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LITTLE ROCK—The state of Arkansas is using a facial-recognition program on every image recently captured for driver’s licenses and identification cards to check for matches, a step they say will ferret out fraud while raising privacy fears among others. The program, funded by a federal grant, already allowed state employees to scan through 2.6 million images, said Michael Munns(picture left), an assistant commissioner with the state Department of Finance and Administration. The funding initially went toward halting fraud among commercial driver’s licenses, but quickly expanded. “The intent there was to make sure people didn’t have multiple licenses and CDLs and regular licenses where they could spread tickets or driving offenses,” Munns said. “But it also just helps us just find other fraudulent folks too that are doing it not for those reasons.” The program uses a computer algorithm to scan the image of a person’s face, creating a string of numbers based on distances between facial features. The program then screens for images matching that number within a small percentage. Workers personally examine each match, then send out letters to identification holders suspected of having cards under more than one name, Munns said. The letter asks for them to come before a driver’s license employee to discuss the issue. However, the response hasn’t been that great. “Most of them that have been asked have not come,” Munns said. “I think some of them might not be in the country any longer, that they were possibly illegal to start with and probably if we sent two letters to two people and they got both of them, they realized there was a problem.” Munns said he did not know how many letters had been sent out, but said the program has flagged more than 3,700 images as suspicious so far. He said the state has more than 6 million images stored within its database, maintained by the state Department of Information Systems. Holly Dickson, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said she only learned about the program after a telephone call from a reporter. Dickson said two studies of such programs found they often had little luck in identifying suspected lawbreakers. “When an issue comes up with a new government database, we bring up ’mission creep’ — that it’s created for one thing that it may become another. This is a prime example,” Dickson said. “This was implemented for checking commercial driver’s licenses and it’s become scanning all the people who have an Arkansas license or ID card.” Dickson said the concern comes from the system snaring those who haven’t committed identity fraud. She said the ACLU would continue to examine the state’s program. Munns said the program comes from Viisage, a Billerica, Mass.-based company that holds the state contract to supply equipment used to create state driver’s licenses and identification cards. Doni Fordyce, a spokeswoman for L-1 Identity Solutions, which owns Viisage, said the company offers the facial-recognition program to more than 10 other states. Munns said only a few legislators knew about the program before he mentioned it during a joint meeting Tuesday of the advanced communications and information technology committee. Munns downplayed any privacy concerns. “We’re basically having no-shows ... which to us is an indication which there was a good and real problem there, or they would come in wanting to know what the issue was and trying to get it resolved,” he said. “We’re looking real close at those photos. And they’ve got to really look like the same person for us to call them in.” Making driver’s license images able to be analyzed by facial-recognition programs fulfills a requirement of the federal Real ID Act. The law sets nationwide standards for driver’s licenses across the country, standards Arkansas cannot currently meet, Munns said. The state’s database for driver’s license data, built more than 20 years ago, may need to be replaced to meet the requirements, something Munns said could cost $15 million on its own. The state may need to purchase expensive printers and special stock for identification cards as well, meaning driver’s licenses may need to be printed at a central office and later mailed. “That would be a big change to our public,” Munns said. “We’re an over-the-counter state now. You come, you get instant gratification and you walk out with your license.” Munns said the state Legislature, as well as Gov. Mike Beebe, soon needs to decide whether to follow the Real ID provisions. The state has until January 2010 to meet at least some of the requirements. Otherwise, state IDs couldn’t be used to board airplanes or enter federal buildings.As in the days of Noah....
