ThirdFactor | UK police spending $75 million on mobile biometrics

Friday, August 22, 2008

The UK government’s Home Office is set to spend up to $75 million on a program called Midas, which will provide police agencies with mobile biometric kits intended to enable officers to identify people based on their fingerprints in real time, according to a Computer Weekly article. The Home Office is looking to sign a number of vendors to supply systems for the program.

A previous system, called Project Lantern, has 200 units in use at 20 police departments in the UK. The Project Lantern devices worked very similar to the ones planned for in Midas, requiring roughly two to three minutes to return information on a scanned image.

National deployment of Project Lantern was estimated to to be around 2010. Most officers who were involved in the project support the idea of mobile fingerprint readers as they reported the devices saved roughly 30 minutes in a given incident.

Just as the University of Georgia police were ending an investigation into a sophisticated fake ID ring, another student dealing in fake driver licenses came to light. The original ring, apparently run by students at the University of Georgia and Gainesville State College, had distributed more than 1,000 fake IDs to students at the two schools.

Fake Harvard student discovered by campus police

A 27-year-old man posing as a Harvard undergraduate student stayed in the dorms, ate in the school cafeteria and chatted with many Harvard students via Facebook before being found out by campus police. He was cited for trespassing and using a false identification card.

Visa Europe expectes big year for contactless, NFC

Visa Europe is anticipating a big year for contactless and NFC payments, with issuance projected to leap from 30 million in 2011 to 50 million in 2012.

Pair using forged student IDs to obtain U-passes deported

A Chinese couple who used stolen identity information from students at Simon Fraser University in Canada to obtain TransLink U-Passes, have been deported.

Siyuan Gu and Jing Wang pleaded guilty in December to using the forged documents.

Research forecasts voice biometrics a major player in payments

ValidSoft partnered with Opus Research and released a report titled “Voice Biometrics Authentication Best Practices: Overcoming Obstacles to Adoption” that predicts the technology will be deployed in payment authentication assuming the best practices it lays out are followed.

Indian government compromises on biometrics and identity

India’s government has called a truce in the ongoing argument between the Ministry of Home Affairs’s National Population Register (NPR) project and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), reports the Indian Express.

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UK police spending $75 million on mobile biometrics