not clear that "rapid" is necessary in this application because the gating factor on how long the immigration process takes isn't the time required for DNA testing. The ROI on shortening the turn-around time on a DNA test may not be there, but that 80% number is staggering.

Because "rapid" isn't that rapid and interacting with the biometric sensor is awkward, DNA, as a biometric modality is likely to remain at the "high value, low volume" end of the spectrum for a long time to come.