By Calvin Biesecker
The Defense Department’s Biometrics Task Force (BTF) is putting together a pilot project that would enroll and identify friendly forces in a biometric database as part of an effort to incorporate biometrics into access control procedures at military installations and facilities in the United States, the director of the office said last week.
The purpose of the ID Protect project would help DoD understand the technology, policy, and business administration of managing biometrics on the “blue side,” Myra Gray said at a biometrics conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. This includes protecting data and providing timely information to decision makers whether to grant or deny access to someone trying to enter a military base, she said.
The database for ID Protect is similar to the DoD’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which is supplied by Northrop Grumman [NOC] using a biometric matching engine developed by L-1 Identity Solutions [ID]. ABIS is populated with fingerprints and other biometric modalities such as iris images collected from enemy combatants and possible terrorists by U.S. soldiers in overseas conflicts. DoD ABIS is managed by the BTF.
ID Protect would also use L-1’s biometric matching software although it would be a separate database from DoD ABIS.
Gray said that as the uses of biometrics are expanded across DoD, a lot of the technologies and business approaches are the same whether for blue or red forces.
But for ID Protect it’s about “how to take the capability and put it into practice and what are the rules [for blue forces] versus the old rules,” she said.
There are some deployments and pilot projects of biometric-enabled access control at some military bases and facilities in the United States and overseas but these efforts are basically separate from each other. The BTF and DoD are still trying to develop requirements for biometric-enabled base access for friendly forces at U.S. installations.
Having a common set of biometric access control requirements across the DoD enterprise may make it easier for personnel who work at multiple installations from having to re- register at each base, one defense official said.