In the identity-card industry, many noticed a stark fact about last week's attacks: Two of the suspected terrorists rented a car with a New Jersey driver's license, a simple document to fake.
The official state ID includes a laminated card and a mugshot on instant film, making it easy to reproduce. Such weaknesses had already prompted plans to include magnetic strips or bar codes on all state licenses and to make them readable by digital scanners in any jurisdiction -- turning the documents into something like national identity cards.
Before this week, civil-liberties concerns had slowed the plans, a standard backed by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The ease with which the terrorists slipped through airport checkpoints, however, has authorities scrambling to study new surveillance methods. In addition to the beefed-up licenses, other ideas include high-tech passports and the introduction of facial-recognition software to video cameras installed in airports and border crossings, allowing them to automatically pick out suspects whose faces matched photos in police databases.
New technologies
All of these new technologies are on the table as part of a broad discussion forming over whether to adjust the balance between civil liberties and security, following the massacre of thousands last week. The catastrophe "serves as a catalyst to accelerate the debate," said current US Representative William Delahunt, Democrat of Quincy, who noted such privacy concerns were previously seen in the more benign contexts of e-commerce and junk mail.
Delahunt said he would oppose formal national-identity cards, though he might support face-scanning in airports. In previous applications such as at last year's Super Bowl, face-scanning software drew criticism across the political spectrum for subjecting citizens to surveillance that some called "virtual lineups." Others say wider use of such systems would be an overreaction, exactly the curtailment of liberties that the terrorists seek to create.
"We're heading for Fortress America," said David Armstrong an Andover-based researcher for the Public Education Center, a liberal Washington think tank.
Said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, DC, advocacy group: "I don't believe it's true that if we were to have widespread facial-recognition technology and other new ways to ID our citizens, that would make us a safer society."
Fourth amendment
The US Constitution's Fourth Amendment bars "unreasonable searches and seizures" and is the jumping-off point for most American privacy and security debates. However, federal courts have placed few limits on how authorities might observe individuals in public settings, a factor cited by many in the law enforcement and intelligence communities.
"They should be careful when they're trying to create a privacy right, because you don't have it now in a public space," said John Woodward, a former CIA official now at the RAND Corp.
Joseph Atick, chief executive of facial-recognition software maker Visionics Corp, said the attacks have changed the politics of privacy.
"What we're faced with is a challenge that civilization has never seen before: the birth of new instruments of terror," Atick said. "There's no doubt in my mind that this [the attacks] will dramatically alter the acceptance of facial-recognition technology."
Atick and his chief competitor, Tom Colatosti, chief executive of Littleton-based Viisage Technology Inc, have sold their scanning software to foreign customers, including airports, for years. In interviews last week, the executives also said they have received numerous inquiries from domestic airports since last Tuesday's tragedies.
The bad guys
Both predicted their software would be placed in at least a few domestic terminals, which they declined to identify, by the end of the year. "Count on it," Colatosti said. He added that he no longer believes the use of the software ought to be publicly disclosed on signs. "The point is to catch the bad guys," he said.
Another hot issue will likely be the security of driver's licenses. These are already required to board an airplane or open a bank account, but are often simple to forge or to obtain using a false name, enabling many cases of identity theft. It is not known whether fake IDs played a role in the terror attacks; authorities wouldn't say whether the New Jersey license used by two men who drove an Alamo rental car from Boston to Portland, Maine, the day before the hijackings was actually issued by the state agency. The FBI has said it thinks the names of 19 hijackers it released weren't stolen or aliases.
But the Globe reported on Saturday that Saudi Arabian officials say several of the suspected hijackers did impersonate legitimate Saudi pilots, suggesting they employed fraudulent documents during the years in which they lived in the US.
Colatosti, whose company supplies driver's licenses to a dozen states, said he expects the attacks will lead to greater use of bar codes and other advanced features to make it more difficult to construct a false persona.
Others note that hardly any airlines have invested in scanning equipment that can be used to check the accuracy of licenses that already include some of these features. After the attacks, "you'll see that change in a hurry," said one industry executive.
Some states have been reluctant to add security features out of privacy concerns. A few states don't even require drivers to be photographed. Other states like New Jersey just haven't funded upgrades, creating a hodgepodge of identity-card standards that some officials say may eventually lead to a national identity system in some form.
"Some [federal] agency is going to have to step up to the plate on this," said Lieutenant Dave Myers, a Florida law enforcement official who is active in the motor-vehicle administration group.
Third option
In addition to new license standards and facial-scanning software, a third option might be to embed in passports chips that could encode information such as a person's digital image or fingerprints, and to require these high-tech passports be readable at airports and other border crossings.
Such a step was suggested in a 1998 paper, Catastrophic Terrorism, issued by Harvard's Kennedy School. Its authors also suggested American subsidies to upgrade foreign passports.
"Naturally, terrorists could still use documents of non-participating countries, but those would attract just the suspicions those travellers seek to avoid," the report states.
Ashton Carter, one of the report's authors and a former assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, said upgraded passports might prove less controversial than some of the other technologies.
"To have effective counterterrorism, there's plenty of things we can do to improve our surveillance without compromising our liberties," Carter said.
He also mentioned restrictions to deter other forms of terrorism. For instance, requiring licenses to buy fermenting equipment that could be used to culture biological weapons.
"Making people have a license to buy anthrax, that's not a cosmic civil-liberties issue," Carter said.
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