Security risk from ‘rigged face scans’
03.04.09
Airport face scanners designed to confirm the identity of passengers arriving in the UK have been ‘rigged’ to cut queues and are creating an ‘unacceptable’ security risk, the Times reports a confidential Whitehall e-mail has claimed. It says that UK border officials at Manchester Airport allege the machines have been recalibrated so that passengers shown as having just a 30% likeness to their passport photographs are being let into the country.
The devices are designed to check the faces of British and European passengers against their digital passports. However, they started to throw up false alarms because the software failed to match the faces of passengers with pictures on their passports as they stood in the booths. The newspaper reports that the machines were recalibrated from 80% to 30%, and that Rob Jenkins, one of Britain’s leading authorities on facial recognition, said such a reduction in the matching threshold would make the machines unable to distinguish between Osama Bin Laden and Winona Ryder, the Hollywood actress.
Mr Jenkins, a facial recognition expert at Glasgow University’s psychology department, said lowering the match level to just 30% would make the system almost worthless. A spokesman for the Home Office said: ‘We can categorically confirm the gates are making the same high level of checks as when the trials began last August.’
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