TAMPA, Fla.—In addition to an ongoing high priority testing program with the research arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is planning additional pilots of biometric exit procedures and technologies to better track the departure of foreign nationals from the United States, according to department officials.
The forthcoming CBP exit pilots planned for next spring will experiment with applications at an international airport in the United States as well as a land border crossing in southern California focused on pedestrian traffic, Michael Hardin, deputy director for CBP’s Entry/Exit Transformation office, told Defense Daily
here on Wednesday at the Global Identity Summit presented by AFCEA and the Biometrics Consortium.
The pilots are part of DHS’ efforts to comply with congressional law requiring the department to use biometrics to track the entry and exit of foreign nationals arriving to and departing from the country. CBP currently has biometric verification deployed as part of the US-VISIT program for entry into the U.S. but has found the exit part of the equation tricky due to a number of factors including cost and the readiness of technology for the application.
Now the department is beginning to move more aggressively to find answers for biometric exit solutions at large and small international airports, which break down between airports that have a large number of departing international flights and those that have a handful on a daily basis. The main effort underway here is the Air Entry and Exit Re-Engineering (AEER) project between the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate and CBP, which ultimately sets the requirements and performs the entry and exit processing of foreign national entering and exiting the country.
Over the summer, S&T opened its test lab in Maryland to examine various scenarios for biometric entry and exit procedures, beginning with open house demonstrations for multiple stakeholders as well as the media (Defense Daily, June 30). During the first week of September S&T began formal data collection efforts with members of the general public representing a wide range of ages and ethnic groups that match with the foreign traveling public.
One important concept being examined early on is automated self boarding gates employing the different modalities of interest, which are fingerprints, face and iris, Bob Burns, S&T’s program manager for the AEER project, told Defense Daily. AEER isn’t an acquisition effort but instead is aimed at trying to develop the processes and concepts of operations that CBP can use at ports of entry and departure, he said.
While AEER is currently focused on improving biometric entry and developing biometric exit processes at large airports, CBP’s upcoming exit pilots are focused elsewhere.
The experiment at a small international airport will take advantage of existing CBP teams that do targeted searches of departing foreign nationals for things like currency violations, Hardin said. Under the Biometric Exit (BE) Mobile experiment, these teams will be equipped with handheld fingerprint capture devices to collect biometrics of departing foreign travelers as they walk down the jet way, he said.
The BE Mobile effort will let CBP do a number of things, Hardin said, including identify if the departing foreigners are who they claim to be, an audit against the airline passenger manifest for foreigners, and how well the technology and process works for collecting and matching the fingerprints.
The BE Mobile test will be done at one of the largest international airports in the United States, although Hardin said the solution is more likely to be adaptable to a smaller airport with just a handful of international flights daily, allowing CBP to keep labor costs down by having to rely on fewer teams to capture biometrics.
The biometric-enabled automated-self boarding gate concept is more applicable to larger airports, where otherwise a number of CBP teams would be needed simultaneously to capture biometric data without delaying flights, Hardin said. Using the BE Mobile concept at a larger airport would require an “enormous cost” with all the teams, he said.
CBP a few years ago conducted a pilot involving its officers using handheld equipment to capture biometrics of departing foreign nationals at a large international airport without holding up a flight, so “We believe we can do it as long as you limit the number of flights,” Hardin said.
Hardin said that using the self-boarding gates at smaller international airports might not make sense because that would be an expensive and unnecessary solution where a different approach would work.
The pilot test in Southern California, slated to begin in April, will take place in a pedestrian exit crossing. Hardin said the biometrics to be collected haven’t been determined. He also said that biographic information will also be collected, probably using RFID capture from travel documents. Non-RFID capture will also be implemented where the travel documents aren’t RFID-enabled, he said.
Burns said that the data generated through the AEER effort and CBP’s forthcoming pilots will be used by CBP to help it sort out the best biometric solutions for different ports of departure.
S&T is testing a number of commercially available finger, face and iris technologies supplied by different companies for the AEER project. Those technologies were tested in the Maryland lab during the summer before the start of formal testing of the various entry and exit concepts.
S&T has begun another outreach effort to industry to invite additional finger, face and iris technologies for use in the lab as part of AEER, Burns said. There will be more meetings with industry on this in the coming months, he said.
Beginning in 2015, S&T plans to add field testing at an airport to the AEER project to give CBP better data to help inform a planned acquisition program for FY ’17.