Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is continuing to lean toward capturing facial photos of departing foreign nationals on international flights as the biometric of choice in its nascent program to help verify the departure of these individuals from the United States in accordance with their visas, an agency official says.
A pilot project earlier this year at a land port of entry in Southern California that involved multiple biometrics to monitor the entry and exit of pedestrians entering from Mexico and reentering that country showed that they were comfortable and use to having a photograph of their faces taken, Colleen Manaher, executive director for Planning, Program Analysis, and Evaluation within CBP’s Office of Field Operations, says at the Homeland Security Week conference hosted by IDGA earlier this month.
Travelers crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S. at Otay Mesa “are not as savvy as airport travelers but clearly face was easy,” Manaher says. When it came to iris capture at the entry port, “they hesitated…they were a little afraid.” She adds that people confuse iris image capture with retina scans and think “’you’re going to be zapping my eyeball.’”
“While I think iris is by far one of the most accurate in terms of biometrics in my opinion, face just seemed to be where travelers were fine,” Manaher says. “And I think that that has to inform going forward.”
Manaher says that people “love” having their picture taken, adding that they enjoy “selfies.”
Mike Hardin, deputy director of CBP’s Entry/Exit Transformation Office, tells attendees that a report being prepared by a contractor is due soon on the results of the Otay Mesa pilot.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson earlier this year directed CBP to begin implementing a biometric exit program in 2018 at U.S. airports for foreign nationals leaving the country. Congress has long mandated the use of a biometric exit program to complement the current biographic-based exit system that seeks to verify that foreign nationals have left the U.S. as scheduled under terms of their visas.
Ultimately, CBP and Congress want to roll out biometric exit processes at airports, land and seaports.
In addition to the Otay Mesa pilot, CBP is conducting other biometric pilots at several airports to test the feasibility, operating concepts, effectiveness and information technology infrastructure needs associated with implementing biometric exit solutions and reengineering the current biometric entry processes.
In Atlanta at Hartsfield Jackson International Airport CBP over the summer began a facial recognition pilot to check the departures of foreign nationals on one international flight per day. Manaher says that in the coming months CBP will be adding more “high risk flights” and partners to the Atlanta biometric air exit pilot toward meeting the 2018 plan of implementing a biometric exit solution at one large airport.
In the current facial recognition pilot in Atlanta the testing has shown that 96 percent of people on the flight to Narita, Japan, have a photo in CBP’s database, Manaher says. That leaves only a few percent where CBP has to figure out who they are, she says.
CBP is also testing mobile fingerprinting devices to capture data on departing foreign nationals at a number of airports. Manaher says the BE Mobile pilot has resulted in identifying “a lot of bad guys” attempting to leave the U.S. by airplane. The pilot has also demonstrated that the biometric data “is pretty amazing, coming in at 98, 99 percent,” adding that the pilot has shown that “we need to know who is leaving this country.”
CBP has been using Unisys [UIS] as its systems integrator for its various biometric pilots, taking advantage of an existing border security contract the company has. For a biometric exit program the agency is expected to open up a procurement to competition.
Manaher also says that biometrics, at least in the air environment, will become an enabler for CBP, other Department of Homeland Security components, and other stakeholders in improving the travelers’ experience from their homes to their final destinations and then home again. She says the same biometric information collected and used by one government agency could be used by another, such as the Transportation Security Administration, to move more efficiently through the airport and onto a plane.
Biometrics will allow the “air travel industry to transform itself,” Manaher says.
Hardin says that CBP is working with TSA and the airlines to explore how the biometric data his agency would collect as part of new exit application could be used toward an “end to end transformation of the airline system.”
Travel volumes are going up and with no new airports being built “there is no way out of this unless we innovate our way out,” Hardin says, adding that this provides an incentive for the private sector to participate with CBP on this innovation.
CBP is currently facing a “perfect storm” in which it is unlikely to be getting more staff despite the fact that more people and cargo are entering the U.S. every year. “Innovation” is the key to grappling with this challenge, she says.
In the next three, five, seven to 10 years CBP will transform “the way you arrive to the United States,” Manaher says. It will unlock innovation in border and airline processes, she says.
Manaher says that an entry-exit solution ultimately requires fusing biographic and biometric data.
At land border ports of entry one glaring difficulty in obtaining biometric data from person’s traveling into and out of the U.S. is by vehicle. CBP is partnering with the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory on development of a plenoptic camera “that can go into a vehicle, pull up a completely fuzzy photo out of it and make it facial recognition quality. Can you imagine if we can get that kind of visibility into who’s leaving and who’s arriving?”
Manaher says that if these types of cameras could be installed on the gantries overlooking inbound and outbound vehicles they would by themselves provide valuable intelligence
Development of the camera is in the “high level prototype” stage, she says.
Plenoptic cameras are good for imaging fast moving objects.