News Article
Ink and Roll Goes Digital
Commissionaires now offering service to collect digital fingerprints
Neil Sutton, Securing the Nation
October 1, 2008
Fingerprinting may be one of the oldest security technologies in existence, but it’s moving from ink to uplinks thanks to digital technology that promises to improve the process.
The traditional “ink and roll” method of taking fingerprints dates back to 9th century China, when merchants would apply their fingerprints to documents to authenticate a record of debt. It wasn’t until the 18th century that it came to be used as a source of criminal identification when an Argentinian police officer successfully used a fingerprint as evidence at a murder trial.
Fingerprints have since become the standard for law enforcement agencies around the world, but the ink and paper process is giving way to electronic collection.
Using digital fingerprinting technology, the inkpad is replaced with an optical scanner that collects an image of the print that can be stored electronically.
“The No.1 advantage of the technology is the speed,” says Jim Watts, president and CEO of Commissionaires, Great Lakes Division, one of the few Canadian companies authorized by the RCMP to collect digital fingerprints on the agency’s behalf.
“The way the traditional ink and roll prints system worked was, you would come down to the office, take your fingerprints on an RCMP form and mail it off to the RCMP in Ottawa and then you wait, and wait and wait and wait. A typical processing time was four to six months,” he says.
Using the digital system, the fingerprint files can be sent to the RCMP’s database electronically, dramatically cutting down of wait times.
“We promise results within 10 days. The actual processing time is about 12 seconds. We have got them back (from the RCMP) as quickly as the same day,” he says.
“The key to success in data management for law enforcement is ease of access, retrieval and sharing,” says Steve Hunt, principal of Evanston, Ill.-based security research firm Hunt Business Intelligence. “Digital fingerprinting could be a tremendous advantage in easing the deluge of data.”
The RCMP has embraced the technology and has been moving its paper based fingerprinting processes to digital over the last four years. The project, Real Time Identification (RTID), is scheduled for completion at the end of this year and was created in response to the increased demand for fingerprinting following 9-11. “There were a number of intermediate steps along the way,” says Watts. “At one point we sent the prints to the RCMP electronically where they were printed out and then processed in the same manner as mailed-in prints. March 2007 was when the system went fully live in production mode with prints being sent electronically directly into the RCMP database for processing, i.e. no paper involved.”
Fingerprinting technology is used widely for people applying for landed immigrant status or Canadian citizenship, applications for child adoption and people seeking pardons for criminal activity.
“If you had a drinking and driving conviction 20 years ago and you want to clear that off, you need your fingerprints taken,” says Watts. He adds his company also works with ‘the trucking companies who need to send prints to the States so they can get visas to go back and forth.”
The speed at which digital fingerprints can be processed is helping to grease the wheels for all of these processes, he says. “So if you’re waiting for an adoption or a travel visa or immigration processing or a pardon, everything’s on hold till the results come back. With the new system, because it’s electronic, it goes directly from our offices into the RCMP database.”
Despite the efficacy of digital prints, conventional ink and roll isn’t likely to disappear soon, says Watts. There are jurisdictions that haven’t caught up to the technology.
“If you want a hunting licence in Montana, for example, we’ve got to take an ink and roll (print) and you’ve got to send it off to Montana,” he explains.
The Commissionaires is looking at other biometric recognition technologies, like iris scanning, but fingerprinting isn’t likely to be replaced as the standard for identification, partly because it has been used for so long.
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