Computers to scan passports at Heathrow

From this summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers’ faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports, the newspaper said.

British border security officials reportedly believe that the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud.

The report said “But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. “To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of “false negatives” – innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records”.

Such passengers may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks.

Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development for the UK Border Agency, told a conference in London this week “We think a machine can do a better job (than manned passport inspections). What will the public reaction be? Will they use it? We need to test and see how people react and how they deal with rejection. We hope to get the trial up and running by the summer”.

Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign (no to identity cards) said “Someone is extremely optimistic. The technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a 40 per cent success rate in a real time situation”.

He told the paper “I am flabbergasted they consider doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for passengers.”

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said “It’s a laughable technology…It’s not that it (the computer) could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won’t match them with their image.

A human can make assumptions, a computer can’t.” So far around 8 million to 10 million UK biometric passports, containing a computer chip holding the carrier’s facial details, have been issued since they were introduced in 2006. The last non-biometric passports will cease to be valid after 2016.

Home Office minister Liam Byrne said “Britain’s border security is now among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we don’t want long waits.”

“So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new automatic gates for British and European Economic Area (EEA) citizens. We will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports (and airports).”