http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199—israelification-high-security-little-bother
The ‘Israelification’ of airports: High security, little bother
Cathal Kelly Staff Reporter 

Voyeurism Security

While North America’s airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel’s, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

“It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He’s worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

“Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s— from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”

That, in a nutshell is “Israelification” – a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death. 
Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

“The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport,” said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of “distress” — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

“The word ‘profiling’ is a political invention by people who don’t want to do security,” he said. “To us, it doesn’t matter if he’s black, white, young or old. It’s just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I’m doing this?”

Once you’ve parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.
Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion’s half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

“This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,” said Sela.
You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

“The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,” said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil’s advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

“I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is ‘Bombs 101′ to a screener.. I asked Ducheneau, ‘What would you do?’ And he said, ‘Evacuate the terminal.’ And I said, ‘Oh. My. God.’

“Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let’s say I’m (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let’s say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, ‘Two days.’”

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.
First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain ‘bomb boxes’. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

“This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports,” Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

“But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America,” Sela said.
“First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not looking for liquids, they’re not looking at your shoes. They’re not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you,” said Sela. 

“Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.”

That’s the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
This doesn’t begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies. 

“There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States,” Sela said. “Absolutely none.”

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport’s behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

“We have a saying in Hebrew that it’s much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it’s dark over there. That’s exactly how (North American airport security officials) act,” Sela said. “You can easily do what we do. You don’t have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training.. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept.”

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.
“Do you know why Israelis are so calm ? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies.

They know they’re doing a good job. You can’t say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don’t trust anybody,” Sela said. “But they say,… ‘ So far, so good…’ Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you’ve spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

“But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don’t know any different.”

By Jonathan Kent,  BBC News, Kuala Lumpur

Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the vehicle’s hi-tech security system.

The car, a Mercedes S-class, was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.

Accountant K Kumaran’s ordeal began when he was run down by four men in a small car as he was about to get into his Mercedes in a Kuala Lumpur suburb.

The gang, armed with long machetes, demanded the keys to his car.

It is worth around $75,000 second-hand on the local market, where prices are high because of import duties.

Stripped naked

The attackers forced Mr Kumaran to put his finger on the security panel to start the vehicle, bundled him into the back seat and drove off.

But having stripped the car, the thieves became frustrated when they wanted to restart it. They found they again could not bypass the immobiliser, which needs the owner’s fingerprint to disarm it.

They stripped Mr Kumaran naked and left him by the side of the road – but not before cutting off the end of his index finger with a machete.

Police believe the gang is responsible for a series of thefts in the area.

Letter

Executive Committee Home

Submitted by MacRonin on December 13, 2009 – 7:00pm

Real ID Follies Continue with PASS ID Waiting in the Wings: Via EFF.org Updates.

Since 2007, the U.S. State Department has been issuing high-tech “e-passports,” which contain computer chips carrying biometric data to prevent forgery. Unfortunately, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), getting one of these supersecure passports under false pretenses isn’t particularly difficult for anyone with even basic forgery skills.

As 2009 draws to a close, we’re inching ever deeper into the corner that Congress painted us into by passing Real ID under the table in 2005. (Recall that Real ID is the failed, Bush-era attempt to turn state drivers licenses into national ID cards by forcing states to collect and store licensee data in databases, and refusing to accept non-compliant IDs for federal purposes, like boarding a plane or entering a federal building.)

The official deadline for states to comply with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) final Real ID rule is December 31, 2009, and an estimated 36 states will not be in compliance by then, leading to some ambiguity for many citizens. For example, will residents of Montana be able to board planes in January 2010 with only a driver’s license (a state-supplied, technically non-compliant document) and without a passport (an identity document issued by the federal government)?

Past history strongly suggests that DHS will issue last-minute waivers to states that have not amped up their drivers licenses to adhere to Real ID. Early in 2008, states that actively opposed Real ID received waivers from DHS, nominally marking the states as “compliant” despite strongly-stated opposition to ever implementing Real ID.

But waiting in the wings is PASS ID, a bill that attempts to grease the wheels by offering money to the states to implement ID changes. Despite having the appearances of reform, PASS ID essentially echoes Real ID in threatening citizens’ personal privacy without actually justifying its impact on improving security. For this reason, PASS ID is not popular — privacy advocates refuse to support the bill because it still creates a national ID system. It still mandates the scanning and storage of applicants’ critical identity documents (birth certificates, visas, etc.), which will be stored in databases that will become leaky honeypots of sensitive personal data — prime targets for malicious identity thieves or otherwise accessible by individuals authorized to obtain documents from the database. And on the other side, short-sighted surveillance hawks are unhappy with the bill because they support the privacy violations architected into the provisions of the original Real ID Act.

As such, advocates of PASS ID are publicly wringing their hands over the deadline in order to encourage Congress to approve the PASS ID Act before the end of the year. But the fracas over health reform is suffocating any chance for meaningful debate about the merits of PASS ID before the Dec. 31st deadline.

A pragmatic analysis should show that Real ID is dead. To date, 24 states have enacted resolutions or binding legislation prohibiting participation in Real ID, and the varied, desperate efforts to reanimate it are misguided. Whether the states or the federal government signs the invoice, the cost ultimately falls to taxpayers, who should be troubled that neither Real ID nor PASS ID is likely to fulfill the stated goal of stopping terrorists from obtaining identity documents. (Just this week, noted security expert Bruce Schneier linked to a report about government investigators successfully using fake identity documents to obtain high-tech “e-passports,” which were then used to buy plane tickets, and board flights — the point being that a fancy, “secure” identity document doesn’t stop individuals from exploiting a weak bureaucracy.)

On the other hand, the resulting databases filled with scanned identity documents will, create tantalizing targets for identity thieves and headaches for people whose digital documents are pilfered; and a national ID system will invite mission creep from the government as well as private entities like credit reporting agencies and advertisers. It’s high time for reason to replace the reflexive defense of a failed scheme. Congress should repeal Real ID for real and seek more inspired, protective solutions to identity document security.

ISRAEL at Risk of Not Being a Democracy Anymore: Knesset Approves INVASIVE ‘Biometric Law’

Anyone who follows the news has no doubt come across the claim that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” Usually, this claim is followed by its logical inference: “As an island of freedom located in a region controlled by military dictators, feudal kings and religious leaders” - Not any more – Israel democracy is now controlled by superficial politicians…

Black Day for Democracy

By Gil Ronen and Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

(IsraelNN.com) The Knesset plenum approved Monday evening the ‘Biometric Law’ in the final readings. Forty Knesset members voted in favor of the law, 11 against and three abstained. The purpose of the law is the creation of a biometric database that would hold the fingerprints and facial photos of all of the country’s citizens. The data would be stored in the Interior Ministry computers.

MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), who led the opposition to the law, said after its approval that the vote was “a serious mistake which causes grave harm to freedom of the individual in Israel.”

“I hope that we do not pay too heavy a price for it,” Horowitz said. “In any case, it has been proven that an unrelenting public struggle by idealists can have influence and make a difference. The proof is that the law in its final wording is completely different from the original version.”

During the Knesset debate about the law, MK Horowitz stood at the podium and held up printouts of information from the Ministry of Interior’s database which contained information about Knesset members and which reached the Internet. He said that he would not show the contents so as not to invade the MKs’ privacy. “The leaked data which reached my hands prove how easy it is to break into government databases,” he said. “I hope that this will not be the fate of the biometric database.”

MK Dov Henin (Hadash) said that despite the government’s statements that it would not force Israeli citizens to join the database, “in fact, whoever does not do so would be punished – he will not be able to leave the country’s borders, since he would not receive a passport at the level required in developed countries.” The database is not truly a voluntary one, he said.

Faked fingerprints
On the same day that the Knesset approved the law, there news from Tokyo that appeared to show that this system, too, was not foolproof. Police in the Japanese capital said that they arrested a 27-year-old Chinese woman suspected of illegally entering the country after surgically altering her fingerprints to deceive a biometric recognition system operated by immigration officials.

United Kingdom is Leading Pack in Face Recognition; Is U.S. Next?

By ASHLEY PHILLIPS – ABC NEWS

A 17-year-old walks into a liquor store, carries a 12-pack of beer up to the counter and hands the clerk a flawless fake ID. Unbeknown to him, the clerk need not even glance at the ID before turning him down. His face gave him away. A facial recognition system placed behind the store counter analyzes the teen’s 17-year-old features and informs the clerk of his illegal age. It’s just one of a litany of uses for the fast-evolving surveillance technology, a field that has security experts salivating and privacy advocates bracing for a battle.

(Getty / ABC News)

Computers that can pick out fugitives in a crowd, video cameras that scold people for littering, eyes in the sky that detect crimes as they’re being committed. While these scenarios may sound straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” they are becoming reality and could be headed for your corner store sooner than you think.

Although still being researched across the globe, facial recognition technology has already taking hold, particularly in Great Britain.

Last week, Budgens, a U.K. grocery story chain, announced that it would use facial recognition technology to prevent its clerks from selling alcohol and cigarettes to underage customers. The photos of customers who were refused previously will be stored in a database, and then if the offenders come in to buy similar products again, the clerk will be alerted.

Similarly, the British government plans to roll out a facial recognition pilot program in London airports this summer. People who hold biometric U.K. and EU passports can pass through unmanned gates. At the gate, their faces will be scanned to match them to their passport records.

Though the technology has been around for years and the British are embracing it and moving forward, technology experts say facial recognition — and the cameras needed to support it — wouldn’t fly with privacy-obsessed Americans, at least not yet.

“[Facial recognition] really has picked up steam in the last 10 years,” said Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, who teaches electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “The principle has been around for 25 years, but it started getting put into commercial systems five to 10 years ago.”

Bhagavatula describes the technology simply.

“Let’s say a digital camera is taking a picture of someone’s face. So now it gets represented in computers as a bunch of numbers,” he said. “Humans have no problem [saying] that’s someone I know. The computer has to look at those numbers and say, ‘Are these the same set of numbers corresponding to a person I took a photo of a year ago?’”

It’s a complex process, and it is not flawless. For computers, those numbers representing human features can change based on the person’s expression, lighting and overall quality of the image, according to Bhagavatula.

To combat this, researchers are constantly looking for new algorithms to analyze facial features. Currently, many researchers are looking at features that don’t change, such as the distance between the eyes, the angle made by the tip of the nose or the length of an eyebrow, he said.

“Many methods try to capture these kinds of things that are unique to people’s faces,” he said. “You hope that these numbers stay the same when a person smiles or frowns.”

The U.S. Privacy Police

The kind of monitoring that would enable facial recognition to work well has not caught on in the United States, at least not yet, according to Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley.

“The English have always had a slightly different attitude toward privacy,” Saffo said. “They’ve never had a strong a privacy culture as America has had. The English do not have a constitution. Their protections are in common law. It is easier for the government to overstep notions of privacy than it would be here, because you have people invoking the Bill of Rights.”

But Saffo believes that given the right crisis, the United States would eventually accept the technology.

“Do not underestimate the psychic shock of the London subway bombings,” he said. “We bleat and cry about privacy, but we happily surrender our privacy for the cheapest of coin.”

So far, most legislative pushes for video monitoring by city governments have been thwarted.

This week in Washington, D.C., a bill pushed by the city’s mayor calling for nearly $1 million in funding for citywide public cameras was voted down by the city council.

“People sometimes talk about video surveillance systems as moving forward inexorably in the United States, but we’ve seen quite a few successful protests,” said Mark Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I think there are a lot of questions that need to be asked about video surveillance. The most obvious one is: what is the purpose?”

“[Britains] have embraced a really extraordinary amount of monitoring by the government that I don’t think the U.S. would accept,” he said.

Yeah, but Does It Work?

Some critics also take issue with the accuracy (or lack thereof) of facial recognition technology.

In perfect conditions, facial recognition can be fairly effective, according to experts, but in less than perfect conditions it can be wildly inaccurate. For example, it is difficult for a computer to identify a person who is walking on a city street or in an airport where his face might be blurred, obscured or shadowed.

“We have gotten a long way from where we were 10 years ago,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Bhagavatula. “But good algorithms have an 80 percent accept rate. It’s pretty good, but not perfect.”

Rob Jenkins, a psychology professor at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, may have found at least one way around the technology’s inaccuracies. Jenkins and his colleague Mike Burton published a study in the journal Science in January that outlined a method to get 100 percent accuracy from computers by using what the researchers called an “averaged” face image, made up of 20 photos.

“The great thing about this averaging process is it just washes out all these differences of single photographs. The lighting and the pose all kind of becomes neutralized,” Jenkins told ABCNEWS.com in January. “And what you’re just left with is the core of the face. The aspects of the image are consistent from one photo to the next.”

Since that study, police, governments and companies have shown interest in his research, Jenkins said. And although he is interested more in how the mind recognizes faces than how the technology is used, as a citizen, he finds the ubiquity of CCTV troubling.

“New technologies that are being unveiled as being the solution to problems — often they’re just a better key to locking and unlocking something, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t think about what’s behind the door,” he said. “Because if you put all this trust in a new technology, … you can find yourself in quite a hairy situation.”

Jenkins points out that sometimes even humans can’t recognize familiar faces.

“The human brain is the most sophisticated computer we know of,” he said. “Engineers are setting themselves [up] with a very difficult problem by demanding accurate performance. Even humans can’t do this reliably and should give us pause. … Is the goal a realistic goal? Are we ever going to build a machine that can do that? And maybe we will, but I think it’s a question that’s worth asking.”

By Swati Prasad, ZDNet Asia – Friday, September 25, 2009 04:59 PM

NEW DELHI–The need for standards and concerns over security and privacy were highlighted this week, as the Indian government prepares to roll out various e-government projects based on biometrics.

“The industry, government and academia need to collaborate to evolve standards for biometrics,” Nandita Jain Mahajan, IBM’s India South chief privacy and information security office, said during the India Preparatory Meeting: Biometrics and Data Protection, held here Thursday. The two-day event was organized by the Data Security Council of India, a self-regulatory organization led by Nasscom.
According Mahajan, the Indian government should adopt open standards to avoid heavy dependence on one technology vendor.
The country is in the process of deploying biometric cards for various e-government schemes, including the national unique identity card and e-passport projects.
“No government wants to be locked into any one technology,” S. K. Sinha, senior director of National Informatics Centre (NIC), said during a panel discussion, adding that India has put much emphasis on standardization for the technology.
“The Indian government is working on a national standard for biometrics [and] wants to have a technology standard that is open and provides a level-playing field so that many vendors can take part,” Sinha said. However, he noted that standards should be established such that they can widely adopted by the industry. “Standards should be implementable,” he said.

Are biometric cards privacy-compatible?
According to Shree Parthasarthy, a director at Deloitte said biometrics is “as old as forensics”, taking into account several factors such as the iris scan, finger prints, appearance, social behavior, skull measurement, voice, and so on. “It’s impossible to replicate or mimic all of these characteristics,” Parthasarthy noted.
And while biometric cards offer better security, he noted that there are several primary concerns over the use of such cards, including questions about privacy protection, misuse of biometric data and how biometrics will support privacy policies.
According to Mahajan, there are three technology components in biometrics: acquisition, extraction and matcher. Often, all attributes of biometric cards do not match and the acceptability error rates can be high, he said.
“If your password is compromised, you can change it, but if your biometrics is compromised, what can you do about it,” he questioned.
Y. D. Wadaskar, managing director of Pune-based IT security products company, WYSE Biometrics Systems, said: “Every individual is unique and therefore, biometrics and privacy go hand in hand. We need to trust these cards just as we trust our doctors and lawyers when we share personal information with them.”
Sunil Dhaka, chief information security officer of ICICI Bank, said the bank has been successful in implementing biometric cards for agriculture-based banking in rural areas.
“Since rural India has no Internet or tele-banking facility, we realized the solution had to be online-offline ready,” Dhaka said. “With such cards, we can do banking at the speed of thought.”

One billion ID cards challenge
Zia Saquib, executive director of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), who also attended the meet, noted that deploying biometric cards for citizens in New York is different from implementing similar schemes in rural India. C-DAC develops applications for e-government projects.
According to Saquib, data collection and enrolment in rural areas can prove a challenge as “identification is a sensitive issue,” he said.
“We need to have strong authentication processes in place at the time of enrolment, he explained, adding that biometric data must not be stored in the same place as personal data.”
Biometric data must be stored locally,” he said. Saquib also highlighted the benefits of using digital rights management methodology for biometrics, giving users access to information only on a “need to know” basis.
Sinha said generating over 1 billion national unique ID cards cannot be done with small number of stakeholders. “You need different stakeholders for enrolment, creation of database, generating algorithms, verifying and distributing these cards,” he added.
“And when you have so many stakeholders, the need for standards becomes all the more critical,” he noted. Asked how the government plans to address privacy and security concerns over biometric cards, he said it is still too early to provide comments.
Sinha said: “All we can say is that the data will be highly protected and we will put several cyber-controls and encryptions in place, in both online and offline mode.”
Swati Prasad is a freelance IT writer based in India.