by Matthew L. Wald, New York Times
WASHINGTON — Logan International Airport in Boston will announce on Monday that it is installing scanners that can check the authenticity of hundreds of kinds of driver’s licenses and passports, check the bearer’s name against government “watch lists,” and generate lists, with photos, of whose document was checked and when.
The system, which airport officials said would fulfill many of the functions of a national identification card but which they hoped would not raise the civil liberties questions that such a card would carry, will initially be used only on airport workers. The Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan, plans to issue new security badges to the approximately 10,000 people who work there, and wants to assure itself that the driver’s licenses and other identification documents that those people present are valid.
But Thomas J. Kinton, Jr., the port authority’s aviation director, said that he would like to see the system used on everyone entering the airport.
“The next logical choice for this technology is at the head of the sterile concourses at our nation’s airports, prior to proceeding through the security checkpoint, where they now ask to see your boarding pass and ID,” Mr. Kinton said. “You are going to very quickly determine whether the person is who they say they are, or whether they have purchased on the market, which we all know are available, a document that is falsified.”
In a test this summer, the system evaluated the passports of 225,000 departing passengers at the international terminal, he said, and picked up several forgeries.
Under the current system, security experts say, no one who is checking ID’s can be expected to know whether a license is valid. “Somebody pulls out a driver’s license from Colorado, and I see a picture, I see that it says, `Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles,’ or whatever, it says, and I say, `Have a nice day,’ ” Mr. Kinton said. The 50 states and various other agencies have issued more than 150 different licenses.
The new system was built by Imaging Automation, of Bedford, N.H. It is already in use at border crossings and airports in Hungary, Finland and Sweden, and Britain has ordered the system for use in consulates to determine if people applying for visas are presenting valid documents, said the company’s chief executive, William H. Thalheimer.
Like the British government, the port authority is concerned with the security of “breeder documents,” counterfeit ID’s that a traveler can use to persuade a government entity to issue another document that is valid.
But the Imaging Automation equipment still raises problems, said Barry Steinhart, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s program on technology and liberty. The first question, Mr. Steinhart said, was whether the system actually works, or is instilling a false sense of security among security personnel. Logan is testing face recognition technology, but has declined the civil liberties union’s request for data on how well it works, Mr. Steinhart said.
“I certainly would want to see the evidence that it works, subjected to peer review,” he said. “We need to be very careful of war on terrorism profiteers in this climate, who are selling technologies that don’t in fact make us safer,” he said. He added that he had no information suggesting the Logan equipment was in that category.
Another question is what would happen to the information after it is gathered, he said. A scanner at a boarding gate could generate an electronic passenger manifest, complete with stored images of the photographs on the license or passport, the moment the cabin door was closed.
“Whether it works or not, it is a symptom of the emerging surveillance society,” he said.
But he conceded that “we are awash in phony documents.” Some would not be picked up by this system, he said, because they are produced by proper issuers, but under false pretenses.
The Imaging Automation system works several ways, Mr. Thalheimer said. It can read bar codes, magnetic stripes or other machine formats and compare those with the information printed on the document in ordinary letters. Stored in its data base are the characteristics of hundreds of kinds of ID’s, including what antitampering features are incorporated into the documents and the lamination, he said. For example, a document might have an image embedded in the plastic covering, or a seal printed on it; a person not familiar with the document would not notice a counterfeit that did not have the feature, he said.
It also looks to see if the document has expired.
The Massachusetts Port Authority would like the new Transportation Security Administration to pay for installing the system through the whole airport. That would cost $1.6 million to $2 million, Mr. Thalheimer said. The cost per passenger would be quite small; Mr. Kinton said that there were about 24.5 million passenger boardings last year.
A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, Robert Johnson, said, “We don’t require anything like what this is purporting to accomplish, not at this time, anyway.”
But Mr. Johnson added, “We’re always on the lookout for new technology that can help us provide the kind of security the American public expects.”