High Tech, Low Effort at INS

WASHINGTON — It is hidden on the back of the new U.S. green card: a digital fingerprint, written with a laser, virtually immune to copying, readable only through a special scanning device.

Experts say the optical stripe--capable of encoding information about a person’s hands, eyes, face and voice--is one of the most secure identity-card features ever invented. But the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has issued more than 5 million such cards to noncitizens living permanently in the U.S. since 1998, has never installed machines that read them.

“The ‘smart’ cards have been effectively rendered ‘dumb’ cards,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). In the post-Sept. 11 world, she added, “we can no longer afford to operate in this way.”

As U.S. officials try to close off America’s 250 ports of entry to terrorists, state-of-the-art technologies are emerging at the center of efforts to identify people with greater precision than ever before. Computer technology can help border guards match the faces of suspected terrorists against “lookout” lists, and encoded fingerprints and other biometric data--like on the new tamper-proof green cards--can help foil the vast black market in phony documents.

Yet at the INS, which regulates immigration and U.S. borders, the track record with information technology has been one of promise unfulfilled, despite an investment of more than $1 billion in such efforts over the last several years, according to official audits and a broad array of critics.

A recent Justice Department report found the INS mismanaged a $31-million program to electronically record the entries and exits of noncitizens crossing America’s borders; INS officials estimate it will take four years and an additional $57 million to finish the job. The agency’s effort to build an electronic database to track foreign students, inspired by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, still covers only 21 southeastern colleges. Two years ago, a serial killer slipped through the INS fingerprint system; its database of fingerprints remains unconnected to the FBI’s.

“It is a monumental task the INS faces to quickly and efficiently install these necessary systems,” Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department’s inspector general, said in an interview. “It is going to be a struggle.”

Just last week, the Bush administration announced plans to overhaul the INS, separating the law enforcement functions from services to immigrants. Some members of Congress want to break up the agency and cite blunders in handling data as evidence of its problems.

“It’s never been more obvious than now that we need a law enforcement agency headed by a law enforcement expert to deal with border security and criminals and illegal aliens,” said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who would place INS enforcement and service operations under a new office in the Justice Department.

Critics point to Angel Maturino Resendez, a Mexican drifter sought two years ago in a string of murders.

Resendez, known as the “railway killer” for crisscrossing the United States on freight trains, had been in the custody of the Border Patrol--an INS agency--a month before he turned himself in to authorities in July 1999. At the time, the INS possessed a computerized fingerprint system that could easily have alerted patrol agents to hold Resendez.

INS investigators, however, had failed to note in its Automated Biometric Identification System, known as IDENT, that police were looking for him. So when Border Patrol officers caught Resendez sneaking into New Mexico on June 1, 1999, and ran his fingerprints through the system, nothing warned them to hold him. Resendez was accused of killing four more people after the Border Patrol let him go.

“We found that the training that was given to INS employees on IDENT, particularly outside the Border Patrol, was ineffective or nonexistent,” Fine recently told Congress.

INS officials acknowledge missteps in their efforts to employ modern technologies. But they also say the agency has struggled with an unwieldy and rapidly expanding mission, along with occasionally mixed signals from Capitol Hill. For example, Congress earlier this year held up the proposed system to track foreign students, in response to complaints from universities about the plan to collect fees.

In addition, the INS labors under strict rules to keep travelers flowing efficiently through airports and land borders, creating a tense balance between traveler convenience and national security.

One of the last federal agencies to embrace computers, the INS in the 1990s poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an array of information technology.

“A great deal of money came in, and as an organization we weren’t well prepared to handle it,” said Paul Rosenberg, who directs the INS office of strategic information and technology development. “As an organization we had some successes in there, and we had some management failures in there.”

Indeed, some initiatives have been promising, such as a program to whisk pre-approved passengers through immigration checkpoints at seven U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International. Under the program, enrolled travelers arriving in the United States can place their hands on a screen that confirms their personal hand geometry in three dimensions within 20 seconds, sparing them from the checkpoints’ often long lines. Since 1995, the program has recorded more than 300,000 admissions into the United States.

Yet the missteps continue to draw attention. Of the 19 suspected hijackers Sept. 11, for example, the INS has been unable to confirm how and when six of them entered the country. Yet five years ago, Congress asked the INS to develop a more efficient system of tracking noncitizens’ entries and exits.

In October, a Justice Department audit found that, despite $31 million already spent, the INS “does not have clear evidence that the system meets its intended goals.”

Although pressures have mounted for a workable INS system, lawmakers are hardly unified on the subject. Congress--pushed by border-state legislators and business interests fearful of long lines at the border--last year extended a congressional deadline for an electronic system from earlier this year to 2003 and beyond.

“I’m pushing people just as hard as I can to make things happen,” INS Commissioner James W. Ziglar recently told impatient lawmakers, while describing the entry-exit tracking system as a “very ambitious project.”

Of all the products now being touted to enhance security, much political interest--in the United States and beyond--is concentrated on machine-readable cards that provide reliable identification and can be used with electronic databases that might hold the names of terrorists.

After Sept. 11, the Canadian government announced plans to adopt technology similar to the newer INS green cards for its residency IDs. The Italian government is using the same optical memory technology in national identity cards. Saudi Arabia and parts of India have also ordered cards, which are produced by an affiliate of Drexler Technology Corp. in Mountain View, Calif.

Although such cards would not catch an individual who is unknown to law enforcement, “they can prevent criminals getting authentic documents and changing them to their own identity,” said Stephen Price-Francis, a vice president with Drexler’s LaserCard Systems subsidiary. “You cannot change the data once it’s written down. It’s a permanent, irreversible process.”

The U.S. government, which also uses the technology for a “laser visa” issued to Mexicans who frequently cross the border, is spending $81 million to buy 24 million of the cards over the next several years.

Increasingly, members of Congress are wondering why the INS has not installed machines to read the biometric features of the cards, tapping their full potential. By some estimates, the INS would need to purchase as many as 3,000 reader machines at about $2,400 each--to be installed at immigration checkpoints at airports and border stations. The INS has an overall budget of $5 billion.

Ziglar has told lawmakers that White House budget officials have vetoed the purchase every year since 1999. But industry sources say the issue has been complicated by internal INS disputes over which technology to use, with one faction preferring a cheaper but more easily counterfeited magnetic card over the laser optical cards.

“It’s just another example of the INS not performing up to expectations,” said Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Texas), a longtime critic of the agency, adding that the situation showed “mismanagement” and “a failure to set priorities.”

“I think that 80% of INS’ problems can be resolved by using technology in a better way than they have in the past,” Smith said.

As one approach, Feinstein and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) have announced a bill to require the INS and the State Department to develop biometric visa documents, and they would mandate a centralized database on all noncitizens who enter the country, which would be accessible to officials at U.S. ports of entry.

But the new database should not be supervised by the INS, said Feinstein. She would give that responsibility to the White House Office of Homeland Security.

Some INS officials said they do not feel defensive about the barbs and insist that the agency is getting much more sophisticated about information technology.

“We feel strongly about moving ahead with this,” said Scott Hastings, an associate commissioner for information resources management. “Our skin is pretty thick about the criticism we get. We’re ready to go.”