Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 181“While blind people can be difficult to enrol, there are instances whereblind people have used iris recognition successfully.” 452There appear to be substantial practical difficulties facing people who have even minoreye conditions or visual aids. The UK trials of iris recognition have been suspendedbecause of such problems. 453 One IT industry publication reported:“(O)n Thursday (6 May), MPs testing the iris-recognition technologywere told that up to 7% of scans could still fail, due to anomalies suchas watery eyes, long eyelashes or hard contact lenses.” 454Multiple biometricsThe Home Office has stated that it intends dealing with iris recognition failures byinstituting a second or third biometric – fingerprints or facial recognition. The GAOreport makes the point that the False Non Match Rate for fingerprinting can beextremely high – up to 36 percent. The failure of facial recognition can be even greater.If we assume that this overall failure rate is representative in the population of blind andvisually impaired people, there will still be a large number of people who areconsistently rejected by the system after considerable effort. Such a situation, at both alegal and a societal level, would be unacceptable.The above data establishes that there is a strong likelihood that iris recognition willcreate substantial difficulties and potential denial of services to blind and visuallyimpaired people. This presents challenges to the implementation of a national identitysystem that employs iris recognition. At a level of principle and practicality anylegislation should ensure:- That visually impaired people will not be denied access to services because theyare physically unable to register for an Identity Card;- That visually impaired people will not encounter discrimination in the use ofidentity systems;- That visually impaired people will not encounter hardship or difficulty whenregistering for a card;- That the legal requirements imposed on individuals set out in the Bill do notplace blind and visually impaired people at greater risk of prosecution thanwould be the case for fully sighted people.The research cited above raises concerns that aspects of the Identity Cards Bill maybring about a violation of standards, rights and safeguards set out in instruments such asthe Disability Discrimination Act 1995 & the Code of Practice of Rights of Access toGoods, Facilities, Services and Premises. These and other provisions seek to ensure that452 Website information http://www.lgiris.com/iris/index.html453 Hard contact lenses cause the recognition system to fail because their diameter is less than the diameter of the iris.Light reflection off the surface of glasses or contacts can cause an unacceptable FTER or FNMR. The iris code is, ineffect, trinary: Each bit could be either 0, 1 or read as “couldn't measure this bit with sufficient confidence”. Withpartial occlusion (long eyelashes etc) the number of uncertain bits exceeds a threshold and the measurement must beattempted again.. With eye damage, depending on the system threshold used, measurement may be impossible andmust be stopped. If the threshold is set too low there will be too many false matches.454 ‘Technical glitches do not bode well for ID cards, experts warn’, Computer Weekly, May 7, 2004.