Big Brother and the Police State
Interpol wants facial recognition database to catch suspects
* Owen Bowcott
* The Guardian,
* Monday October 20 2008
Interpol is planning to expand its role into the mass screening of
passengers moving around the world by creating a face recognition
database to catch wanted suspects.
Every year more than 800 million international travellers fail to
undergo "the most basic scrutiny" to check whether their identity
documents have been stolen, the global policing cooperation body has warned.
Senior figures want a system that lets immigration officials capture
digital images of passengers and immediately cross-check them against a
database of pictures of terror suspects, international criminals and
fugitives.
The UK's first automated face recognition gates - matching passengers to
their digital image in the latest generation of passports - began
operating at Manchester airport in August.
Mark Branchflower, head of Interpol's fingerprint unit, will this week
unveil proposals in London for the creation of biometric identification
systems that could be linked to such immigration checks.
The civil liberties group No2ID, which campaigns against identity cards,
expressed alarm at the plans.
"This is a move away from seeking specific persons to GCHQ-style bulk
interception of information," warned spokesman Michael Parker.
"There's already a fair amount of information collected in terms of
passenger records. This is the next step. Law enforcement agencies want
the most efficient systems but there has to be a balance between
security and privacy." The growth of international criminal gangs and
the spread of terrorist threats has increased demand for Interpol's
services.
Last year it carried out 10,000 fingerprint searches; this year the
figure will reach 20,000.
An automated fingerprint identification system with far greater
capacity, known as Metamorpho, will be installed next year. Earlier this
month Interpol launched its "global security initiative" aimed at
raising $1bn (£577m) to strengthen its law enforcement programmes. It
claims to hold the "names and identifiers" of 9,000 terrorist suspects.
Branchflower will speak at the opening of the Biometrics 2008 conference
in Westminster about the possibility of extending its biometric database.
Before the conference he said that Interpol wanted to create a face
recognition database, to match its fingerprint and DNA records, that
could be searched and matched automatically.
"Facial recognition is a step we could go to quite quickly," said
Branchflower, "and it's increasingly of use to [all] countries. There's
so much data we have but they are in records we can't search."
If Interpol had been operating a face recognition database linked to
national border controls last autumn, he said, it might have picked up a
Canadian teacher wanted for child abuse as he entered Thailand. The
paedophile was the subject of a high-profile manhunt.
"We could have picked him up the moment he entered Bangkok rather than
having to wait another two weeks," said Branchflower."We need to get our
data to the border entry points. There will be such a large role in the
future for fingerprints and facial recognition."