Forget about the soul. The eyes soon will be windows to a police record. Reported in the Salt Lake Tribune.

The Davis County Sheriff’s Office on Monday debuted a new iris-scanning technology it will use to track and identify convicted criminals. It also could be used to find missing children or senior citizens.

The Davis sheriff’s office is the first of 45 sheriff’s offices nationwide to receive the technology, which uses a camera to take a high-quality image of the colored portion of the eye that surrounds the black pupil.

Images are scanned into a computer and become part of an online national database to which Davis County also has gained access. A $10,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant through the National Sheriffs’ Association paid for the technology.

“We’re anxious to start using this new high-tech tool,” Sheriff Bud Cox said.

Iris scanning will help public-safety agencies identify and track criminals more quickly, effectively and easily than traditional methods of fingerprinting or testing DNA, said BI2 Technologies President Sean Mullin, whose company makes the equipment.

Iris scanning produces more precise biological information than fingerprinting, he said, adding finger pads can be altered to change the print. The database increases “the ability to share data not just in Utah and not just in the region, but across the United States,” Mullin said.

The technology’s use has grown during the past four years. It now is used in nearly 200 agencies across the country, he said, noting there are nearly 300,000 convicted criminals in the database.Davis County said it will begin scanning the eyes of Davis County Jail inmates. It also will make the technology available to families who’d like their children’s or elderly parents’ information to be part of the nationwide database for use if they become lost or confused and unable to identify themselves.

Children’s scans would be kept until they turn 18 (or longer if the child is missing or has a medical condition that hampers their self-awareness). Iris scans of the elderly would be kept until age 125.

Cox said parents given copies of their children’s fingerprints at safety fairs can lose them. The new technology offers a quick way for parents to help safety officers identify their children.

A Salt Lake City civil liberties attorney urges caution. He doesn’t believe the government should collect data about children.

“With regard to the criminal, it makes sense the government maintain that record,” attorney Brian Barnard said, “but in regard to the innocent child, let the parent keep [the iris scan].”

He called a national database of children’s information “government encroachment,” and added there is potential for the government to misuse the data.

Davis County has no plans to make the scans mandatory, but rather would make them available for interested parents at community events and county fairs.

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The New South Wales Department of Corrective Services will implement mandatory iris scanning and fingerprinting across its 32 prisons to help verify visitor identities, according to a report from CIO.com.au.

Biometric verification will be centralised for 14 prisons over the next 18 months under a $1.5 million project. The technology has been used for about a decade to assist with visitor identity validation.

Director of asset management Peter Hay said biometrics is required to accurately identify visitors.“Our long term plan is to bring all the facilities under… a single point of biometric truth,” Hay said.  “[Biometrics] is the only way to best verify identities.”

Visitors to state prisons including maximum security goals Long Bay and Silverwater Womens must verify their identities against iris scanners and fingerprint machines on entry … The department will also install kiosks to allow inmates to check serving time and account information, and plans to integrate the biometric validation system with its inmate management systems and external state law enforcement agency databases like Crimtrac by mid next year.  Hay said the department has overcome initial collaboration difficulties across the state prisons …

The department has 6500 staff and manages some $2 billion in assets and about 10,000 inmates.

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The New South Wales Department of Corrective Services is looking to integrate the fingerprint and iris detection systems used across several of its 34 prisons.  Story from IT News.

With 10,000 inmates and 400,000 visitors in New South Wales prisons every year, the Department of Corrective Services’ biggest challenge is positive correct identification of all persons arriving and leaving a correctional centre. Peter Hay, director of asset management at the Department told the Biometrics Institute conference today that several maximum and medium security prisons in New South Wales use fingerprint and iris scanning to verify the identity of visitors to its facilities. But these systems, he said, were built by different vendors, using different templates with the data stored in different databases. “At the moment we are operationally linked, but not technically,” he said. Hay has been charged with upgrading the hardware and software in 14 of these systems in a project due to be complete by June.

Alongside the upgrade, the Department is shelling out $1.5 million to link its various biometric systems into a proposed “single point of biometric truth”, to be controlled from a central facility in Sydney. The project has been in the planning for ”a challenging 12 months”, Hay said, as it has meant convincing five separate product vendors to “work closely together for a common solution.” NSW prisons use biometric devices from Argus Solutions and Biometric Innovations, templates from Sagem and LG and an offender management system from Syscon Justice …

The integration work is expected to completed by the end of October. By 2010, Hay said the department will aim to link this consolidated system with the department’s Inmate Management Systems and eventually with the systems of other NSW law enforcement agencies (such as NSW Police’s COPS and CrimTrac). The Department will also install inmate kiosks within the prisons where prisoners can “register to see such information as how long they have left to serve or the status of their account.”

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• New York City DOC plans to move closer to Rikers, and relocate 3,000 inmates.
• In Abu Dhabi, the government is adding a range of biometrics to the national ID card.

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The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people’s physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.

The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information — from palm prints to eye scans. Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI’s Biometric Services section chief, said adding to the database is “important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbors, our children so they can have good jobs, and have a safe country to live in.”

The FBI already has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, the bureau wants to compare palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes. The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect. A lot will depend on how quickly technology is perfected, according to Thomas Bush, the FBI official in charge of the Clarksburg, West Virginia, facility where the FBI houses its current fingerprint database. “Fingerprints will still be the big player,” Bush, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told CNN. But he added, “Whatever the biometric that comes down the road, we need to be able to plug that in and play.”

First up, he said, are palm prints. The FBI has already begun collecting images and hopes to soon use these as an additional means of making identifications. Countries that are already using such images find 20 percent of their positive matches come from latent palm prints left at crime scenes, the FBI’s Bush said. The FBI has also started collecting mug shots and pictures of scars and tattoos. These images are being stored for now as the technology is fine-tuned. All of the FBI’s biometric data is stored on computers 30-feet underground in the Clarksburg facility. In addition, the FBI could soon start comparing people’s eyes — specifically the iris, or the colored part of an eye — as part of its new biometrics program called Next Generation Identification.

Nearby, at West Virginia University’s Center for Identification Technology Research, researchers are already testing some of these technologies that will ultimately be used by the FBI. “The best increase in accuracy will come from fusing different biometrics together,” said Bojan Cukic, the co-director of the center.

But it’s unnerving to privacy experts.

“It’s the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project. “People who don’t think mistakes are going to be made I don’t think fly enough,” said Steinhardt. He said thousands of mistakes have been made with the use of the so-called no-fly lists at airports — and that giving law enforcement widespread data collection techniques should cause major privacy alarms. “There are real consequences to people,” Steinhardt said.

You don’t have to be a criminal or a terrorist to be checked against the database.

More than 55 percent of the checks the FBI runs involve criminal background checks for people applying for sensitive jobs in government or jobs working with vulnerable people such as children and the elderly, according to the FBI. The FBI says it hasn’t been saving the fingerprints for those checks, but that may change. The FBI plans a so-called “rap-back” service in which an employer could ask the FBI to keep the prints for an employee on file and let the employer know if the person ever has a brush with the law. The FBI says it will first have to clear hurdles with state privacy laws, and people would have to sign waivers allowing their information to be kept.

Critics say people are being forced to give up too much personal information. But Lawrence Hornak, the co-director of the research center at West Virginia University, said it could actually enhance people’s privacy. “It allows you to project your identity as being you,” said Hornak. “And it allows people to avoid identity theft, things of that nature.”

There remains the question of how reliable these new biometric technologies will be.

A 2006 German study looking at facial recognition in a crowded train station found successful matches could be made 60 percent of the time during the day. But when lighting conditions worsened at night, the results shrank to a success rate of 10 to 20 percent. As work on these technologies continues, researchers are quick to admit what’s proven to be the most accurate so far. “Iris technology is perceived today, together with fingerprints, to be the most accurate,” said Cukic. But in the future all kinds of methods may be employed. Some researchers are looking at the way people walk as a possible additional means of identification.

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• Securus secures Lamar County TX inmate telephones contract
• Face ID and iris scanning get small delivery platform.
• Knox County TN Probation staff complain about violent criminals assigned to Electronic Monitoring with no rules.
• Fayette County PA reduced cell-rental costs from $262,000 in 2005 to less than $9,000 last year.

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• The British Prisons Services is embarking on a three-year study that will look into possible links between prison diet and inmate violence.
• Utah legislators decide on “pilot program” for sex offender supervision.
• New identification technology (iris scanning) used by police criticized as invasive.

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Maricopa County’s 4th Avenue Jail has begun using iris scanning ID techniques, but not on the inmates:

In an effort to keep close tabs on some of its employees with high level security clearance, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has placed iris scanners in some critical locations inside the jail. “This is to get away from keys, get away from swipe-cards that are easily misplaced or lost,” said Deputy Doug Matteson … Matteson said the iris scans will soon act as time cards, able to track the moment a jail employee clocks into work. We know who is on duty and who is off duty, and we’re going to advance the system in the near future,” Matteson said.

The Fourth Avenue Jail is the primary booking and transition center for the County in Arizona, seeing some 6,000 to 8,000 inmates each month. See the full story from KNXV-TV in Phoenix.

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From WVEC.com:

Norfolk jails are taking a gadget used often in television and movies and applying it to the real world, keeping prisoners from escaping.

A scanner will read the inmates’ eyes and the computer will memorize their information. Then, when someone goes in or out, officials will know who it is without a shadow of a doubt. “The eye is just like a fingerprint,” said Major Mike O’Toole of the Norfolk Sheriff’s Department. “Everybody has an individual eye that’s different.”

The Norfolk Sheriff’s Department spent $30,000 to buy the iris scanning system. “We felt it was the leading technology and most accurate,” said O’Toole. “I think it’s an excellent investment.” Right now, deputies must rely on questions and photos to properly identify the 30,000 inmates. “Pictures are sometimes a problem because a person’s locked up for a long time, and their physical appearance can change,” said O’Toole.

Officials learned that lesson the hard way back in 2006, when one inmate posed as another and escaped. Deputies caught him just a few hours later, but now the jail isn’t taking any chances. “Most large jails have a problem with it, and that’s why we’re looking at this technology.” Soon, cameras will be clicking on corneas every day in Norfolk like they used to only in the movies. The Sheriff’s Department hopes to have the new system up and running by the end of next month.

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A growing number of sheriff’s departments are usi9ng irtis scanning technology to identify inmates, sex offenders, and many others.

More than 2,100 departments in 27 states are taking digital pictures of eyes and storing the information in databases that can be searched later to identify a missing person or someone who uses a fake name … At least 10 metro areas are doing scans of criminals to identify them should another crime occur or to be sure the right inmate is released. “This is the wave of the future. This will become as common as fingerprinting,” says Sheriff Greg Solano of Santa Fe County, N.M.

Read more at USA Today.

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