"Schiphol Airport Installs Cameras That Check Passengers' Identity"

Tuesday, October 30, 2001    

Schiphol Airport Installs Cameras That Check Passengers' Identity
By BRANDON MITCHENER 
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam is offering frequent fliers
a special deal: Breeze through passport control in exchange for
surrendering a bit of personal privacy.

The airport has installed computerized cameras that can snap shots of
irises, the colored portion of the eye, and instantly compare them to
stored images of passengers' eyes to check identity. The passenger
database also would have names, dates of birth and other personal data
to be checked against the files of the Dutch border police. Fliers who
pass the machine's muster would be waved through passport control, while
border agents would scrutinize those who flunked -- and those who don't
want to stare into the camera.

"Anybody who says, 'I don't want to have my iris details stored anywhere
doesn't have to do it,' " says Marianne De Bie, a spokeswoman for
Schiphol Group, the airport's operator. "The old passport control
counters aren't demolished."

The fight over privacy is often waged between two extremes: the
government's need to know set against the individual's right to privacy.
But some European governments and companies are exploring a compromise
in which consumers voluntarily submit to greater data gathering to get
something they want in return.

The trick is "making sure there's sufficient value in the services being
offered," says David Haws, director of Actica Consulting, which is
advising the British government to use incentives to encourage the use
of "smart" identity cards.

The British have long shunned national identity cards as a threat to
privacy, but Mr. Haws predicts that many citizens will sign up if they
are offered incentives, such as discounts on personal-income taxes for
filing electronically. In addition to the usual I.D. card information,
the cards would carry so-called digital certificates, which allow users
to obtain government services online by providing computerized proof of
identity.

Privacy groups complain that all such systems create huge databases of
information that governments could tap without the knowledge or consent
of citizens. What Schiphol is "talking about in effect isn't just a
passenger card, it's a national or international linkage of identities,"
warns Simon Davies, a professor at the London School of Economics, and
director of the consumer-rights group Privacy International. Connecting
a Dutch border police database with computer files of other
law-enforcement agencies is "the only way it will function," he says.

The Schiphol system is indeed extremely sophisticated and precise. The
iris is the most personally distinct feature of the human body, with 244
independent characteristics. Because it continues to form in the first
year or so of life, even identical twins have different irises, whereas
they would have the same fingerprints and hand patterns. The technology
also is used for automatic teller transactions at a U.K. bank, vault
security at a German bank and restricted access control by British
Telecommunications.

At Schiphol, the initial photo of the eye takes about one second for the
system, called Privium, to snap and is done at the airport.

The scanning machine looks like the eye of Hal, the talking computer in
Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey." The basic camera itself,
which can see through glasses, contact lenses and in a wide range of
lighting conditions, is about the size of a small toaster.

The passenger basically looks into a video camera and is identified in
about one second. The airport began running the system last week in a
one-year pilot program, installing equipment in the same area as
passport control.

Participation is voluntary, but passengers who take part will be given
priority in processing as well as designated car parking spaces and
dedicated -- and supposedly faster -- security checks and check-in
lines. The initial cost is 99 euros ($88.4).

Making such systems voluntary may reduce complaints because individuals
can decide against participating. With the right incentives, governments
also can spend less time policing the law-abiding majority of their
citizens and more time investigating those with something to hide -- a
goal that is recognized as increasingly important after Sept. 11. System
designers believe that convicted felons or would-be terrorists wouldn't
submit to the iris-recognition systems, for fear of being tracked.

"Let's not be too naive," says Paul Thomas, president of the Belgian
government's data-protection commission. "Privacy is a human right," he
says, "but you have to live in order to enjoy other freedoms, including
privacy."

Europe has taken the lead in quid-pro-quo privacy because of a tradition
of stricter privacy laws written in reaction to abuse by national
governments, including Nazi Germany. European courts have interpreted
the postwar European Convention on Human Rights as giving individuals
near-absolute control over their personal information.

Quid-pro-quo privacy is showing up most frequently in the travel
industry. Heathrow and Frankfurt airports are among several world-wide
gearing up for trials of the same iris-recognition system installed at
Schiphol. Those tests will be limited to fairly small numbers of
individuals, such as frequent fliers of British Airways and Virgin
Atlantic at Heathrow.

But Schiphol hopes eventually to extend the iris-detection system to
everyone who uses the airport and believes people would be willing to
pay for the service. Eventually, airport authorities want to offer some
50,000 people who use the system incentives that go beyond speedier
passport checks. Passengers could pay for duty-free goods or parking
fees by staring into iris-recognition cameras; the charges would be
automatically deducted from credit cards.

Though many consumers may not think about it, some people have been
making privacy trade-offs for years. For instance, department stores
offer credit cards at very low interest in exchange for being able to
keep tabs on peoples' spending habits. Sweepstakes operators offer
prizes in exchange for names and addresses that they can collect and
sell as mailing lists.

But these trade-offs weren't always made explicit, leading to an
avalanche of junk mail and complaints that the companies were abusing
their position.

Tom Windmuller, director of an International Air Transport Association
group that is promoting tests of the iris-recognition systems at
airports, promises the new travel technologies won't be intrusive. "Some
people are going to wonder, 'Are they stealing my soul?'" he says. But
he says experience shows that "for those who do, the perceived benefit
completely overrides any lingering concerns they might have."

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