Remarks by the Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at the U.S.-VISIT Industry Day

Release Date: November 13, 2006

Arlington, Virginia
US-VISIT Industry Day
November 13, 2006

Secretary Chertoff: It's a great view out there. It's kind of hard to pay attention to what's going on in the room when there's a lot of nice things outside the room.

Well, I'm delighted to be here, and I'd like to thank the various agencies which have representatives in attendance, not only in my own department but the Department of Justice, Department of State, National Institute of Justice, Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I think it reflects a broad range of agencies that have an interest in this kind of technology as an important ingredient in the way forward in protecting our homeland security.

But as important are our partners from the United Kingdom and European Union reflecting that this is an international challenge and not merely a national challenge, that, in the end, a world in which we are networked through biometrics to increase the security for those who travel and trade is a safer world and one in which we all have a very important investment.

One of the reasons I wanted to come today was to acknowledge the substantial progress that has been made in developing faster, high-quality 10-print capture devices, and also to encourage you to keep working to develop the kind of operationally sound and workable hardware and software that we will need over the next couple of years to meet our objective of implementing 10-print capture at our ports of entry and overseas in our consulates.

This is a moment of great opportunity for all of us, although the individual agencies here have specific needs that may differ. Overall, we have a common necessity. We just need ability to get fast, accurate and high-quality fingerprint capture so that we can run the fingerprints against databases that tell us whether we have a terrorist, a criminal or somebody else whose identity is important to us. Without this capability, our efforts to establish a broad foundation of biometric-based next-generation technology will not, in fact, come into effect.

What do we want to do this for?  Well, obviously, to the extent that we have developed a names-based screening system to identify known terrorists and keep them out of the country or keep them, frankly, from traveling around the world, that's been a very positive step forward. But the next challenge is the unknown terrorist, the person who is a threat whose name is not known to us, or the person who is a threat who may come in under a false name. And the tried and true method for identifying the unknown terrorist is the fingerprint. The fingerprint is valuable not only because as far as I know it's never been shown that more than one person has the same set of fingerprints, but because fingerprints leave telltale traces. A latent fingerprint, a fingerprint that is left on the glass or in the training camp or in the safe house is, in fact, a powerful tool for determining who has been in that place or who has handled that object. And as those of you who watch television know, that's a long-term -- or for a long period of time been a staple of not only forensic investigation in the criminal sense, but also forensic investigation in the terrorist sense.

Now we have had some success with two-print capture, and with actually having a two-print system that is workable. And that is, of course, our currently existing U.S.-VISIT system.

And let me take a moment to praise the U.S.-VISIT program office, which had done an exceptional job of deploying this system and getting two-print capture devices at all of our permanent ports of entry. This two-print system has already yielded very substantial results in keeping bad people out of the country. But in order to take it to the next level, to get the unknown threat as well as the known threat, to get the threat that has never crossed our border as well as that that has previously been in the country, we need to move to 10 prints. And the critical element here is the 10-print capture device.

What that will let us do, when we get the 10-print capture device, is for any single foreigner who crosses into our borders, get their 10 prints, and run them not only against our existing databases to see whether they have been here before under a different name or whether there is a criminal record in this country or internationally against them, but to stand those 10 prints against latent prints lifted from around the world in terrorist safe houses or in battlefields, to see whether the person crossing the border has ever been involved in training in an al Qaeda training or believed running an al Qaeda safe house. That kind of ability to identify someone who has interacted or touched the facilities of terror is exactly the kind of 21st century tool that will give us a measure of protection at our borders that has never been dreamed of in the history of this country.

And let me tell you another benefit. This is going to be a great deterrent, because when we get this device fully deployed and operational, when we capture these fingerprints, when we run them against these databases, what will then happen is we will have a world in which any terrorist who has ever been in a safe house or has ever been in a training camp is going to ask himself or herself this question:  Have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere?  Have I ever touched anything which might have been picked up by DOD, a member of the armed forces, or by an FBI agent and dusted for prints and had those prints lifted and put in a database?  That is the kind of deterrent that is going to drive these terrorists crazy. And in much the same way as the guilty murderer has to always wonder whether they've left telltale fingerprints behind them at the crime scene, so a terrorist is going to have to wonder whether they've left those telltale fingerprints at the scene of a training camp or at the scene of a bomb factory. And that, I think, is going to have a powerful deterrent effect on anybody who wants to come into our borders.

The good news is, we are already underway deploying this capability. The State Department has begun to test 10-print fingerprint reading devices at three of its consulates overseas -- in San Salvador, El Salvador; London, England; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And our objective by the end of 2008 is not only to have deployed readers at our consulates overseas where they can be used when visas are being issued, but to have deployed them at our major ports of entry so that even those who come in without visas will have to submit their 10 prints so that we can run them against our terrorist databases.

Ultimately, if you do your work well, we will be one step closer to making global travel not only more convenient, but safer for all citizens around the world.

Now, 10 fingerprint collection is going to do something else for us:  It's going to bring us closer to full interoperability between the U.S.-VISIT IDENT database and the Department of Justice's IAFIS database.

As you know, this interoperability between these two databases has been an objective and a goal of people in law enforcement and homeland security for many years. What the ability to have interoperability between these databases will allow us to do is to increase our ability and the State Department's ability to screen travelers; it will increase the accuracy of matching; and most important, it will give us a broader range of databases against which we can scan our fingerprints in order to detect matches.

This integration will also benefit the law enforcement side of the house by permitting the FBI and other law enforcement organizations increased access to all of the databases, including our immigration databases. In order to promote this interoperability, DOJ, DHS and the State Department began sharing information as the first part in a series of three phases that will lead to achieving full interoperability between IDENT and IAFIS. This provides state and local agencies access to biometric-based information about a person's immigration history from IDENT for the very first time.

Two of the first locations in which we have begun the first phase of this interoperability are Boston, with the police department, and Dallas, through the sheriff's office. And we have already seen some promising results since we began this first phase of interoperability in the last few weeks.

Earlier this month, the Dallas sheriff's office arrested a subject for theft. Officers fingerprinted the subject as part of the routine booking process. The fingerprints were submitted to IAFIS, which responded with the subject's criminal history and a record of numerous previous arrests. The subject had six different aliases and five different dates of birth. Of course, names and dates of birth can be changed, but the fingerprints cannot.

But in this case, the additional fingerprint of immigration files showed something else. It alerted the DHS Law Enforcement Support Center that this particular subject had been arrested in Dallas. And as a result of the information-sharing effort, DHS was able to learn that there was an immigration warrant out for this individual, and a detainer was issued for the subject in Dallas County. That means we now have an additional warrant or an additional detainer against this person to make sure that when they finish their criminal sentence, if they get convicted -- and, of course, everybody is presumed innocent -- they won't be leaving the courthouse or the jail without making a stop at immigration to be deported.

Now, Boston has also experienced a similar success. After arresting a person for breaking and entering, police ran the suspect's fingerprints against IAFIS and IDENT using this interoperable system. The resulting immigration data let the police know that this individual had used seven different names and nine different dates of birth over the last 10 years. And of course, this person has previous convictions in seven states for crimes ranging from assault with a deadly weapon to battery and had already been deported from the country twice. By having this interoperability, the police were able to see the full range of this individual's historical activities, including his historical criminal activities. And ICE was notified of the fingerprint match so that we could then pursue immigration-related charges.

This move to 10 fingerprint collection, coupled with our completion of the integration of these databases, is going to give federal, state and local law enforcement officials, as well as visa-issuing posts overseas, the kind of visibility they need to identify individuals with greater accuracy and greater focus than has ever been the case before.

And finally, I'd like to say we're taking this not only to cities all across the country and consulates overseas and our land ports of entry, but we're taking this new biometric technology to sea.

Facing even the challenge of operating in a maritime environment, the United States Coast Guard has started to collect biometic information, digital fingerprints and photographs from migrants who are interdicted while attempting to make unlawful entry into the United States through the Mona Passage. That's a body of water between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Using a mobile collection device, the Coast Guard will now compare migrants' biometric information against U.S.-VISIT databases, which includes information about wanted criminals, immigration violators, and those who have previously interacted with government authorities. We hope to start remote biometric matching using ship-to-shore communications in the spring of 2007.

This, by the way, is a tremendous illustration of the leverage we get at the Department of Homeland Security by having under one roof Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and the United States Coast Guard all operating together to give a complete cloak of protection to the United States from people who want to get in here either under false pretenses, or worse yet to do us harm.

Now, in order to make this work and in order to continue our progress, of course, we need to rely on industry because it is your ingenuity that develops the hardware and the software that are the critical tools that our operators will use on land, at sea, and maybe even in the air in order to continue to move forward on this use of biometrics.

I want to say to those working in industry, you've provided us with next-generation, 10-fingerprint scanners that do move us closer to our critical mission, which is full scanning of 10 fingerprints at all ports of entry. And to our government professionals, I want to thank you and congratulate you for your focus, your energy, your initiative, your drive, and your good stewardship, which is the way we have government and industry working together to serve Americans.

But although you've done a lot of good work, the job is not yet done. We're just at the beginning in terms of making sure we have actually operationally-viable 10-print capture equipment that can be used in the kind of rushed environment that, frankly, we face at our ports of entry. The critical test for all technology is not what you can do in the laboratory, but it's what you can do in the field. And it's recognizing the very real constraints that dealing with literally millions of passengers every year place upon any kind of technology and any kind of equipment. And therefore, what we need is the kind of solution that is robust, that is operationally sound, and that can, frankly, deal with the wear and tear of ordinary life.

So I urge you to stay focused and continue to strive for success in using innovative technology development to meet these real-world requirements and the demanding standards that our operators are entitled to place on any technology that we roll out into the field.

And for our part, we will continue to lay out challenges to develop technological tools that will boost our ability to protect this country against all threats coming from outside.

Securing our nation is about preventing terrorists and criminals from even taking the first steps to get into this country and carry out their ill-willed plans. Through the work we're doing together to implement biometric-based programs and to bolster their capabilities on an ongoing basis, I am confident that every month we will take further steps in protecting Americans against the kinds of threats that we still remember caused all the havoc and destruction and death of September 11th.

So thank you for your fine work. I exhort you to continue working. And we look forward to seeing the fine results at our airports and our seaports and our land ports of entry in the next couple of years.

Thank you very much

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This page was last modified on November 13, 2006