Biometrics – IPS, the Flat Earth Society and transformational cosmology

With some people, you can give them any amount of evidence, they will continue to believe that the earth is flat.

Failure rates of 19 and 20 and 31 and 52% clearly scupper IPS’s plans for the NIS. Millions of us would be unable to prove our right to work in the UK if that proof depended on biometrics, we would be unable to obtain non-emergency state healthcare and our children would be barred from state education.

Faced with revolution, the government would have to abandon the NIS. Logic, maths, science, a basic understanding of technology, businesslike common sense, an adult sense of responsibility, simple truth-telling and a desire to preserve institutional credibility and dignity all suggest that the NIS should have been abandoned on the day the biometrics enrolment trial report was published [5].

Instead, what did IPS say when the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee confronted them with these failure rates? According to the Committee’s July 2006 report, IPS said that the key findings of their biometrics enrolment trial were not key findings, and that the trial was not a test of the reliability of biometrics, but only a test of their usability (para.88) [6].

If it wasn’t a test of reliability, why are the reliability figures reported as key findings? Why would IPS want to test usability but not reliability? Surely they wouldn’t deploy the NIS with biometrics that are congenial to everyone but just don't happen to work. And what is this distinction between reliability and usability? For 300 pages, the May 2005 report discusses usability almost entirely in terms of reliability.

Despite the polite and sensible entreaties of the Committee, no large-scale field trial of the reliability of flat print fingerprinting has been subsequently conducted by IPS. If the biometrics enrolment trial was not a reliability test, then there is still no evidence to support IPS’s claim that flat print fingerprinting can deliver their vainglorious ambition [7].

Logic, maths, science, etc … all having been abandoned, IPS told the Committee, not quite that the earth is flat, but that the maximum acceptable false non-match rate for flat print fingerprinting is 1% (para.18) and they pointed the Committee (p.126ff) to a May 2004 report written by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Following 9/11, the newly established US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designed US-VISIT, a biometrics-based scheme to protect the US border from infiltration by malevolent aliens. NIST conducted a computer-based trial of flat print fingerprinting to predict the success of US-VISIT. They estimated that the technology would successfully verify identity 99.5% of the time. That is equivalent to a false non-match rate of 0.5%, well within IPS’s 1% limit [8].

In December 2004, the US Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reviewed the statistics for the first year of operation of US-VISIT. On average, 118,000 people a day presented themselves to primary inspection at the borders. Primary inspection is largely a biometrics check. If the false non-match rate is 0.5%, you would expect 590 of them to fail and to be referred to secondary inspection by human beings. The actual figure was 22,350 failures. 19%. Just like in the UKPS biometrics enrolment trial [9].

NIST provide no support for IPS. They predicted something like 0.5% and the outcome was more like 19%. The idea that the methodology used in their May 2004 report is a reliable way of forecasting the outcome in the field is thoroughly discredited [10].