Dept. of Homeland Security To Test Iris Scanners 221
SonicSpike writes "The Homeland Security Department plans to test futuristic iris scan technology that stores digital images of people's eyes in a database and is considered a quicker alternative to fingerprints. The department will run a two-week test in October of commercially sold iris scanners at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, where they will be used on illegal immigrants, said Arun Vemury, program manager at the department's Science and Technology branch. 'The test will help us determine how viable this is for potential (department) use in the future,' Vemury said."
!better (Score:5, Funny)
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Brought to you by all those people who thought this administration would be better than the last.
LMAO. Also brought to you by the folks at Diebold, makers of the hackable electronic voting device. Now taking bets on how long it will take to hack into our iris scanners.
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The choice was between Obama and McCain, not Obama and GWB. So, this is bought to you by the people that thought that this administration would be better than the Mc
Yes, business as usual (Score:3, Insightful)
From my non-American point of view, the difference between American Liberals and Republicans is like the difference between getting bitten by a cobra or mauled by a bear. One might be somewhat less painful than the other but the end result is not that different. From what I have seen, it does not matter who is the American president or from what party he is from since all of them will stick to the status quo on foreign policies (preserving American "greatness") while also eroding the rights of not only Amer
They can scan our irises (Score:2)
Why is this so horrible? Several years ago, I planted some very nice dwarf irises, and they're doing well. We'd welcome the government people who want to come over and scan the cute little things when they're in full bloom. They'll be up some time in March, but of course we don't know when exactly. Maybe there's an email address we can write to about this? We'd be happy to notify them that our irises are up.
If everyone cooperated with this, and with the government's help, we could flood the country wit
Re:!worse (Score:4, Insightful)
its not worse either
That rather depends on your vantage point, now doesn't it? GWB never tried to tell me that I must buy a product from a for-profit industry.....
and whats it got to do with this new administration, really?
Who do you think runs Homeland Security? The underpants gnomes?
Re:!worse (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:!worse (Score:5, Funny)
http://4gifs.com/gallery/d/146816-2/Al-Qaeda_USA_Iraq.gif [4gifs.com]
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Re:!worse (Score:5, Insightful)
What a surprise. You remembered the people killed on 9/11 but you forgot all of the US and allied service-members and innocent civilians killed by the wars.
Hundreds of thousands have died. Millions have been displaced. And our country's treasury has been raided. I don't think Halliburton caused the wars, but I do know they have conducted themselves as war profiteers. And that is a vile crime.
Not buy oil? HA! (Score:2)
I can choose whether or not I buy oil.
No you can't. Virtually every product available today depends directly or indirectly on oil or oil derived products. Gasoline, fertilizer, plastics, diesel, lubricants, fabrics and many more are all produced from oil. Even the food you eat and the water you drink depends on oil in order to produce it and get it to market. The manufacture of any power production equipment requires oil at some point in the process. Claiming you can choose not to buy oil is somewhat like claiming you can choose not to bre
Go ahead and try! (Score:2)
With the exception of fabrics you haven't named a single product that I can't live without, albeit with varying degrees of difficulty. There are also fabrics (hemp comes to mind) that don't rely on oil.
Think so? Good luck with that. I would love to see you try to live up to your boast. I'm pretty sure you would fail miserably.
Bear in mind that you will have to live as a subsistence farmer or hunter/gatherer in the most primitive conditions you can imagine. You will not be able to utilize steel or any other metal because you can't get them today without oil. You'll have to forage for seeds because modern agriculture is completely oil dependent. You will not be able to utilize rubber, most fabrics, mo
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you haven't named a single product that I can't live without
The number of people truly capable of living in the US without consuming petroleum-based products is incredibly small. While you could theoretically live without it, in practice I would bet almost anything you do not actually possess the skills and resources to do so. Having the choice to try and do so isn't the same thing. You can choose to try and fly to the moon. Without the proper skills and resources, though, it's a forgone conclusion that hav
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Fact is, the majority of uninsured people can't pay for insurance.
I'll cite my reference when you cite yours.
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1. The EPA blocked the ships, not Obama.
2. They fixed that and the foreign skimmer ships have actually been operating for months now. (Go look it up from somewhere other than fox news)
Also, don't give me any bullshit about "Obama could have signed an executive order and overrode the EPA". Yes, Obama could have violated numerous checks and balances and completely overstepped his authority but you c
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I agree, but "routine expenses" are not on the order of thousands of dollars. Sure, an oil change is, what, about $30. A doctor's visit is somewhere in the ballpark of $300. God forbid that you're sick and need lab tests done for $500 each. The medicine to cure your disease, something like $700 a bottle.
All this for a "routine" expense like strep throat.
Furthermore, you're being "taxed" by private companies as is. Really sick,
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Translation: I use insurance like everyone else and have absolutely no idea how the fuck I would pay for healthcare without it. I don't make $500,000 per year and can't pay for medical expenses out of pocket but I hate Obama so I'm using this argument of convenience.
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especially one led by a legal scholar
You mean the same legal scholar with the anti-gun voting record? The one that voted for retroactive immunity for telecommunications corporations that broke the law? The one that thinks the commerce clause gives the Federal Government the power to compel the citizenry to do business with for-profit enterprise? The one that thinks the 1st amendment doesn't apply when citizens band together under the guise of a corporation?
That legal scholar?
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Dunno. From my northern vantage point here in delicious Canada, I knew it wasn't going to be better. I knew in fact based on his previous history, and lack of experience it was going to be worse. You guys got a "Iggy lite", which of course means that he's got no real world experience, and believes that government intervention in all things is the only proper way to solve any issue. And when there's actual issues at hand, he's no where to be found and letting anyone else deal with it so he has no blame.
B
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Have you forgotten the Florida recount fiasco
That wasn't really the administration, as much as it was inherent silliness in our electoral procedures. That a presidential election can turn into a 'fisaco' is the root of the problem.
falsified WMD claims, unprovoked war in Iraq, downplaying of civilian causalities, torture of prisoners, McCarthyism in a different name, stripping of the rights of LGBTs, the USA PATRIOT Act, illegal wiretapping, harassment of the media, payoffs of the media, stripping of bankruptcy protection, and the alienation of our allies?
You win this round AC.
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That wasn't really the administration, as much as it was inherent silliness in the actions of the Bush/Cheney campaign.
FTFY
FTFY
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The Bush/Cheney campaign wasn't the one that tried to cherry pick which districts got recounts. There's only one person that deserves the credit (or blame) for electing GWB. His name is Al Gore.
That is, if you ignore all of those votes being thrown out from BS challenges, voter intimidation, etc. I'm not trying to devolve this into some partisan argument, but the Florida Republican party has much to answer for during that election.
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Actually, since you apparently have either a case of amnesia or willful ignorance, Clinton signed Don't Ask Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act basically because that is the best he could get with Newty and the rest of the Repugs who were hell-bent on their Contract on America.
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What's going to stop them (Score:3, Insightful)
From deciding this is a great idea and putting it everywhere? They already fingerprint (foreigners), so iris scanning isn't really that far off. I won't bore you anymore with the slippery slope argument, I think we all know where this is going.
I wonder what it'll take to rally the docile United States citizens to fight back. You guys have guns and shit, don't you? Maybe you should go confederate on the government's ass.
Re:What's going to stop them (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll try.
They'll get sued.
The courts will see it as an invasion wherever it's an invasion, and as valid wherever it's valid, and will screw up the fringe cases that will become controversial until an apellate court gets it right or the Supreme Court does what the GOP chose them to do.
This ain't America's first rodeo.
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The courts will probably rule that you have no expectation of your privacy when you are outside of your own home like they have ruled for just about everything else. Remember, this is the same court that allows warrant-less GPS devices to be placed on your cars. (http://articles.cnn.com/2010-08-27/justice/oregon.gps.surveillance_1_gps-device-appeals-chief-judge-alex-kozinski?_s=PM:CRIME)
The idea that courts will cle
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The courts will probably rule that you have no expectation of your privacy when you are outside of your own home like they have ruled for just about everything else. Remember, this is the same court that allows warrant-less GPS devices to be placed on your cars. (http://articles.cnn.com/2010-08-27/justice/oregon.gps.surveillance_1_gps-device-appeals-chief-judge-alex-kozinski?_s=PM:CRIME)
That's because they're right. You don't have a right not to be followed around by the police, even if they do it sneakil
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It isn't a game of semantics. If you're illogical, then what you say you expect is irrelevant. You have no logical expectation of privacy when you leave your blinds open or drive around in public. Those are the opposite of privacy.
And no, you shouldn't trust the government. It's made of people, and people, as you demonstrate, sometimes don't understand the things that are written down for them to understand, and prefer to impose their own interpretation.
Meanwhile, the government is not a monolith. It's
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I'll take Judaical review over "proportional" representation any day of the week. Proportional representation gives too much power to political parties. Political parties under such systems tend to be much more monolithic entities than they are in the United States.
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Proportional representation allows e
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It is a lot easier to bribe and individual than it is to bribe an entire organization. For example, if I vote for a Republican am I getting someone like Ron Paul or someone like John McCain or someone like George
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You mean like how the independents just decided who got to be prime-minister in Australia?
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No no, you misunderstood.
I don't mean independent voters (non-registered I think? I'm not entirely familiar with the American system), I mean independent politicians.
These are politicians who aren't members of a political party. Typically they are people who were formerly members of a party and left for whatever reason but hold enough local support to get back into government.
In this particular case I suppose it's more the result of the batshit crazy method Australians use for their elections than proportio
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proportional representation
The U.S. also has proportional representation. If your Congressional district can elect a third-party candidate, he will be seated in Congress.
The U.S. doesn't have a "two-party" system for any reason other than two parties have a lot more political skill than any third party does.
What the U.S. has that other countries don't have is direct election of the President (well, sort-of direct; there's an Electoral College in the way, but its flaws are subtle enough that nobody brings t
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This. I think the real problem with the US system is less the lack of proportional representation, and more the way the votes are counted. The result is that even if there was a skilled third party, it would be more difficult for any of its members to actually get voted in than it would in other countries.
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Under Bush the Radiant, government argued -and the courts followed that to some extent- that constitutional rights are citizen rights not general human rights. (One of the reasonings why imprisonment without court decision is ok). Since Obama the Kenian follows his predecessor when it comes to law&order-crap, my guess is that the iris scan will be extended to residents that aren't citizens (green card holders). If that goes okay, it will be extended to c
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Obama the Kenian follows his predecessor when it comes to law&order
I was listening until you went off into the generalistic weeds.
Obama is not following Bush. He's trying to extricate the government from Bush's stupid choices on law without simultaneously removing its power to govern. In some cases Obama's justice department has followed the Bush course, intending the courts to decide against Bush's ideals. That leaves the case decided, since the Obama government won't appeal it the way the Bush gove
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In some cases Obama's justice department has followed the Bush course, intending the courts to decide against Bush's ideals.
True. I give you that. And Obama is not another Bush. But your picture isn't accurate either. X-ray scanners came under Obama and the homeland/patriotism paranoia is still going on. To narrow my overly generalistic claim a bit: Obama accepts enough of the Bush era status quo, to put the US in a civil rights condition that wouldn't have been conceivable 10 years ago and that as long as it goes on, creates by itself a climate that makes it possible for things to worsen.
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The scanner issue is silly sensationalism that's gone overboard because nads are involved and the media have the maturity level of an adolescent. Flying on commercial transport is a choice, not a right. Meanwhile, the price of a small error in the air is hundreds of lives lost. If the idea that someone might see a grey outline of your nads while looking for weapons disgusts you, then stay on the ground. The idea of hundreds of people dying because some whackjob gets a box cutter onto a flight disgusts m
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Actually, they already do iris scanning for legal immigrants. You get your fingerprints (all 10) and iris scanned whenever you get your permanent residence card. I think the difference is that they're going to start iris scanning and fingerprinting illegal immigrants.
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They scanned my iris in Houston airport back in 2005. At least, that's my understanding of why I had to take off my glasses and look a camera in the eye at very close range - and I think iris scanning is more advanced as a biometric than retina scanning. So I'm bemused as to what's new.
Is uncertainty a practical function? (Score:2)
I think instilling uncertainty in leadership is a practical function of civilian weapons ownership.
I could be wrong.
Our leaders could be that stupid.
Then again all their security might just be that good.
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Who said anything about entering in an unauthorised fashion?
The difference is what constitutes an authorised entry! The US takes photos and all ten fingerprints of anyone entering at its entry points. Other countries obviously also have customs entry/exit points (noone is denying that). But they don't treat you like a criminal right from the outset by taking all ten of your damn fingerprints! That level of suspicion and paranoia is truly unique to the US. Most other countries, your passport and visa is good
Hello Mr. Yukkamoto (Score:3, Insightful)
GAP Sign: Hello Mr. Yukkamoto and welcome back to the GAP!
John Anderton: *Mr. Yukkamoto?*
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I guess he really has his father's eyes.
How nice. Pretty iris flowers (Score:2)
Finally! The US government is putting technology to work for good in scanning flowers...I can only assume that it will be used for public art displays?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_(plant) [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Already Used In The UK... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not that I have, or ever am likely to, commit a crime ever but an iris scan isn't going to put me at the scene of a crime or give much away to a private health insurance company looking for any excuse to up my premiums.
You know what, that's actually pretty insightful. I'm against biometrics in general for government tracking, but you make a good point that an iris scan, unlike dna and fingerprints isn't something that you casually strew around everywhere you go.
It does genuinely seem like one of the least e
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Plus I always find it amusing that many people who get paranoid about biometric data will still carry things like store loyalty cards that seem to do nothing more harmful than give purchase discounts.
A store loyalty card tracks why I buy at that store. It stops tracking me when I leave the store.
They already have low tech measures (people) watching customers move the store to see what path they take, and how long they spend in each area, etc. Using technology to do this lets them do more people at once... b
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A store that is big enough to give you a loyalty card has probably already done enough damage to your social environment
The independant car wash at the end of the street has a loyalty card. After I buy 10 washes I get the 11th free. Its integrated into their POS system and I assume they can do all sorts of data profiling to see which add-on options I bought, whether I got a snack or a coffee while I waited, how often I get a car wash, exterior only vs in-and-out vs full wax... whatever. I'm ok with that.
I t
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Here in the UK, we have a saying of "clone towns" where small businesses in town centres were trashed as a result of price-cutting out-of-town hypermarkets leaving a lot of empty properties that the big chain stores and theme bars could move into - thus many town centres in the UK look identical now.
Towns are dead, their main customers are the unemployed and old people, noone else has the time.
I got back from Holiday last week on Wednesday, about 8PM. Tesco was the only store open, so I went in and did a sm
Minority Report (Score:2)
At last, personalized mall marketing!
Okay somebody tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
How many times have you heard of people leaving their iris prints on a doorknob, or wine glass, or a gun?
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For example, it will start with mandatory scans for passports and airports, then all border crossings, then even bus and train stations and amusement parks, and where can they take it from there?
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-Target macro movement (walking, sitting, fidgeting, etc)
-Target "micro" movement (blinking, eye darting, etc)
-Optical angles (incidence, refraction)
-Optical resolution (microns over meters)
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What if you get Cheetos in your eye?
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How many people have close-up photos & videos of themselves scattered across facebook, flickr, youtube, etc?
Huh? (Score:2)
TFA says range is 3-6 feet (Score:2)
Age of Minority Report?
Well, at least not until they compile a database with everyone's confirmed identity and a gaggle of biometric data to go with it.
(Don't you hate it when people answer their own question? I do.)
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Oh yay (Score:2)
If this is anything like retina scanning, they're just scanning the eye for 360(or a multiple of) arc samples and storing the average value, maybe 12 bits greyscale or 12 bits RGB.
Consider the amount of variability(or lack thereof) of your iris. No zebra red/blue stripes.
Consider how much your eyes look like your parents'/mailman's eyes.
Consider how much the scanner fudges for head rotation and eye movement.
What's the false positive rate?
Get rid of illegal immigration... (Score:2)
It is a bit like the piracy debate, make it a pain to buy legitimate content and suddenly piracy is attractive. Make the legitimate content easier to buy and give no advantag
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Why can the DHS and the rest of the government spend so much money on fences and stuff but don't strike at the root of illegal immigration: The fact that legal immigration is full of problems.
That's not the root of illegal immigration. The root of illegal immigration is the lack of enforcement of employment law. Make it impossible for illegal immigrants to work and the problem will solve itself without a fence.
Illegal immigration is from economic imbalance (Score:3, Insightful)
The root of illegal immigration is the lack of enforcement of employment law.
The root of illegal immigration is economic imbalance. More money and higher paying jobs exist in the US than exist in Mexico. Accordingly we should expect to see people migrating to where the economic opportunity happens to be. It's like osmosis - people will move in the direction of money an opportunity. Laws can do little more than slow the movement. Expecting people to obey the law when the alternative is abject poverty and possible starvation is absurd. We don't have a problem with Canadian's imm
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You're right as far as you go, but you're ignoring the role of NAFTA in destroying Mexico's economy.
Government-subsidized U.S. farms destroyed the small Mexican corn farmers.
The big U.S. electrical construction companies, with their monopoly powers and government subsidies, came down and out-competed Mexican electrical contractors. I met a Mexican electrical contractor who came to New York (legally) because he couldn't make a living in Mexico any more. He said they didn't take bids any more, they told you h
Tough policing will not solve immigration ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why we need to take that economic opportunity away from them unless they play by our rules.
Unless you plan to make illegal immigration a capital crime, you will not stop it no matter how well you enforce the laws. The economic incentives greatly outweigh the consequences. If the choice is between starvation and breaking immigration laws, the choice is easy.
It's not our job to help Mexico build up its economy.
No it's not required but that doesn't make it a bad idea. We didn't have to help Europe or Japan after WWII either but it was a good idea to do so. An economically healthy Mexico would benefit the US far more than the few illegal migrant wo
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Unless you plan to make illegal immigration a capital crime, you will not stop it no matter how well you enforce the laws.
You don't attack the immigrant, you attack the employer that's breaking the laws by hiring him. Make it more expensive to hire illegal labor than legal labor and business will stop doing so.
Besides, you misunderstand me. I'm pro-immigration. My Libertarian inclination is for nearly unfettered immigration. I say that we should let them all in legally as long as they aren't a terrorist or criminal. My only issue is with the hypocrisy of our existing laws and the lack of enforcement thereof. It's not fa
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Unless you plan to make illegal immigration a capital crime, you will not stop it no matter how well you enforce the laws. The economic incentives greatly outweigh the consequences. If the choice is between starvation and breaking immigration laws, the choice is easy.
Set the minimum wage for illegal immigrants to $20/hour. Make employers liable even if they don't know their employees are illegal. Set damages appropriately high for going below this wage, and force them to pay the wages retroactively if an employee is discovered to be illegal.
BAM! I just offloaded most of the cost of enforcing the laws onto the employers, and the manpower onto the lawyers.
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The USA doesn't have the resources to help them much
Sure we do. If you are thinking just dumping money on them you're thinking about the wrong things. I'm talking about helping them grow their economy. Trade. Sharing of technology. Investment in their companies and them investing here.
And yes, if the US government didn't support illegal immigration it would be entirely possible to stop.
It's not a law enforcement problem. Never has been. We have a much longer unprotected border with Canada and yet we don't have Canadians coming across the border illegally. Why? Same laws apply to them. The reason they don't immigrate illegally is there is no economic
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No, the root of illegal immigration is that the US is full of teh awsum and every other country in the world (but especially those south of the Rio Grande) are full of teh suck!
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The flaw in your logic is that it bears no relation to the real world. 99.99% of legitimate content can be trivially purchased at either your local big box store or your favorite online retailer. Yet it's pirated anyway.
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A) I agree, many people pirate because they can. That's unfortunate, but nothing new. And that doesn't imply that if pirating were illegal they would buy things instead -- their budget for content is probably very similar with or without pirating. So without pirating people would just consume less unique content, or would consume more legitimately free content.
B) Most of the stuff I pirate is *not* available in stores. I rarely pirate anything that I can buy. Occasionally I'll pirate something that is techn
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There are many cases where the law, not the people need to change.
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Illegal immigration, by definition, selects for people who are willing to break US laws.
Which I might note, is almost everyone. If a law is unjust, it will be broken.
The eyes have it (Score:2)
Don't cut out my eyeball, bro!
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That's the first hack (literally!) people think of, but an iris scanner won't work on a disembodied eyeball. The iris will be fully dilated.
Of course, if you need to go somewhere controlled by an iris scanner just after a visit to the ophthalmologist... oops!
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I always wondered if they would still work after you had an iridectomy. http://www.eyecharity.com/images/iridectomy_montage.jpg [eyecharity.com]
It won't work on pilots (Score:2)
Propaganda (Score:2)
s/illegal immigrants/illegal aliens/
HTH!
WARNING!!! (Score:2)
Warning! Do not look directly into iris scanner with remaining good eye!
Scanning illegal immigrants (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds great, (Score:2)
but the TSA will be administering them rectally.
Oh the irony of technologies of abundance... (Score:3, Informative)
... used to enforce artificial boundaries. If we have the technology to make iris scanners, made with very delicate nanoscale components, doing immense amounts of pattern matching, hooked to a huge networked database, then we have enough technology to make a world of abundance for everyone, and essentially, there is no reason to restrict immigration anywhere in the world, and no need for wars over resources, etc. Something I wrote related to that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
A quicker alternative to fingerprints? (Score:2, Informative)
This page brought to you by Shakrai (Score:2)
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This [wikimedia.org] is an iris scan.
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