Alberta ponders biometric ID cards for homeless

From the Calgary Herald

Those who offer services to the homeless face many identity management challenges.

DEA clears biometrics for controlled drug e-Rx

From GovHealthIT.com

DEA currently bans the e-prescribing of controlled substances -- a restriction that covers some 10 percent of all prescriptions.

That prohibition compels physicians who e-prescribe to maintain a separate paper-and-fax system for controlled substances.

That appears to be changing.

Indian Govt. plans to go biometric with census

From The Times of India

This will be an incredible challenge and I'm curious to see how this plays out.
To my knowledge, there isn't a single country that has a comprehensive biometric database of its adult population: not Lichtenstein; not the UAE -- both rich countries with small populations.

Can India pull it off?
There are 804,043,947* Indians aged 15 years or older.
There are a certain number of non-citizen "usual residents."

For reasons both technological and logistical, this is the identity management equivalent of the moon shot.

*CIA World Factbook:

Population: 1,156,897,766 (July 2009 est.)

Age structure:
0-14 years: 30.5% (male 187,197,389/female 165,285,592)
15-64 years: 64.3% (male 384,131,994/female 359,795,835)
65 years and over: 5.2% (male 28,816,115/female 31,670,841) (2009 est.)

1,156,897,766 * (.643 + .052) = 804,043,947

At Bronx clinic, the eyes are windows to medical records

From CNN (March 15, 2010).

This article touches upon many important factors related to biometrics and identity management: Privacy, Accuracy, Cost-Benefit, and selecting the proper biometric modality.

It also has a nice dose of human interest:

"The acceptable error rate is zero, because we're talking about people's lives here. People can get hurt and die," said Evan Smith, Eye Controls' chief executive officer.

Prohibitive biometrics bill defeated in New Hampshire

From securityinfowatch.com

The New Hampshire state legislature has evidently determined that biometric applications are compatible with the state motto: Live Free or Die.

Good for Granite Staters.

L-1 for sale?

From SecurityDirectorNews.com

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this development to the biometrics/identity management industry.

Is this a repudiation of L-1's entire strategy?
Is it driven by the more personal financial considerations of Mr. LaPenta?

Time will tell.

ID Card for Workers Is at Center of Immigration Plan

From the Wall Street Journal
Putting a fingerprint biometric on the Social Security card and using it as the citizenship test for employment is the idea being floated by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

Are fake Social Security cards the fulcrum around which illegal immigration issues turn?

Biometric passports raise fears about what it will cost

From the Niagara Falls Review.

Cost should be considered not just in terms of how much the passport document itself costs to produce, but also in terms of the efficient operation of the customs service and the reduction in crime committed by those who would value false identification documents.

Which do you think costs more:

• (a) 100,000 biometric passports
• (b) one customs employee with training costs, a salary, benefits and a pension?

or

• (a) 11.5 million passports (approximately all of them).
• (b) Losses associated with less efficient international trade if the next 9/11-style terrorists enter the U.S. from Canada.

Scientist: Nose the future of biometrics

The headline overstates the case made in the article, but the article provides a very useful handle when grappling with the difference between the scientific and business communities where biometrics is concerned.

Essentially, any durable part of the human anatomy may be used as a biometric input provided the user can reliably and repeatedly present the same anatomical feature to a sensor.

Society, and ultimately the scientists interested in biometrics, will only be well served through the successful commercialization the biometric technologies that are already reliable.

Commercial innovation leading to the adoption of modern identity management techniques is something that can improve our lives in the short-to-medium term by lowering the societal cost of identity theft and/or mistaken identity.

Figuring out how to turn a nose into a number?

One day this guy's reign of terror will end, but not before face- and finger-based identity management tools are ubiquitous.

Frost & Sullivan Finds Vast Potential for Biometrics Industry in APAC

The article examines the biometric identity management industry in Asia. The analysis, however, applies across the developed world.

I suspect the developing nations aren't far behind, either.