In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.
Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.
Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.
But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.
In fact, “Congress ordered the creation of such a system in 1996”, as the Times reports. Further, DOH has been able to implement a limited entry and exit system, known as “US-VISIT”, which tracks only about 2 percent of people entering the U.S. Despite the system’s limited coverage, it has reportedly prevented a considerable number of criminals and immigration violators from entering the U.S., as the Times reports:
In January 2004, domestic security officials began fingerprint scanning for arriving visitors. The program has screened more than 64 million travelers and prevented more than 1,300 criminals and immigration violators from entering, officials said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other officials often call the program a singular achievement in making the country safer. U.S. Visit fingerprints and photographs 2 percent of the people entering the country, because Americans and most Canadians and Mexicans are exempt.
Nonetheless, for the time being, DOH has given up on plans to have an exit monitoring system which would widen the scope of US-VISIT to include a biometric US-VISIT exit monitoring at land ports of entry, where most visitors enter and exit the U.S. In a report released on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office ("GAO"), the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, the GAO found that significant computer problems plagued even the current US-VISIT system:
Our site visit interviews suggest that current monitoring and control activities were not sufficient to ensure that US-VISIT performs in accordance with its security mission and objectives. For example, at 12 of the 21 land POEs we visited, computer-processing problems arose that, according to CBP officials at those locations, had an impact on processing times and traveler delays. Generally, officials at these 12 sites said that computer problems occurred with varying frequency and duration; some said that computers were at times slow or froze up during certain times of the day, while others said that problems were sporadic and they could not ascribe them to a particular time of the day.
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Others have also reported computer processing problems associated with US-VISIT. Our review of the report prepared by the contractor hired by DHS to study wait times at the POE in Nogales-DeConcini, Arizona (discussed earlier) confirmed that slowdowns had occurred at the facility during two of the periods covered by its study (June 2005 to August 2005). According to the contractor, these slowdowns resulted in CBP officers having to revert to manual I-94 processing without the benefit ofUS-VISIT biometric checks. Specifically, in its reports, the contractor noted that:
“…on the morning of Thursday, June 23, the computer systems used to perform secondary inspections became very slow, impacting the issuance of I-94 and enrollment in US-VISIT. The staff had to revert to using the paper I-94s, which visitors had to fill out by hand...”
“As happened during the [prior] study, the computer systems were unavailable for a period of time. This occurred on Tuesday from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. Port officials decided to revert to the manual process because the network had become very slow and the queue was growing. CBP officers told … researchers that it was taking up to twenty minutes to receive responses to queries....”
According to the GAO report, the persistence of some of the computer problems may be due to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials not reporting computer problems to the established help desk—often choosing instead to simply turning off and restarting the computers. The GAO investigators reported:
US-VISIT officials told us that various controls are in place to alert them to problems as they occur, but the lack of awareness about computer processing problems raises questions about whether these controls are working as intended. US-VISIT officials told us that it is their position that once US-VISIT entry capability equipment was installed and operating, CBP became responsible for identifying problems and notifying US-VISIT when US-VISIT-related problems occurred so that US-VISIT can work with CBP to resolve them.
The officials stated that computer problems can be attributable to other processes and systems not related to US-VISIT which are not the US-VISIT Program Office’s responsibility. In addition, the Acting Director of US-VISIT noted that there are mechanisms in place to help CBP and US-VISIT identify problems. For example, US-VISIT officials told us that US-VISIT and CBP headquarters officials meet regularly to discuss issues associated with US-VISIT implementation and CBP maintains a help desk at its Virginia data center to resolve technology problems raised by CBP field officials. Regarding the latter, the Acting Director noted that if POE officials do not report problems, there is nothing CBP and US-VISIT can do to resolve them. During our review, we noted that CBP officers are required—in training and as part of standard operating procedures—to report problems with US-VISIT technology to the CBP help desk. Nevertheless, CBP officials at 9 of the 12 sites we visited where computer processing problems were identified said they did not always use the help desk to report or resolve computer problems (and thereby generating a record of the problems). Officials at 5 of the 9 sitestold us they temporarily resolved the problem by turning off and restarting the computers.
Given DOH’s problems with the current US-VISIT system which covers only about 2 percent of people entering the U.S., it is perhaps not surprising that DOH would give up on scaling the system up to include the remaining 98 percent of visitors to the U.S.—especially since DOH concluded that it would have to mirror the current US-VISIT system in order to provide for biometric verification. According to the GAO report, DOH decided against scaling up US-VISIT for the following reasons:
While this may aid border security, installation could increase processing times and adversely affect operations at land POEs where space constraints, traffic congestion, and processing delays already exist. GAO’s work indicated that management controls in place to identify such problems and evaluate operations were insufficient and inconsistently administered. For example, GAO identified computer processing problems at 12 sites visited; at 9 of these, the problems were not always reported. US-VISIT has developed performance measures, but measures to gauge factors that uniquely affect land POE operations were not developed; these would put US-VISIT officials in a better position to identify areas for improvement.
According to the GAO report, the DOH appears to have focused on the expense of hiring additional staff, building new buildings and roads at border crossings as the major stumbling blocks to scaling up the US-VISIT system:
US-VISIT officials told us that they anticipated that a biometric exit process mirroring that used for entry could result in delays at land POEs with heavy daily volumes of visitors. And they stated that in order to implement a mirror-image biometric exit capability, additional lanes for exiting vehicles and additional inspection booths and staff would be needed, though they have not determined precisely how many. According to these officials, it is unclear how new traffic lanes and new facilities could be built at land POEs where space constraints already exist, such as those in congested urban areas. (For example, San Ysidro, California, currently has 24 entry lanes, each with its own staffed booth and 6 unstaffed exit lanes. Thus, if full biometric exit capability were implemented using a mirror image approach, San Ysidro’s current capacity of 6 exit lanes would have to be expanded to 24 exit lanes.)
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Other POE facilities are similarly space-constrained. At the POEs at Nogales-DeConcini, Arizona, for example, we observed that the facility is bordered by railroad tracks, a parking lot, and industrial or commercial buildings. In addition, CBP has identified space constraints at some rural POEs. For example, the Thousand Islands Bridge POE at Alexandria Bay, New York, is situated in what POE officials described as a “geological bowl,” with tall rock outcroppings potentially hindering the ability to expand facilities at the current location. Officials told us that in order to accommodate existing and anticipated traffic volume upon entry, they are in the early stages of planning to build an entirely new POE on a hill about a half-mile south of the present facility. CBP officials at the Blaine-Peace Arch POE in Washington state said that CBP also is considering whether to relocate and expand the POE facility, within the next 5-to-10 years, to better handle existing and projected traffic volume. According to the USVISIT program officials, none of the plans for any expanded, renovated, or relocated POE include a mirror-image addition of exit lanes or facilities comparable to those existing for entry.
Given the importance to national security, it seems a bit lame to claim that the U.S. can not add “additional lanes for exiting vehicles and additional inspection booths and staff”. Regarding the alleged space problems, one would think that if large parking garages can be built in the middle of space congested cities that other innovative uses of space could be developed to handle the need for additional lanes. For example, if necessary, additional lanes could be built on top of the existing lanes—like the two levels of the George Washington Bridge. Hence, the 24 entry lanes at San Ysidro, California could have a second level added which would create an additional 24 exit lanes, i.e., 6 more than needed.
Since DOH concluded, however, that “making major and costly changes to [port of entry] infrastructure and facilities” prevented the deployment of a US-VISIT system, DOH considered an radio frequency identification (RFID) system. According to the GAO report:
Among the technologies considered for testing by the US-VISIT Program Office, the only one that met all the US-VISIT evaluation criteria was passive, automated, radio frequency identification (RFID). This technology, according to US-VISIT, “best satisfied all the assessment criteria.” RFID is an automated data-capture technology that can be used to electronically store information contained on a very small tag that can be embedded in a document (or some other physical item). This information can then be identified, and recorded as having been identified, by RFID readers that are connected to computer databases. For purposes of US-VISIT’s testing of the nonbiometric technology, the RFID tag is embedded in a modified I-94 arrival/departure form, called an I-94A. Each RFID tag has only a single number stored in it; privacy is protected because no information is stored on these tags other than a unique ID number that is linked to the visitor’s biographic information. To facilitate the transmission of the number from the RFID tag, a new DHS system of records—the Automated Identification Management System (AIDMS) 48—was created to link the unique RFID tag ID number to existing information stored in the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) database, which is used by CBP to verify travel information and update traveler data.49 According to US-VISIT, limiting the data on the tag to a single number helps preserve the privacy of travelers; acquisition of the number would provide no meaningful information to non-authorized persons, since they would then have to access TECS to link the number to biographic data. However, access to computers and their databases at land POEs is restricted to authorized personnel and involves additional protections such as passwords as well as entrance into physically restricted areas inside POE buildings.
Despite its promising aspects, DOH concluded that RFID was not a viable solution for two reasons. First, according to the GAO report, the RFID tests were plagued with “numerous performance and reliability problems, such as the failure of RFID readers to detect a majority of travelers’ tags during testing”. In other words, the bugs in the RFID system tested by DOH have not been worked out yet. Second, and more important, DOH concluded that the current RFID system it tested is not viable because it can not ensure that the visitor exiting the country is actually the same person who entered, as required by Congress. According to the GAO:
However, even if RFID deficiencies were to be fully addressed and deadlines set, questions remain about DHS’s intentions going forward. For example, the RFID solution does not meet the congressional requirement for a biometric exit capability because the technology that has been tested cannot meet a key goal of US-VISIT—ensuring that visitors who enter the country are the same ones who leave. By design, an RFID tag embedded in an I-94 arrival/departure form cannot provide the biometric identity matching capability that is envisioned as part of a comprehensive entry/exit border security system using biometric identifiers for tracking overstays and others entering, exiting, and re-entering the country. Specifically, the RFID tag in the I-94 form cannot be physically tied to an individual. This situation means that while a document may be detected as leaving the country, the person to whom it was issued at time of entry may be somewhere else.
Curiously, given DOH’s apparent lack of Tech prowess, DOH is looking to future tech developments over the next 5 to 10 years to provide the magic bullet which solves all of its problems. According to the GAO report:
US-VISIT officials stated that they believe that technological advances over the next 5-to-10 years will make it possible to utilize alternative technologies that provide biometric verification of persons exiting the country without major changes to facility infrastructure and without requiring those exiting to stop and/or exit their vehicles, thereby precluding traffic backup, congestion, and resulting delays. US-VISIT’s report assessing biometric alternatives noted that although limitations in technology currently preclude the use of biometric identification because visitors would have to be stopped, the use of the as-yet undeveloped biometric verification technology supports the long-term vision of the USVISIT program. However, no such technology or device currently exists that would not have a major impact on facilities. The prospects for its development, manufacture, deployment and reliable utilization are currently uncertain or unknown, although a prototype device that would permit a fingerprint to be read remotely without requiring the visitor to come to a full stop is under development.
In conclusion, it would appear that DOH’s problem is more one of will and attitude regarding its approach to these tech problems. It would seem that DOH would be better off trying to implement a less than perfect system, rather than aiming for a perfect system. By starting with a less than perfect system, DOH personnel could gain an understanding of the system’s requirements and shortcomings, so that version 2.0 could make substantial improvements on version 1.0. If Bill Gates had taken DOH’s approach, he would never have launched Windows, whose 1.0 version was not really ready for prime time.
Sources:
1. GAO Report.
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