The move is part of an increased focus, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, on the need to improve identification procedures at airports both in Australia and other countries.
-Before Congress at the moment there is legislation that would require all visa waiver country people that arrive to have a biometric in their passport," Fiona Fraser, director, traveller strategies, Australian Customs Service, said at the Biometrics Institute Conference & Exhibition in Sydney this week.
Australians travelling to the US for pleasure don't generally require a visa at present, Fraser explained, so it's considered a visa-waiver country. -Australians would have to have a biometric in their passport by 2003 to maintain our visa-waiver status," Fraser said.
The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2001 -- introduced and passed in the US House of Representatives on December 19, 2001, and referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary -- section 302: -Requires a visa waiver country, in order to maintain program participation, to certify by October 26, 2003, that it has a program to issue to its nationals qualifying machine-readable passports that are tamper-proof and contain biometric identifiers."
Asked at the conference when Australians were likely to see a biometric in their passports, Fraser said: -I don't know if that legislation is going to pass." She pointed out that there appears to be two views in the US, the first being -whatever it takes security-wise" and the other being that the economics of some of these issues have to be carefully thought-out.
However, -there are certainly some big trends ahead if that legislation will be passed," she said.
Questioned about the likelihood of a worldwide standard for a passport biometric, Gail Batman, national director, passengers and IT, Australian Customs Service said: -I think it's unlikely that we're ever going to get to a stage where there is only one biometric used for passport control around the world. I think all countries that are looking at this technology need to be planning to use a range of inputs."
According to Batman, the choice a country makes about what biometric might go in its national passport won't be the only one that they can limit themselves to processing at the border. -People are going to be turning up with quite a range and we're certainly looking at it from that perspective as well," she said.
For reliability reasons, the passports office is looking at the possibility of multiple biometrics for Australian passports, Batman said.
In related news, Sydney Airport is currently trialing face recognition technologies -- the automation of face-to-passport checks using biometrics and one-to-many checks to identify people in crowds.
-Prior to September 11 our interest was solely one-to-one verification of identity," Fraser said. However, the airport will consider the use of one-to-many verification to help identify terrorists and wanted people at the border.
Requests to further question Australian Customs Service on the proposed biometric passport were denied.
If Australians are like Canadians, who were supporting Cuban terrorism and are still supporting left-wing mass murder in Africa, then yes, the US has a valid reason to want to secure itself.