Biometrics – don't ask, don't tell

Police forces all over the UK are introducing mobile fingerprint equipment. Result? Approximately 20% of the criminals who would otherwise have been taken down to the station will now be asked politely to go on their way. That's what we were saying back in May.

Don't ask
DMossEsq wrote to his MP asking about this matter. Would Nick Herbert, the policing minister, care to comment? Or the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA)? Could they explain why public money is being wasted on technology that doesn't work?

And thanks to his MP an answer has now come through from Chief Constable Nick Gargan, Chief Executive of NPIA.

Don't tell
Does Mr Gargan express confidence in the biometrics being used? No.

Does he say that mobile fingerprinting will improve crime prevention or crime detection or crime clear-up rates? No.

He doesn't disagree that there is a 20% failure rate associated with flat print fingerprinting based on the 2004 UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial.

Rather endearingly – obviously a conservative man with a respect for tradition – he tries on the old line that the biometrics enrolment trial wasn't really a biometrics enrolment trial but it won't wash.

That high 20% failure rate in the biometrics enrolment trial was caused, he says, by using only a small sensor to scan people's fingerprints. That was then. Policemen on patrol are now being issued with so-called "Bluecheck" devices. And what do they use? According to Mr Gargan, only a small sensor to scan people's fingerprints.

The technology has improved, he claims. Is the failure rate down from 20% to 2%? Or 0.2%? He doesn't say. All he says is that the technology has improved. An unsupported and unquantified assertion.

What's the point?
"Finally and perhaps most importantly", Mr Gargan says, policemen on patrol can always ignore the Bluecheck results and take suspects down to the station anyway.

Don't worry
The Home Office are investing your money wisely. You are much safer as a result.

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Cribsheet
Given the choice of two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the English choose one and the Italians the other. Whereas we might say in English that the scale of the deception being practised on the public by the Home Office is "gargantuan", for example, in Italian they would call it "pantagruelico". Not many people know that.

Gustave Doré's 1873 illustration for Gargantua,
the second (1534) of
François Rabelais's series of five novels,
La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel

Biometrics – don't ask, don't tell

Police forces all over the UK are introducing mobile fingerprint equipment. Result? Approximately 20% of the criminals who would otherwise have been taken down to the station will now be asked politely to go on their way. That's what we were saying back in May.

Don't ask
DMossEsq wrote to his MP asking about this matter. Would Nick Herbert, the policing minister, care to comment? Or the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA)? Could they explain why public money is being wasted on technology that doesn't work?

And thanks to his MP an answer has now come through from Chief Constable Nick Gargan, Chief Executive of NPIA.

HMG's cloud computing strategy – there isn't one – and the Edgbaston Test

On 20 October 2011 Chris Chant listed 23 symptoms of the illness which Government IT suffers from. He carried on energetically repeating his diagnosis, unchallenged, and promoting cloud computing as the effective prescription. There he was, at it again, six months later on 11 April 2012, in a blog post on the G-Cloud website, #Unacceptable IT is pervasive. Two days later his resignation was announced.

The man in charge of G-Cloud is Andy Nelson, the Government's Chief Information Officer (CIO). That's only a part-time job. He is more fully occupied as CIO at the Ministry of Justice, where he's got his work cut out with Libra among other things. Libra is the £467 million Fujitsu system which is meant to produce the accounts for HM Courts and Tribunals Service. When the National Audit Office saw the 2010-11 accounts they were in such a mess that the NAO couldn't even qualify their opinion, they had to disclaim an opinion.

Under Mr Nelson, Denise McDonagh is also responsible for G-Cloud. Again, it's only a part-time job. Her day job is CIO at the Home Office. And again, there are quite a few distractions there:

• There's the £385 million CSC contract with Sarah Rapson's Identity & Passport Service which is one of the reasons UK passport-holders are currently being over-charged by £300 million a year.
• There's the £265 million IBM contract with the UK Border Agency to provide IABS, Jackie Keane's Immigration and Asylum Biometric System. IABS is meant to keep the UK border secure and make the 2012 Olympics safe but there's a problem – the biometrics don't work.
• The same problem applies to the National Policing Improvement Agency's promotion of MobileID, a system to allow policemen on patrol to check suspects' fingerprints on the spot using mobile equipment. The idea is for MobileID to save police time. Which it will because, with a 20% failure rate, this flaky technology will cause 20% fewer criminals to be arrested.

Those distractions and others will no doubt explain her lacklustre post on 26 April 2012, Cloud Cynicism (or Dispelling the Dark Clouds) and why she hasn't been heard from since.

Not so, Eleanor Stewart. She's a trouper. She's the Assistant Director of G-Cloud and she's always good for a lively post. On 27 April 2012 she produced Crowdsourcing and a response., in which she took up some of the many questions posed in the 20 responses to Chris Chant's last post.

What the heck can we do to resolve some of the scary and largely unknown legal and policy issues that people are nervous about in a globalised world?, she asked. Good question. No answer.

And What ‘worked examples’ might we be able to provide to ... sceptics? That's in response to the simple question how cloud computing is supposed to obviate the need for long contracts to produce systems like Libra, for example, or IABS or DWP's Universal Credit. Chris Chant says it will. How? No answer.

Ms Stewart threw the post open to the crowd. And published one comment. One. The limiting case of a crowd. (I wandered lonely as a cloud?)

"Scary and largely unknown"? Hmm. Quite clearly, no-one in HMG knows the answers to some very basic questions about its cloud computing strategy. Which is odd. They keep talking about it. Andy Nelson, for example, was holding forth at the Cloud Computing World Forum only the other day. And they've been advocating it for years – the G-Cloud Overview was being touted in August 2010. But still no-one can answer the questions.

Is it all hot air? A cloud of hot air? A cloud which, when it hits some of the colder patches of reality, results in heavy precipitation and the wettest drought ever seen, which washed out the Edgbaston Test? That's certainly what it looks like at this end of the wicket.

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A version of this post has been kindly published by the estimable PublicTechnology.net

HMG's cloud computing strategy – there isn't one – and the Edgbaston Test

On 20 October 2011 Chris Chant listed 23 symptoms of the illness which Government IT suffers from. He carried on energetically repeating his diagnosis, unchallenged, and promoting cloud computing as the effective prescription. There he was, at it again, six months later on 11 April 2012, in a blog post on the G-Cloud website, #Unacceptable IT is pervasive. Two days later his resignation was announced.

Police forces all over the UK are introducing mobile fingerprint equipment. Result? Approximately 20% of the criminals who would otherwise have been taken down to the station will now be asked politely to go on their way

The Guardian tell us today that the Metropolitan Police have bought themselves some new equipment – mobile fingerprint readers. They are the 25th UK force to do so.

It all seems very sensible:

One of the aims of the technology is to cut the number of trips police make to the police station, so that officers can spend more time on the frontline. Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner at the Met, said: "Evidence has shown that a full identification arrest can tie-up both the subject and the police officer for several hours. Even a traditional identity check conducted on the street can take an extended period of time to complete. "It is effective particularly in revealing serious and violent offenders who will do everything they can to prevent the police from knowing their true identities."

It isn't.

Because the failure rate on this technology is about 20%*.

In the case of people whose fingerprints are on file, about 20%* of the time that fact will not be discovered using this technology.

To be slightly more technical:

• When the Home Office tested flat print fingerprinting in the UKPS biometrics enrolment trial back in 2004 they found that the false non-match rate was 19 or 20 percent*. Nick Herbert, say, would be told by the system that he was not Nick Herbert. His prints didn't match anything on the database. A non-match. A false non-match, as it happens, as Nick Herbert had just registered his prints on the database five minutes before.
• That's how the trial was conducted. 10,000 of us registered our faces and our fingerprints and our irisprints and five minutes later we tested to see if we could have our identity verified using one or other of those biometrics. Flat print fingerprints failed 19-20 percent of the time. Face recognition failed between 31 and 52 percent of the time which is why the smart gates at our airports and every other instance of automated face recognition are guaranteed to be a waste of time and money.

Nick Herbert is the policing minister. He and the Home Office have not published the results of any flat print fingerprint trials since then. At least one trial has been performed:

The NPIA signed a contract with 3M Cogent in 2010 for mobile fingerprint identification devices. The deal followed field trials involving 28 police forces using Lantern devices to test how mobile fingerprinting performed in an operational environment.

But the Home Office refuse to publish the results. So as far as we know – we, the public – the false non-match rate remains approximately 20%.

Which means that out of all the wanted criminals who are stopped and whose prints are on IDENT1 – the national fingerprint database – 20% will falsely not match and be allowed to go on their way.

There's a question for Mr Herbert forming at the back of your mind, isn't there – do you know what you're doing?

If he wants to prove that the answer is yes, and that he's not undermining the fight against crime and wasting our money at the same time, then Mr Herbert must publish the Lantern trial results. Nothing else will be convincing.

The chances of the Home Office publishing those results? See yesterday's hell-freezes-over press release.

It's not just DMossEsq:

• See also for example the Freedom of Information work being done on Project Lantern by the indefatigable Andrew Watson.
• John Vine, the Independent Chief Inspector of the UK Border Agency has revealed the mendacity behind the use of face recognition biometrics and flat print fingerprints – see his report on the Brodie Clark affair, para.3.13, the UK Border Force have had just seven hits in over two years of using this technology on visa nationals.
• Brodie Clark told the Home Affairs Committee that fingerprint checks are the least reliable identity/security checks made by Border Force staff, their ninth and bottom priority.
• And the Home Affairs Committee are getting ever more outspoken about the recalcitrance of the Home Office, unconstitutionally refusing to disclose information to Parliament.

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* Please see UK Passport Service Biometrics Enrolment Trial Report May 2005, Management Summary, Key Findings, para.1.2.1.4, p.10:

Fingerprint verification success • The majority of participants achieved successful verification on fingerprint, with rates of 81% for Quota participants and 80% for Disabled participants. One of the factors influencing failure was that the single fingerprint device used for verification occasionally did not record sufficient detail from the fingers. • Younger participants had a higher fingerprint verification success rate than older participants.

Updated 20.2.18

It's nearly four years since the blog post above was published. Not a single success story for mobile fingerprinting has been told. Four years. Zero results.

Unabashed, Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners.

The difference this time is that the policemen on the street will be able to interrogate not just IDENT1 – the national criminal fingerprint database – but also IABS, the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System: "The scanners link up to an app on cops' smartphones – which is already available to all 5,500 frontline officers – and run the prints against the UK's criminal fingerprint and biometrics database (IDENT1) and the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System (IABS)".

What is unchanged is the 20% figure. It remains the case that 20% of those stopped by the police will be falsely not matched. Thanks to this flaky biometrics technology, wanted criminals will be asked to move along when actually they should be detained.

Police forces all over the UK are introducing mobile fingerprint equipment. Result? Approximately 20% of the criminals who would otherwise have been taken down to the station will now be asked politely to go on their way

The Guardian tell us today that the Metropolitan Police have bought themselves some new equipment – mobile fingerprint readers. They are the 25th UK force to do so.

It all seems very sensible:

One of the aims of the technology is to cut the number of trips police make to the police station, so that officers can spend more time on the frontline. Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner at the Met, said: "Evidence has shown that a full identification arrest can tie-up both the subject and the police officer for several hours. Even a traditional identity check conducted on the street can take an extended period of time to complete. "It is effective particularly in revealing serious and violent offenders who will do everything they can to prevent the police from knowing their true identities."

It isn't.