As anyone who commutes by train can tell you, mobile technology is responsible for any number of daily annoyances. I mean, do you really need to know what the chap next to you has planned for the weekend?
Perhaps it is for this reason that we at Consult Hyperion are so excited to be involved with a truly groundbreaking use of mobile technology: mobile fingerprinting.
Automatic fingerprint identification technology is already mature, and has in fact been used in law enforcement domains for several years now. In terms of law enforcement, the ability to identify people effectively at the point of encounter – without having to return to the station – is becoming increasingly important.
Instant knowledge
Having this ability not only saves the police a significant amount of time, but also has an impact on virtually all aspects of operational policing. For example, by confirming someone’s identity whilst out in the field, the police can instantly know whether they have already met a suspect before, and also can review what they know about him, such as whether he has a criminal record, whether he is likely to be armed and violent, and so on.
In addition, there are several knock-on effects that make mobile fingerprinting a very compelling prospect indeed. By being able to ID suspects quickly, there is no need to house suspects in cells until they can be identified.
Mobile ID also makes it much easier to verify that the correct person reports on bail – leading to improved offender compliance – and also gives the police the ability to help focus more quickly on the individuals of interest.
Reduced overheads
The net result of all this is that more police officers can be kept on the street, and bureaucracy overheads can be reduced along with the number of refused charges, wrongful arrests, and subsequent detention payments and litigation.
Mobile ID will also allow for the earlier release of innocent parties without the need for them to attend at police stations.
We know that using this approach to identify people works well because fingerprint details are unique to each person – and indeed each finger. In recent years, activity in the area of electronic fingerprint scanning has therefore focused on improving ease, accuracy and security of fingerprint capture.
Goodbye inkies
Recent developments in sensing technology have resulted in several ink-less (often referred to as ‘livescan’) fingerprint scanners.
Compared to the ink and paper-based methods traditionally used in law-enforcement environments, this technology is extremely easy to use, and the introduction of integrated circuits and other technologies has made it possible to shrink the sensor size to the area of a postage stamp, which means that sensors can now be fitted into laptops, mobile telephones and personal digital assistants easily.
However, compared to rolled prints and ten-print cards, these ‘flat-print’ sensors produce less information about a finger. Automatic identification of images of such small fingerprint portions requires complex algorithms similar to the algorithms used for conventional latent fingerprint identification used for marks found at the crime scenes.
Attention grabbers
Novel fingerprint capture techniques have been gaining attention to overcome the ease with which traditional ‘capacitance fingerprint-capture’ systems have been spoofed.
Such systems – including a non-contact 3-D imaging of all ten fingerprints in a single reading – are claiming to be able to collect prints of quality equivalent to traditional ‘rolled’ fingerprints used in policing.
Fingerprint systems using ultra-sound claim to accurately image a fingerprint and overcome problems with contaminates (ie, dirt and grease transferred from finger in the normal course of fingerprint capture).
Golden touch
For all of these reasons, recent news reports have revealed that every police force in the UK will soon be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners – handheld devices that allow police to carry out identity checks on people in the street – as part of a scheme called Project MIDAS (an acronym for Mobile Identification At Scene).
Consult Hyperion worked closely with the police to devise the roadmap for the introduction of the technology used in this scheme, and helped them demonstrate the outline business case for conducting identity checks on people in the street.
This technology is likely to be in widespread use within the next 18 months, and may eventually be able to receive pictures of suspects, as well.
Thousands of readers
In order to roll this technology out to the greatest number of police officers, tens of thousands of mobile readers – each about the size of a deck of cards – are expected to be distributed to police forces across the UK as part of the Project MIDAS scheme.
For obvious reasons, these devices needs to be robust, with size and weight kept to a minimum, and yet must be able to deliver speed and accuracy. At the same time, officers don’t want to be bogged down with too many different devices, and so manufacturers will increasingly need to focus on multi-functional devices that will help to rationalise and reduce the number of devices carried by officers.
Back in October, the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) went public with details of the type of equipment that the scheme will embrace, as well as the full scope of the project.
Rapdity
The initial phase of MIDAS will enable officers to perform checks on the fingerprints of people arrested or detained with amazing speed. By contrast, at the moment, officers have to take suspects to custody suites if they need to check fingerprints. On average, this procedure takes 67 minutes, according to a presentation given by the NPIA at Biometrics 2008.
The marks will be compared against records on Ident1, the national police database which holds information on 7.5 million individuals. For this reason, Project MIDAS is expected to save enormous amounts of police time and reduce the number of wrongful arrests.
Some US police forces are already using the technology. Thomas Smith, an officer from the Los Angeles police department, spoke at the Biometrics 2008 conference about the success of his force’s use of mobile ID devices which send images and fingerprint matches back to officers on the street.
He said they had become so powerful that once the machines were produced some suspects admitted they were lying about their identity.
Getting standard
In the US, there is a biometric smart card standard for Federal staff called PIV (FIPS 201). Consult Hyperion also worked with UK Police to recommend this standard for adoption by UK Police forces as a smart ID card and this was accepted.
In the future, we believe that this whole system could be joined up so that UK Police can be identified through their smart card in a mobile device and use their fingerprint stored on the card, rather than have to link back to the national fingerprint system over GPRS.
In the UK, mobile fingerprinting will give the police a full, mobile national capability to check identities. Project MIDAS has been designed to have the capacity to beam images of suspects back to officers on the streets to help confirm identifications.
Civil liberties
Unsurprisingly, Project MIDAS has already raised concerns regarding civil liberties and privacy concerns, but the police insist that fingerprints taken by the scanners will not be stored or added to databases.
Unfortunately, however, because police cannot store fingerprints beyond their immediate use, the process for presenting evidence in court will need to be thought through more carefully.
According to an article recently published in the Guardian, a limited trial of mobile police fingerprint devices, called Project Lantern, started in 2006, with 200 devices distributed and 30,000 checks performed.
They were deployed in police cars using automatic number plate recognition technology – stopping vehicles that were logged as stolen, having no insurance, no MOT or simply unknown. Fingerprint checks often showed they were carrying falsified documents, or had no license, no insurance, and so on.
This same article went on to say that the electronic searches, encrypted and sent over public networks, were usually returned to the mobile devices within two minutes; 97 per cent of searches were completed in five minutes.
Responses are graded as “high” or “medium”. If high, it shows the system is confident of a match; if medium, it could display up to three potential identities. The returned data includes the name, age and gender of the suspect if there is a match.
Huge opportunities
Aside from its use out in the field, there is a huge range of opportunities for police to use mobile ID in other ways. For example, mobile fingerprinting could be used on the deceased at the scene of a crime, on suspects for intelligence in the early part of an investigation, to check the identities of prisoners in transit, or even in a mortuary.
The technology to support all of these uses exists right now.
As is often the case, the real challenge will be to change behaviours, overcome objections, and maximise the benefits of this powerful way of ensuring an accurate – and instant – way of identifying people, for those working in the criminal justice sector and beyond.
