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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
Politech facecam archive: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=facecam Politech biometrics archive: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=biometrics --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50470,00.html Scanning Tech a Blurry Picture By Declan McCullagh and Robert Zarate 2:00 a.m. Feb. 16, 2002 PST ARLINGTON, Virginia -- Iris-scanning and face-matching technologies don't work nearly as well as their manufacturers have claimed, the Department of Defense has discovered. In a 270-person pilot program at the Army Research Laboratory, the Pentagon tested iris recognition technology from Iridian for 26 weeks and the Visionics FaceIt system for 13 weeks. Iridian claims a 99.5 percent success rate, and Visionics predicts solid face-matches 75 to 99.3 percent of the time. The results: Reality didn't match the hype. At a biometrics conference on Friday, Defense Department official Steven King said that of the 270 persons checked by the Visionics system, it correctly recognized individuals a mere 51 percent of the time, and identified an individual to within a range of 10 participants 81 percent of the time. The supposedly more reliable Iridian eye-scanners, meanwhile, correctly verified someone's identity just 94 percent of the time. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------