#3 Depends on the technology being used. Facial recognition can be stymied in various ways, especially when done at a distance in crowds. Closer up (as in, say, an immigration queue where people can be told to remove hats and sunglasses) it works very well.
Fingerprint recognition can be foiled, but only remotely (i.e. if the bad guy has time to create a soft replica of the print in question and then uses that to authenticate a computer logon or a document).
Iris recognition is very accurate. Handwriting recognition is pretty decent, when done on an electronic pressure pad (even very good forgers seldom press the pen in the same way as the person whose signature they are copying).
There's some promising work on things like recognizing the characteristic walk and stances of people, not mature yet. |
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Friday called for a new international standard for putting biometric data such as fingerprints on passports, and said the technology could play a vital role in combating terrorism. Ridge said in a speech at the London School of Economics and Political Science that the international community had made great strides in cooperating to tackle terrorism, but more needed to be done. "Common international standards of biometrics must be developed. In my view, the sooner, the better," he said. Biometrics include face-recognition technology and fingerprint and iris scanning.