"WASHINGTON - Iris scanners and facial-recognition cameras aren't just for spies anymore.
The futuristic technology once found mainly in James Bond movies and science-fiction novels is becoming increasingly pervasive throughout the nation, showing up everywhere from hospitals and high schools to docks and airports, including Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
And it could become the dominant way for Americans to identify themselves if Congress moves ahead with efforts to create a biometric employee-verification system to ensure that only U.S. citizens and legal immigrants get jobs.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who chairs the Senate's immigration subcommittee, has said that a verification system based on fingerprints, iris scans or some other form of biometrics must be part of any comprehensive immigration-reform bill.
The plan is controversial with civil libertarians, who say it poses a threat to Americans' privacy. But supporters say it is the only reliable, tamperproof way to stop the identity theft and fraud that plagues the current E-Verify system.
For such a proposal to work, Americans would need to provide their fingerprints or other biometric information to the government to help create a federal database that employers could use to identify would-be workers as legal U.S. residents.
It would be the most widespread use of biometrics in the nation, but it would not be the first.
Biometrics is the measurement of a person's unique physical characteristics, using digital fingerprints, handprints, iris scans or facial-recognition cameras.
'Biometrics have become fairly ubiquitous now,' said James Ziglar, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and the recently retired president and chief executive of Cross Match Technologies, a Florida-based biometrics firm" ...more
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