Wednesday 23 November 2011

Technology securing the border

Poor ... inefficient ... over-hyped ... real risk to the integrity of the control ... immature ... poor quality ... unreliable ... completely fails ... not joined up ... comical ... erroneous ... laughable ... these are just some of the words of praise heaped on the electronic face recognition gates used for passport control at Heathrow Airport, and on the eBorders scheme in general, in Nicola Stanbridge's eulogy broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning.



Hat tip: JGM

1 comment:

SDG said...

The late Peter Ustinov told the story that he travelled through Cairo Airport frequently at a time when the border authorities had just installed a number of walk-through metal scanners. He noticed that they never went off even when some passengers were obviously carrying metal objects. On closer inspection, he noted that none of the scanners were ever plugged into the power supply because the airport's vast army of cleaners were allowed to pull the plugs on the scanners to connect their own electrical devices, but were not cleared to re-connect the scanners. And the Egyptian border control people who had the authority could not be bothered. An interesting approach.

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