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25 August 2005 Fingerprint biometrics — lessons from BelgiumBelgium has 23 years of experience in collecting the fingerprints of asylum seekers. SA Mathieson reports.Belgium’s ministry of the interior started collecting the fingerprints of asylum seekers in 1982, to allow checks on whether someone had already made an application. The prints were processed by Belgium’s criminal fingerprint database. “Over the years, the numbers of asylum seekers increased enormously,” says Jan Moerman, a systems manager for the ministry. By the end of the 1980s, the ministry was sending prints from more than 100 asylum seekers a day – to the criminal system which had a total daily capacity of 150. Moreover, storing the prints of asylum seekers with those of criminals seemed inappropriate. The requirements are different, as scans are taken in ideal conditions, rather than recovered as latent or partial scene-of-crime prints. Belgian experience The ministry’s asylum seeker service opened its own database in September 1993, using equipment from Printrak, the same vendor as Belgium’s criminal fingerprint database. According to Motorola, which purchased Printrak in 2000, this makes Belgium one of the more experienced users of the brand – although police in Canada, Norway and Switzerland have all been customers for more than 20 years. Belgium’s ministry of the interior bought its first live-scan machines from another provider. The results were printed and rescanned for the Printrak system, involving some loss of quality. This stopped in 2000, with the purchase of Printrak live-scan machines, as part of a general upgrade. The upgrade was required because by 1999, capacity had become a problem, with 250 applicants a day. Belgium has two asylum seeker reception centres: one near Brussels’ airport where people stay for a few days, and the other one in Brussels itself, which aims to process every applicant on the same day. In 1999, that was not possible, and this led to the only significant spike in matches of applicants to those already on the database since the system went live. "When we started in September 1993, we had a hit rate of 14%,” says Moerman. "Very fast, it dropped down.” It is now less than 0.5%. Russians duck out But in 1999, “applicants saw there was a possibility of avoiding fingerprinting. We noticed it was mostly people from Russia who didn’t turn up”. The number of matches went up as a result. The ministry’s short-term answer was to fingerprint Russians first, but since the upgrades of 2000 and January 2005, the speed of the Printrak system has greatly increased, while the number of asylum seekers has fallen to around 60 to 90 a day. "Now, the live-scan machines can make between 15 and 20 bookings an hour. We have three, so if we go as fast as possible, we could process 60 people an hour,” says Moerman. This has the advantage that everyone waiting can be fingerprinted and checked for previous applications before they are interviewed: previously, matches sometimes came through during an interview, which could make the discussion to that point a waste of time. Motorola motoring Stephanie Brzezinski, biometrics product manager at Motorola, says that some of the speed increase is due to general improvements in processor speeds, but also specific work by Motorola to find matches more quickly. The speed of live-scan equipment has also increased, she says: “Capture technology has improved to the point where you can view the finger virtually in real-time.” Getting it wrong The ministry’s database contains the fingerprints of 282,000 applicants. However, Moerman says that false negatives and positives tend to be due to human error, such as the wrong person from the waiting room being fingerprinted, although he adds that a false negative might never come to light. If the system does report that someone has applied before, staff use the previous application’s photo and other information for further checking. Of false positives from the technology, “I really can’t remember we have had any,” says Moerman. “We do several checks. We’re aware that we are dealing with human beings, and decisions here can affect them for the rest of their lives.” Asylum seekers mobile A further check is carried out by the Eurodac centre in Luxembourg, which compares a sample to fingerprints taken by asylum seekers in other European Union countries: this produces at least 10 or 15 matches a day in Belgium. "Asylum seekers have got very mobile,” says Moerman, with those in Belgium often aiming to get to the UK, either on what the ministry calls the ‘horizontal axis’ from eastern Europe or the ‘vertical axis’ through Italy to Norway, and onwards to the UK. Eurodac guarantees an answer within 24 hours, but it was designed when asylum seeker numbers were very high. “It’s really a little over-dimensioned,” says Moerman, to the ministry’s benefit — it often returns a result within minutes. Missing fingers Moerman says that a decade and a half of experience counts when using biometrics, adding that some government agencies may be rushing the technology into use. He says the quality of fingerprints taken varies enormously, sometimes because the owner works with their hands and sometimes because they simply have weak lines on their fingertips. “You can’t say that someone in front of you with bad prints has been manipulating their fingers,” in order to fool the system, Moerman says. He adds that many people may wear down their prints or lose fingers in accidents, and this poses a challenge for the planned high-volume biometric systems such as passports: “What are you going to do with those people?” © SA Mathieson 2005.
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