The US-VISIT (US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator
Technology) program requires foreign visitors to the USA to have two fingerprints taken. In addition, a facial picture is also taken. All is done digitally and is supposed to not inconvenience any traveller. Except for the fact that they are handing over some very private information, I guess.

Homeland Security claims that “The enhanced entry procedures at airports and seaports add minimal time - in most cases only seconds - to the immigration process, which typically takes 60-90 seconds without US-VISIT procedures.” An old Wired article has the undersecretary for border and transportation security on record stating “... it takes only 23 seconds per person to take fingerprints and photos and check them against government files.”

Combining both statements of the above paragraph, one would expect a typical entry into the US to take 90-120 seconds instead of the previous 60-90 minutes. I can vouch for the previous 60-90 seconds, based on a number of personal experiences. My most recent entry into the US does not support a 90-120 seconds time frame though. Instead, the average processing time at a major international US airport was 240-300 seconds. That is right, 4-5 minutes per entry into the US. Processing time for a single person is slightly slower than an entire family, of course. With 13 million annual visitors (see Wired article), it would take approximately 123 man-years of time to process one year's worth of visitors. Ouch.

Perhaps the increase of time doesn't seem like much, but 3-3.5 minutes means a 250-260% increase of time. Doing some interesting calculations, gives some other interesting info. If we take an international flight with 150 non-US residents and pretend that the average size of an entry groups is 3 people (some groups will have large families, other will be lone travellers, so I think 3 is even pretty large for an entire group, but ok), we have 50 groups needing to enter. It will take 250 minutes (over 4 hours) to process these groups. Even with 10 immigration officers taking care of this, it amounts to 25 minutes per plane. I don't even want to consider the number of planes entering an average international airport each day.

Standing in line for 100 minutes before you are allowed into the country can be quite an uncomfortable procedure. Airlines have a tendency to book you on the nearest connecting flight, even when you ask for a longer time inbetween flights. In practice, this means that during my most recent entry, everybody standing in line with me, was complaining about missing their connecting flight. These were people from at least two different flights. Not a single one was able to make their connection. For some of them, this meant finding a place to spend the night, since there would be no other flight going to their final destination. Others ended up standing in another line for half an hour at a service desk, trying to get a seat on a later flight to their destination. A lot of these people were going on vacation. Some of them were only “in transit” to some destination outside of the US. All in all, entire planes full of people were inconvenienced, had to cancel hotel stays and transportation arrangements, had to make new hotel and transportation arrangements, and generally had an extremely lousy start of their vacation time. Immigrations officials have always seemed very unfriendly folks, probably because of the nature of their job, but now travellers are starting to get annoyed and unfriendly as well.

All this seems a lot of negative results, for the illusion of protection. Illusion, yes. After all, what terrorist is going to travel to the US when he knows his information is on file? Sure, if you don't implement this, a terrorist might actually fly and now he won't. But how many terrorists does this affect? How many terrorist organisations will now simply recruit new terrorists that have no prior records? Does this really help that much that is worth the aggrevation?

There are some strange things regarding this process anyway. First of all, the only thing the US government now knows, is that a set of fingerprints Y and a facial shot Z belongs to a person carrying Passport X. But is this person really who X claims to be? Or is this person A, travelling on a stolen document? The use of biometric information gathered at the country of residency of person A would at least increase the chance of that information being correct.

Another strange thing is the continued questioning upon entering the US. Why are you here? How long will you stay? What do you do for a living? All of those questions serve a purpose. That purpose probably didn't change, but what exactly is that purpose these days? Find out who is going to work here illegally? It can't really be for security purposes, the most important information is now contained in the files, isn't it? And with those prints and pictures, it should be a breeze (hah!) to pick up anyone who stays in the country too long.

Accounts about the US-VISIT system often claim that it includes a real-time check of the prints against government files. I have a feeling that either these files are very thin, or the claim is outright incorrect. Even with a very fast supercomputer, I wonder if one can really check two prints per visitor (and or a picture) against an entire database, for 13 million annual visitors, in real-time. It seems more likely that this information is stored somewhere and processed at a slower pace. Which would defeat the entire purpose of such a check, of course. Who knows though, maybe I underestimate the power of government computer systems.

Finally, one more gripe: how well do these digital fingerprinting gadgets work, when the contact area (lens) is not cleaned after each print taking? Does this mean they have my print on file with part of the previous visitor's print imposed over it? It is rather strange to see the immigrations officer cleaning his hand after each time he touches a visitors hand to help them position their hand properly, but nobody cleaning the lens. Makes me wonder how many of my bacteria the person who came after me is now carrying around

[EDIT: according to Bruce Schneier (blog) who actually wrote back when I asked him about this (very cool), the scanner should still be reliable with multiple uses. Damn.]