It seems that terrorism is going to get more and more difficult - in part thanks to new automated systems in development at the University of Buffalo.

These systems would use a wide range of biometric identifiers including facial, voice and gait in order to determine the likelihood that a given person is about to commit an act of terrorism.

“The goal is to identify the perpetrator in a security setting before he or she has the chance to carry out the attack,” said Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Govindaraju is co-principal investigator on the project with Mark G. Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

The project, recently awarded an $800,000 grant by the National Science Foundation, will focus on developing in real-time an accurate baseline of indicators specific to an individual during extensive interrogations while also providing real-time clues during faster, routine security screenings.

“We are developing a prototype that examines a video in a number of different security settings, automatically producing a single, integrated score of malfeasance likelihood,” he said.

Source

The Australian government is moving towards greater use of biometrics to prevent identity theft which costs A$1.1 billion (C$906 million) annually, the federal Attorney General Philip Ruddock said today.

Addressing the Biometrics Institute’s annual conference in Sydney, Ruddock said the Council of Australian Governments has agreed to investigate how biometric security measures could be adopted by all the state’s and territories.

This is part of the National Identity Security Strategy which aims to strengthen existing identity processes and to make sure procedures are consistent across the country.

It supports the establishment of a national A$28.3 million Document Verification Service announced in the recent federal budget. “We need to beat criminals at their own game and biometric identification can help us do this,” Ruddock said.

And while everyone has a right to privacy, Ruddock said, “There can be no greater invasion of a person’s privacy than the theft of their identity”. He said one challenge with biometric use is the lack of consistent standards.

Read more at InterGovWorld

AUSTRALIA - The detainment of Cornelia Rau - incorrectly adjudged to be a foreign national - could have been prevented by an upcoming smart card scheme, a Senate committee heard today.

Rau was held by immigration authorities for almost a year.  Patricia Scott, secretary for the Department of Human Services, is confident that the proposed Access card, containing biometric photo and other personal infomration, would have prevented the incident.

The card has been subject to the introduction of draft laws which are intended to culminate in the Access Card replacing the current Medicare cards, providing access to up to 16 government health and welfare services.

Source - News.com.au

Police in Miami have upgraded their biometric forensic tools with new kit from Motorola, enabling them to solve cases that have previously stalled, including seven murders.

The Miami-Dade Police Department said this week that it has upgraded its Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) to the latest Motorola Printrak Biometric Identification Solution.

The system offers enlarged storage capacity as well as increased descriptor data for each record resulting in increased accuracy.

The Miami-Dade agents have already noticed a 30 per cent increase in reverse search hits on the system, according to Glen Calhoun, superintendent of the Identification Section at Miami-Dade.

In an AFIS system, reverse searches are executed by comparing an arrested subject’s fingerprints against a database of unsolved crime scene prints, to see whether the arrested individual may be responsible for other unsolved crimes.

“After seeing these reverse search improvements, we re-entered 25 old cases and were able to solve seven homicides using the new system,” said Calhoun.

The Miami-Dade Motorola Printrak system is capable of storing fingerprint and palm-print data and has interfaces to cities within Miami-Dade County, as well as to the state system at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

3VR Security, Inc., the pioneers of searchable surveillance, today announced a new standard for intelligent video management across the enterprise. 3VR Version 5.0 is the industry’s first video surveillance platform to federate facial surveillance data enabling face watchlists, alerts, and searches across distributed systems. Version 5.0 also includes an API enabling integration and search of data across 3rd party systems like transaction management, POS, and access control. Other new features include enterprise system health monitoring, expanded video input support, and smaller, quieter hardware.”The largest drivers of loss, vulnerability, and operational cost stem from the inability effectively manage systems and share the critical intelligence across distributed environments,” said Stephen Russell, CEO of 3VR Security. “With Version 5.0, shared watchlists and federated searches can be deployed to stop suspects wherever and whenever they strike.”

Building on existing features, Version 5.0 expands 3VR’s leading facial surveillance features to include single-click publishing of watchlists and instant searches across distributed systems. The new API available in 5.0 allows users to search not only video data like people, objects, and activity, but also data from 3rd party systems. For retail banks this means linking faces to transactions across branches, even if a suspect assumes a false identity.

Other new features in Version 5.0 include:

“A unified, 360-degree view of user activity across physical and logical systems is a frequently neglected milestone in physical and logical integration,” noted Mark Diodati, Identity and Privacy Strategies Analyst for Burton Group. “Organizations interested in this milestone require a physical security event monitoring mechanism that can index activity, identify users, and integrate into their logical security event correlation systems.”