Last week I remarked on fingerprint identification of fliers. Today, I found something related in the announcement of a biometric e-Passport in Brunei:

Compared to the existing passport, the e-passport has an embedded 72-kilobyte chip and several security features. This complies with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) which makes it more difficult to duplicate. The chip itself will contain the owner’s facial and fingerprint images.

The assumption being that the biometric data will provide an accurate unique identifier for each individual, and naturally one of the issues to arise from such a system is the actual data security of the stored fingerprint and facial imagery. Add to that assurances that the staff on the ground are capably trained to interpret this data.

One of the main issues seems to be the desire to ensure that passports are indeed genuine. I wonder how biometric data will serve that goal better than any other random machine-generated identifier.

From Gadling:

Scandinavian airline SAS has introduced finger-print check-in on a domestic flight from Stockholm to Gotenburg in Sweden. Its purpose at the moment is to make sure that the person who checks-in luggage is the same as the person boarding the flight, a sure advantage for airport /on-flight security.

While they point out that this is not new on a domestic level, they note that eventually they would like to make this an international system of identification. I am not sure how widespread it would be, but it brings up a couple of different issues.

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