Throughout
history technology has evolved drastically in our everyday lives. Initially,
technology provided us with light, transportation, and communication. Now
technology is apparent in every single part of our lives including in homeland
security. Currently standing as the most improved area in homeland security
technology is biometrics. Biometrics, technology which analyzes and measures
human body characteristics for the purposes of authentication, is starting to
become very popular in public security systems and consumer electronics.
Examples of biometrics include fingerprint, or retinal scan, or facial
characteristic maps. In order for these human body characteristics to be
analyzed, fast computers utilize algorithms to cycle through references to find
a match to the input data. In order for all biometric technologies to be
properly be used, our data must be collected as a reference initially. The
majority of biometric devices involve a reader or scanning device, software
which converts the scanned data into digital form to compare, and finally a
database that stores all the biometric data for comparison.
After the
tragedy that shook the United States on September 11th, attention
has been brought back to the use of biometrics. The federal government wanted
to pay more attention to the use of biometrics as a way of border patrol and
security purposes within airports and other environments for protection.
However many concerns have been brought up creating debate as to whether or not
biometrics is actually useful product. Biometrics is very expensive and would
be costing the federal government a lot of money. Is it worth it for the
government to spend money on this new product even though we are not sure if it
will not work?
Biometrics
provides a safe and easy way to identify an individual and pull up a report
such as a police officer can do in their car. If each individual is scanned as
they enter buildings, this does not prove they will not be committing any
crimes. They will be able to identify the individuals past history, however the
future and present cannot be predicted. Moreover, are biometrics invading our
privacy as U.S. individuals? Many individuals do not want to give the federal
government all their information. If they have our information, what happens if
it is hacked into or stolen, the federal government will be responsible for
losing an entire country’s data. Is it worth that risk since it may or may not
even be providing that much protection? Ultimately, the real question is what
is biometrics doing for our country and should it be implemented more around
the United States or is it a waste of time and research money?
I believe that our country should put more time and research into biometrics. If it could improve safety in any way it is a worth while idea. Human characteristics are already used to identify individuals so this would just be taking it to a new level. As far as I know, using human characteristics for technology has not yet back fired and I do not see it doing so in the near future. Of course limits should be created for this technology, but I think the benefits will greatly outweigh the negative effects. Also, I do not believe hackers would be able to steal this information because our government seems to have done a good job of preventing this in the past. You have to consider all of the other top secret information that would be targeted by hackers that has never been stolen before.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI am torn because we've been "improving" our security for years yet something always seems to go wrong. I think taht biometrics may just be another super expensive unreliable system. No matter what, there is going to be someone who gets through the security system, thats inevitable. Also, if there were to be some sort of emergency then there is no way that a biometrics system is going to be efficient enough to approve everyone in a timely manor...causing widespread panic. We all have the fingerprint scanner on our laptops and we know how well that works...NOT. So I feel like this is a useless system.
ReplyDeleteI think that it could drastically improve our security. As of right now, we are all required to carry around wallets with cards of information. This can easily be copied or stolen. However, it is virtually impossible to replicate our bodies to the point of bypassing a biometric security system. Where I see the most benefit is in transportation. Where as of right now it takes so long to get into foreign countries because everyone wants to verify who and why we are traveling, if we had a quicker system we could see improvements. Paperlessly we could track where people are going, and significantly speed up travel. If we used the same amount of money on this security as the pentagon, I would be at ease about issues.
ReplyDelete