I know as much about Arthur C Clarke as I do about James Joyce: I’m vaguely aware of the books they wrote, but I’ve never read any of them. However, a quotation attributed to Clarke remains one of my favourites: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
How true. Just imagine if a character in the Arthur Miller play, The Crucible, which has as a backdrop the notorious Salem witchcraft trials of the 17th century, were to pull out a mobile phone and say ‘Hang on a minute. I’ll just give the King in London a bell to see what he thinks.’ They’d have been on the bonfire before they got a dial tone.
That’s a hypothetical example of regarding as magical, or bewitched, something that is beyond one’s rational comprehension. But there is another dangerous kind of magical illusion: attributing to a technology that we partially understand a potential that it cannot possibly live up to. Or rather, failing to see the limitations that will beset a technology once it comes to any sort of prominence.
E-mail is a classic example. It’s less than 10 years since breathless articles appeared in magazine publications relating how ‘with this new e-mail stuff you can send Bill Gates a message and He’ll mail you back himself.’ Not any more he won’t. Or if you do get a reply, it’s not from him; it’s from his firewall. The promise of e-mail as a fast, informal, effective means of communication is failing under a torrent of spam, worm viruses and badly constructed messages.
Another technology now in danger of gaining panacea status for all our online security needs is biometrics: the practice of encoding digitally some personal physical feature such as a finger . Those enthused by it are promising that it will curtail the incidence of ‘identity theft’, prevent further terrorist attacks in major population centres, eradicate computer fraud and streamline the provision of
electronic services.
Well it won’t. Because it’s not magic; it’s only technology. It’s technology that is getting pretty close to what the Gartner Group might call ‘the peak of the hype cycle’, a peak that is usually followed by the ‘trough of disillusion.’ But for the
moment, good vibes are to the fore.
In June, as part of the Irish EU presidency, a presidency summit on biometrics, jointly organised by the European Biometrics Forum, the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources and the European Commission took place in Dublin. Among the speakers was. Robert Moony, deputy director of the US VISIT programme which was established to firm up border-security procedures in the US in the wake of September 11th and which includes perhaps
the highest profile and most wide-reaching implementation of a biometric identity system in the world at the moment.
Any visitor flying or sailing to the US on a non-immigrant visa now needs an identity document containing some form of biometric verification, either a fingerprint or a digital photograph. These procedures are currently in place at 115 airports and 14 seaports. By September 30 this year, biometric details will be required for all visitors under the Visa Waiver program arriving at the US by air or sea.
After that the department of Homeland Security is getting ambitious. By the end of this year it wants to expand the program to include the 50 ‘busiest’ land ports of entry and to include all 165 land ports of entry by the end of next year.
And therein lies the rub. Because the scale of this operation is so huge that it is likely to crumble under its own ambition. The US, or at least the continental part of it, has two land borders: one with Canada and one with Mexico. The latter is listed in no less an authoritative reference as the Guinness Book of Records as the
most frequently crossed border in the world. A staggering 290m people crossed from Mexico into the US in 2000 and a similar number made the corresponding journey south. That’s nearly three quarters of a million people a day. And that’s probably only the legal ones.
Small wonder that the authorities are dragging their heels about implementing biometric checks for all those visitors. Checking all those people, gathering the data, storing and matching it with current records in such a way that the information gathered will be any way useful at all is such a gargantuan task that either the procedures will quickly fall into disuse, or the flow of traffic will be
greatly curtailed.
Could it be a related issue that applicants from Irish student for working holiday visas to the US have almost halved in the past year? That’s probably an effect of the heightened security procedures, but not the one intended. Because after all, it’s not magic, it’s only technology.
23/08/04
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