18. Measuring the Uniqueness of the Individual

The relatively new science of biometrics is attempting to solve the age-old question-—Wh am I? It is doing it by measuring and recording digitally the physical attributes of any individual. The idea is that we are un-forgeable, and that we carry proof of our identity in our body at all times, including the uniqueness of fingerprints, iris, voice, gait temperature, smell, etc. The applications of biometrics range from police work through a huge range of commercial fields in which secure identification is important.

The search started out not as a way of seeing tiny differences, but as a way of classifying a limited number of similarities into a range of types. Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used cranial measurements to reveal the persistence of certain features in murderers, mental patients, Jews and boys attending public schools. Galton and an ltalian, Cesare Lombroso, reduced human identity to a question of mathematics, and they used it as an ideological weapon: Galton saw Negroid features as a sign of degeneracy, and was a firm believer in eugenics. But this approach to classifying people on the basis of types soon fell out of favor, giving way to a search for individual differences.

It was Alphonse Bertillon, a French police detective, who invented a system of classifying peopIe so that a number of features could be cross-checked. It consisted of a card with two photographs on it, the person’s place and date of birth, and a number of bodily measurements. He also drew up charts of people’s ears, and kept them on file. Quite recently, a man in England was convicted of murder on the evidence of an earprint he had left at the scene of the crime. Like Bertillon more than 100 years ago, researchers in Britain are compiling a database of ear images.

But the cutting edge of biometrics technology is iris scanning. The identification of the iris part of person’s eye has in many cases overtaken traditional fingerprinting as the most reliable proof that we are who we are. The Nationwide building society
reported that a six-month trial of iris recognition technology at a cash machine at its head office in London was very satisfactory. The success of iris scanning rests on the facts that an individual’s iris remains unchanged throughout his or her life, that no two people’s irises are the same—in fact, no two irises are the same, as people’s left and right eyes are different—and that each iris contains at least 260 independent characteristics on which comparisons can be based. However, according to Mark Grossi, who was in charge of the Nationwide experiment, irises are variable over time. If scanning were used by banks, customers would have to have their eyes photographed periodically. But still, he insists, they are impossible to forge.

One reason iris scanning is preferred to fingerprinting is the stigma attached to the latter. J. Edgar Hoover, long-time head of America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, stated with regret t at many people regard fingerprinting as something that is only done to criminal suspects. There have been cases in which people who have been fingerprinted to identify suspects in criminal cases demand that their fingerprints be publicly destroyed once the culprit is found. Hoover explained that it is useful for the individual to have his or her fingerprints on record “as a protection against accident, amnesia or loss of identity through disaster.”

Francis Declerq, th founder and president of Keyware, a software company that has pioneered various biometric technologies, said that his job is to ask the question, “What makes us unique?”, and then to create the technology that answers that question. Declerq loes not believe that any one measurement can sum up an individual. Your voice or hair style can change from day to day, and voice or facial recognition software would not take that into account. So Declerq has designed “multiple biometrics “ software, which combines, for example, a fingerprint reading with a spoken password and a photograph. Our uniqueness, he argues, can only be measured in a number of ways. “No one biometric,” he argues, “is 100 percent reliable, because w are human.”

Adapted from an article in the Observer

Questions 1 -6
Which of the people listed below is associated with the methods of identification 1-6?
Write the letter of the appropriate person in boxes 1 —6 on your answer sheet.
You may use the same name for more than one answer

FD Francis Declerq
FG Francis Galton
AB Alphonse Bertillon
JEH J. Edgar Hoover
MG Mark Grossi

1. identification cards
2. irises
3. cranial measurements
4. earprints
5. multiple biometrics
6. fingerprints

Answer: 1-AB,2-MG,3-FG,4-AB,5-FD,6-JEH

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