This morning, I thought the big news was that the economy added 32,000 jobs in July, over 200,000 fewer than expected, a whopping average of 640 per state. And according to the people who are paid to research these things, more layoffs are coming. Add to this the fact that even the IRS admits Americans are making less money, the fact that record oil prices make inflation likely, and strangely enough you might get the idea that the economy isn’t very good for most Americans.
However, then I was sidetracked by two biometric passport stories. Here in the states, we are moving forward with a system whose failure rate can be as high as 50%. “Across the pond,” British passport applicants are being asked not to smile for their passport pictures, as it interferes with the accuracy of the biometric picture readers.
Pardon me, but a system with a failure rate of half is worse than useless — fingerprint scans have a failure rate of more like 2% (one in 50), and even that is overwhelming when you are doing thousands of scans daily. A system that can be foiled by a smile is likewise, worse than useless. None of us want to be detained over a biometric reader deciding that our passport pictures don’t look enough like us. If a simple smile can throw it off, I can only imagine what sleeping on an airplane seat might do to it. This is over and above a new pair of glasses, a little thinner hair, botox, or any of a dozen other innocent things that might change about your appearance between getting a passport photo and going overseas. The even greater risk is that, because the failure rate is so high, security officials will simply ignore the warnings of the device, allowing even obvious mismatches to pass. It is a waste of both taxpayer’s time and taxpayer’s money.
This is the real life equivalent of Elmer Fudd asking what is obviously Bugs Bunny in a pair of sunglasses “Have you seen a little gray rabbit about your size, with long ears like yours, and a little cotton tail like yours?”