Tag: biometrics

Kuwait Warns Foreign Residents of Upcoming Deadline for Compulsory Biometric Registration

Kuwaiti authorities have called on foreign residents in the country to ensure that they complete an ongoing compulsory biometric registration exercise before the government-prescribed deadline at the end of this year.

The deadline for Kuwaiti citizens to comply with the requirement elapsed in September, but aliens have until December 31 to do so.

Col. Thamer Dakhin Al-Mutairi, an official from the Personnel Identification Department, is referenced by Arab Times as saying that all those who do not meet the December deadline will have their transactions disrupted.

Already, the government says citizens who failed to meet the September deadline have a block on some of their transactions such as banking services, although they still have a chance to catch up.

The government indicates that so far, slightly over three million people are already done with the process, while over 754,000 others are yet to do so.

Al-Mutairi has also reminded residents of the points where registration takes place. He says it is safer to book appointments because all those who show up without an appointment may not be attended to by identification personnel.

Kuwait mandated a compulsory collection of fingerprint biometrics from citizens and residents in May last year, saying it is part of efforts to bolster the country’s national security architecture.

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US authorizes CIA mercenaries to run biometric concentration camps in Gaza Strip

The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.

Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.

This comes as Israel carries out daily massacres and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, enacting the proposal known as The Generals’ Plan, originally crafted by former national security chief Giora Eiland to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.”

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Logging Into a Brave New World: How Facial Recognition Just Got Personal

Surprising exactly no one paying attention to the slow erosion of privacy, the US General Services Administration (GSA) has rolled out its shiny new toy: facial recognition technology for accessing login.gov. Yes, that beloved single sign-in service, connecting Americans to federal and state agencies, now wants your face—literally. This gateway, clicked into over 300 million times a year by citizens has decided the most efficient way to keep us all “safe” is by scanning our mugs. How very 2024.

But of course, this little “upgrade” didn’t just appear overnight. Oh no, it dragged itself through bureaucratic purgatory, complete with false starts, delays, and some spicy critique from the Inspector General. Apparently, login.gov had been fibbing about its compliance with Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2)—a fancy label for a government-mandated security standard that requires real-deal verification of who you are. Up until now, that “verification” meant having someone eyeball your ID card photo and say, “Yep, that looks about right,” rather than dipping into the biometric surveillance toolkit.

Facial recognition was supposed to make its grand debut last year, but things got complicated when it turned out login.gov wasn’t actually playing by the rules it claimed to follow. The Inspector General, ever the fun police, caught them misrepresenting their tech’s adherence to the IAL2 standard, causing the rollout to stall while everyone scrambled to figure out if they could get away with this. Now, after enough piloting to give a nervous airline passenger a heart attack, login.gov has finally reached compliance, but not without leaving a greasy trail of unanswered questions in its wake.

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The U.S. Government Is Dramatically Expanding The Use Of Facial Recognition Technology

Do you want to live in a society where you are required to have your face scanned wherever you go?  If not, you may want to speak up now while you still can.  As you will see below, the U.S. government is aggressively expanding the use of facial recognition technology for identification verification purposes.  For now, the use of facial recognition technology will be optional.  But as we have seen before, once a voluntary option is adopted by enough people our leaders have a way of making it mandatory.  Of course it isn’t just our government that is pushing facial recognition technology.  It is popping up throughout our society, and given enough time it would literally be everywhere.

Login.gov is billed as “a single sign-on solution for US government websites”, and now users of Login.gov will be given the option to use facial recognition technology to verify their identities…

An online hub for Americans to access benefits and services across the federal government is giving its users a new option to sign on.

The General Services Administration will begin offering facial recognition technology as an option for users of Login.gov, a one-stop for government-provided public services, to verify their identities.

GSA’s Technology Transformation Services announced Wednesday it will allow Login.gov users to verify their identity online through facial technology that meets standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 800-63-3 Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2) guidelines.

We are being told that this will help reduce identity theft and fraud, and I don’t know anyone that likes identity theft and fraud.

But do we really want to live in a dystopian world where our faces are constantly being scanned all the time?

I certainly don’t.

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Parsons Gets $1.9M US Army Technical Direction Letter for Next-Gen Biometrics + More

The U.S. Army granted a technical direction letter worth $1.9 million to Centreville, Virginia-based Parsons Corporation for the acquisition of biometric mobile and static collection devices, including software, in support of the U.S. Army’s Next Generation Biometrics Collection Capability (NXGBCC).

Expected to be fielded in 2025, NXGBCC will replace the Army’s Biometrics Automated Toolset-Army, which the Army says, “is old and obsolete.”

NXGBCC will gather, analyze, and share fingerprints, facial, iris and voice biometrics, and is the first time Army personnel will use a capability that is software-based rather than tied to unique hardware that must be maintained, according to the Army.

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Germany Rushes to Expand Biometric Surveillance

Germany is a leader in privacy and data protection, with many Germans being particularly sensitive to the processing of their personal data – owing to the country’s totalitarian history and the role of surveillance in both Nazi Germany and East Germany.

So, it is disappointing that the German government is trying to push through Parliament, at record speed, a “security package” that would increase biometric surveillance at an unprecedented scale. The proposed measures contravene the government’s own coalition agreement, and undermine European law and the German constitution.

In response to a knife-stabbing in the West-German town of Solingen in late-August, the government has introduced a so-called “security package” consisting of a bouquet of measures to tighten asylum rules and introduce new powers for law enforcement authorities.

Among them, three stand out due to their possibly disastrous effect on fundamental rights online. 

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The Dangers of Biometrics: Beyond Fingerprints and Facial Recognition

Biometrics, the science of identifying individuals based on their unique physical and behavioral characteristics, has a rich history. However, it wasn’t until the late 19th century that Sir Francis Galton established the scientific basis for fingerprint identification.

Over the years, biometrics has evolved from manual methods to sophisticated electronic systems. In the 1960s, the FBI began using computers to store and match fingerprints. The 1970s saw the development of voice recognition systems, and the 1980s brought iris recognition technology. The advent of digital cameras in the 1990s paved the way for facial recognition systems.

Biometrics has become integral to various applications, from securing smartphones to controlling access to high-security facilities. Fingerprint scanners, for instance, are now standard on most smartphones, allowing users to unlock their devices with just a touch. Airports and border control increasingly adopt facial recognition technology to verify travelers’ identities. In other areas, such as India’s Aadhaar program, iris scanners are used for national identification. Meanwhile, wearables and smart home devices continuously collect data from their users’ daily activities. In some cases, individuals willingly hand over their sensitive data, as seen with 23&Me, a company facing financial difficulties and considering selling the DNA data of its 15 million users.

However, the widespread use of biometrics also raises significant privacy concerns. Unlike passwords or other credentials, biometric data such as DNA is immutable—you can’t change it once it’s compromised. This permanence fuels fears about the security of biometric databases. It is a growing concern, as they present attractive targets for threat actors seeking to gain access to sensitive personal data.

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Illinois changes biometric privacy law to help corporations avoid big payouts

Illinois has changed its Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) to dramatically limit the financial penalties faced by companies that illegally obtain or sell biometric identifiers such as eye scans, face scans, fingerprints, and voiceprints.

The 2008 law required companies to obtain written consent for the collection or use of biometric data and allowed victims to sue for damages of $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation. But an amendment enacted on Friday states that multiple violations related to a single person’s biometric data will be counted as only one violation.

The amendment, approved by the Illinois Legislature in May and signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker on August 2, provides “that a private entity that more than once collects or discloses a person’s biometric identifier or biometric information from the same person in violation of the Act has committed a single violation for which the aggrieved person is entitled to, at most, one recovery.”

As Reuters reports, the “changes to the law effectively overturn a 2023 Illinois Supreme Court ruling that said companies could be held liable for each time they misused a person’s private information and not only the first time.” That ruling came in a proposed class action brought against the White Castle restaurant chain by an employee.

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Scotland Plans Live Facial Recognition Technology

More controversy is developing in the UK, this time in Scotland, around the use by law enforcement of cameras equipped with live facial recognition technology.

Reports say that the police in Scotland may intend to start using this tech to catch shoplifters and persons who break bail conditions. But civil rights group Big Brother Watch is warning against any kind of deployment of live facial recognition as incompatible with democracy – primarily because it indiscriminately jeopardizes the privacy of millions of people.

To make sure this is not happening, the non-profit’s head of research Jake Hurfurt has told the press that the tech should be banned.

That would be an improvement also from the point of view of legal clarity around how AI and big data are used by law enforcement; since currently, Hurfurt remarked, the government and the police “cobble together patchwork legal justifications to experiment on the public with intrusive and Orwellian technology.”

Big Brother Watch offered another observation – the UK is a rare country outside of China and Russia (apparently, even the EU is “scaling back”) that is ramping up this type of surveillance.

The previous heated debate over live face recognition had to do with the London police, and at the moment, the Met’s decision to deploy it – besides being “a multi-million pound mistake,” is also facing a legal challenge, the group said.

They are hopeful this might serve as a teachable moment for the police in Scotland and dissuade them from repeating the same costly “experiment” of trying to usher in a “hi-tech police state.”

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U.S. Department of Commerce Has Plan Already in Place to Digitize the Identities of all Americans Receiving ‘Public Benefits’

Federal ‘Guidelines’ have already been secretly adopted for a Digital ID program that will start off as ‘voluntary’ but only the most gullible Americans would believe that’s anything but temporary.

In the globalist drive toward the creation of a national digital ID for all Americans is well under way, and the first group of citizens to be coerced into accepting a digital ID will be those receiving public benefits of one type or another.

Government healthcare benefits, Veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and of course low-income welfare programs of every type will all be fair game for digital IDs, and the U.S. government is already far down the road to adopting a strategy of digitizing all government-dependent citizens.

It all begins with a little-known program within the U.S. Department of Commerce.

I bet you didn’t know that the federal Commerce Department has a sub-agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST for short, and that NIST has already adopted a set of “digital identity guidelines.”

These guidelines are ostensibly designed “to better support public-benefits programs.” Biometric Update reports that these programs assist beneficiaries with essential needs such as food, housing, and medical expenses, and then goes on to explain NIST’s role in digitizing all these government beneficiaries.

As is almost always the case, the federal agency has partners in the private sector to help it fulfill its mission of bringing in the technocratic/biometric beast system designed to replace people’s free will with government mandating every facet of their lives.

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