For several years, until very recently, I had been traveling with a very beaten up and dog eared passport. The photo page had already started to de-laminate when I received it new from the British Embassy in Washington DC.
Despite the increasingly critical state of the lamination and it's generally dodgy appearance and I never once had a serious problem crossing a border with it. Sure enough the occasional immigration officer would take an extra long look at the passport, then at me and then at the passport again and then at me again before eventually stamping it and letting me pass. My progress through immigration was generally a little longer than those around me due to the suspicious state of my passport. However, I was never seriously delayed.
Three months ago I had to renew my old beaten up passport at the UK Passport Office in London. I am now the proud owner of a brand new shiny, embossed, hologram'd, bio-metrically encoded UK passport. Now I could look forward to speeding through immigration controls with the ultimate in secure, modern, identity documentation. That's what I thought anyway...
I flew to the UK for the day on Thursday this week and discovered to my surprise that despite being in possession of new state of the art passport, the immigration check actually took longer than it had done in the past. How could that be?
It turns out that the immigration officer now has to use a scanner to process these new enhanced passports. The scanning process would appear to be imperfect i.e. it took the immigration officer three attempts to get a clean scan of the document. As a percentage of the total time I was standing in front of the officer over three quarters of this time was spent looking down at the machine and trying to get it to work. Question: Is this meant to make citizens of the UK feel better about their border security?
Hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary development have given humans the most phenomenal signal processing and pattern recognition abilities. No digital system comes close to matching the power of our analogue signal processing capabilities. The professionals that control our borders have put these biological advantages to powerful use. Immigration officers, like customs and police officers, develop an innate ability to pick up on minor signals given off by the bad guys: voice stress, sweating, pupil dilation, nervous twitches etc. These tell tales are absolutely the best way of detecting whether someone is being evasive or not. It's going to be a very long time before any digital system can match sensory and pattern matching powers of the human system.
If you want to stop the wrong people crossing your border the best strategy is to have a skilled and highly experienced immigration officer looking cooly into the eyes of the person presenting their credentials, observing their behavior while engaging them in conversation and questioning. When the immigration officer's attention is diverted by an inefficient digital process then borders control processes are much less effective than they would be if we relied on human intuition alone.
No digital system is perfect and there is no such thing as perfect security. Policy makers might feel good about the fact that our passports now have these fancy digital chips embedded in them. However, any security professional will tell you that it's only a matter of time before the bad guys find a way to hack, spoof or circumvent this technology. The fundamental problem is that this layer of digital enhancement is in danger of giving us a false sense of security. Becoming dependant on these new digital tools runs the risk of us believing what they tell us even when our old analogue intuition system says something different.
As technologists we have a responsibility to ensure that policy makers and the organizations implementing this type of system are aware of the limits of technology. Where technology effectively enhances human capabilities it can be a very powerful tool. However, technology is too often seen as a panacea which replaces rather than enhances human capabilities. That is a very slippery slope which we start down at our peril.