But call for input meets skepticism over feasibility and costs for next phase of US-VISIT

By Alice Lipowicz
Washington Technology

WASHINGTON — Five years after Congress ordered biometric tracking of foreign visitors leaving the United States by land and after spending millions of dollars on planning and testing that yielded limited results, the Homeland Security Department is now seeking the private sector's help to address the challenge.

The department issued a request for information in May soliciting ideas for its U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) Biometric Land Exit Solution.

"The goal of identifying travelers in their vehicles is a particularly challenging issue," said biometric expert Raj Nanavati. "Everyone is struggling with this globally." (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)

The technology solution could cost $3 billion or more if fully implemented. The DHS, which has scheduled an industry day for June 30, is allocating additional funds toward an exit solution. Despite the large size of the opportunity, the renewed effort has received mixed reactions.

Although they are somewhat optimistic, industry executives and analysts say the technical hurdles are substantial and difficult to overcome.

"The goal of identifying travelers in their vehicles -- whether cars, trains or buses -- is aparticularly challenging issue," said Raj Nanavati, a partner at International Biometric Group, a consulting firm in New York." Everyone is struggling with this globally."

Even so, there is some hope that the impasse could be broken. "The consensus isthat something will be done for land port exits," said Jeremy Potter, senior analyst at Input Inc., a market research firm in Reston,Va. "Now that the RFI has been issued, it enables a dialogue to takeplace. It creates buzz.

"But DHS is also confronting some skepticism, given its past failures to meet several deadlines for deploying an exit solution. "Our members are not overwhelmingly excited about it," said Walter Hamilton, chairman of the International Biometric Industry Association. In addition to the RFI, US-VISIT program officials are asking for a budget increase in fiscal 2009 of $42.6 million — from $13 million currently — for land, sea and air exit programs.

The funding will go for land exit project integration and analysis, land exit planning and design, and biometric air/sea exit,said US-VISIT spokeswoman Anna Hinken. DHS is also preparing a report on the exitprograms, which is due by the end of the year.

The current effort is the latest in a longline of starts and stops in DHS' attempts tomonitor the arrivals and departures of foreign visitors. Congress created the original requirement for entry and exit tracking in1996 and then added biometric verification in 2003.

To date, US-VISIT has cost about $1.5 billion, according to a February report by the Government Accountability Office, including about $417 million spent on planning and testing for land, air and sea exit systems. The program has focused primarily on collecting fingerprints and digital photographs of foreign visa holders when they apply for visasand for verifying entry into the United States.The prime contractor is Accenture Ltd.

For airport departures, DHS recently issued a notice of proposed rulemaking requiring airlines to collect biometric information during passengers' check-in. For land exits, DHS conducted 15 months of prototype testing in which radio frequency identification (RFID) chips were embedded in I-94 documents issued to foreign visitors and then scanned remotely when the visitors drove through exit lanes at border crossings. However, the test did not include biometric verification.

In December 2006, GAO judged those tests to be inadequate and unsuccessful in meeting Congress' requirements. At that time, US VISIT officials concluded they would not implement a biometric exit capability because it would cost as much as $3 billion and cause major delays at the land border stations.

Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for policy at DHS, said in 2006 that an exit capability would require construction of new lanes and installation of new readers and infrastructure that would cost in the tens of billions of dollars. The recent RFI asks industry respondents to identify potential technologies, devices and procedures for the nation's 167 land entrypoints. The goal is at least 97 percent accuracy.

Responses are due by July 16. DHS said it might issue a request for proposals as early as January 2009.

US-VISIT officials said it will take five to 10 years for new technologies to develop to check fingerprints of people exiting the country without a major impact on existing facilities. Current technology choices include RFID tags, which can be read at a distance of 20 to30 feet, and handheld fingerprint scanners and readers. In the previous US-VISIT testing, RFID tags were to be read at a distance while the document holders in vehicles passed through exit lanes.

However, the resulting scans were not consistently accurate, which industry sources blamed on poor reader placement that caused multiple reads, poor positioning of the RFID chips within the vehicles — for example, on documents stored in briefcases — and possibly too many simultaneous reads, such as for multiple travelers on a bus. Nanavati said the department is displaying flexibility by saying it is willing to consider fingerprint, iris, facial recognition and other modalities rather than only the 10 finger prints in the US-VISIT entry program.

A handheld scanner, or possibly cards ortokens on which to place a fingerprint, might be used to collect fingerprints from occupants in a moving vehicle. "But with 10 prints, it is a lot more complicated and you need a bigger device," Nanavati said. "Everyone sees a need for this, but there is no easy answer."

Jeremy Grant, senior vice president of identity solutions at Stanford Group Co., a research group in Washington, suggests that US-VISIT temporarily try not to read biometrics from occupants of a moving vehicle. If the visa holders can be made to use a separate lane or approach a kiosk before reaching the border, their fingerprints could be checked manually, he said. Typically, US-VISIT visa holders represent about 3 percent of the land border traffic, according to DHS officials.

Robert Mocny, DHS' director of USVISIT, told Washington Technology earlier this year that he was hopeful industry would develop better solutions for the biometric land exit program in time to satisfy Congress. "We don't have the answer right now," he said. "We will hold industry days and hope to have an answer soon."

US-VISIT's biometric exit system ought to be more fully defined to focus on specific objectives, Grant said. In theory, everyone's identity might need to be verified to authenticate each US-VISIT visa holder's identity upon exit. It might also be possible to achieve the same objective by creating penalties for visa holders who fail to voluntarily check out when leaving the country, he said. For example, those visa holders might be prevented from re-entering the United States at a later date.

Meanwhile, Grant said, the program is likely to continue moving forward in the planning stage, as it has in recent years, but not necessarily moving any closer to deployment.

"My clients are asking me if there will be a positive impact on the industry from biometric exit this year," Grant said. "I say, 'Don't count on it.'"

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